Digital Storytelling: Time to be Considered in Reading Comprehension

Abstract

This quasi-experimental study investigated the potential effect of digital storytelling of basic fifth grade students' reading comprehension skills. Thirty-four male and female fifth-grade students were randomly selected from a conveniently-selected school, namely; Al Rusol Educational School for excellence, a private school in Irbid Directorate of Education, Jordan. The participants were distributed randomly into two intact sections and thereby forming two groups: An experimental and a control. To achieve the aim of the study, a reading comprehension pre-Test and post-Test was developed. The reading comprehension test comprised two parts: The first part consists of one applied comprehension question and the second part is comprised of five analytic comprehension questions. Four stories in A Beautiful Mind 5 textbook from Units, 11, 12, 13 and 15 were redesigned digitally and then were showed by data show projector. The finding indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the overall reading comprehension post-Test and in each part of the test: Applied and analytic comprehension. The study recommended using digital storytelling in teaching English language reading comprehension skills.