Picture Book: Its Effect on EFL Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Selecting instructional media is a prominent aspect in classroom activities. Combining pictures and text is considered effective for teaching and learning foreign language. Accordingly, picture books are meaningful media that use integration of words, illustration, and design. In the context of language learning, teachers need to be selective of using or making picture books in term of shape, content, and genre of the text. Focusing on the genre, narrative text plays an important role in school curriculum since local culture can be inserted to build students' cultural awareness. Regarding the gap showing few studies given more attention on teacher made picture book for reading skill, this paper investigates the effect of picture books toward student's English reading comprehension. Pre-experimental design was carried out, and this study involved thirty-five secondary school students as sample, especially the tenth graders. The instrument of this study were tests. The tests were constructed and tried them out to produce valid items. The data were analyzed by using t-test after the fulfillment of statistical assumption was checked. For the media, they were validated by two experts before implementation. The result shows that there is a significant effect of using picture books to students' ability in understanding narrative texts more comprehensively.