Learning English through short stories

3. METHOD
According to the hypothesis of this study, it is believed that the introduction of a narrative text genre in the form of simple short stories could be more effective than a non-narrative (expository) text genre on reading comprehension especially in the intermediate stages of language learning.
To examine the above research question the following corresponding null hypothesis was formulated:
Iranian Journal of Language Studies (IJLS), Vol. 2(1), 2008 55

There is no significant difference between students' reading comprehension of narrative and non-narrative texts especially in the intermediate stages of language learning.
To investigate the hypothesis the following experiment was designed.

3.1. Subjects
200 female, adult, Persian speaking university undergraduates, majoring in English Translation at The Islamic Azad University of Maybod (Yazd), voluntarily participated in this study. These students were all studying English as a foreign language, their ages ranged between 20 to 22 years. There were two groups of students: group A, were sophomores in their first semester, and group B was freshmen in their fourth semester.

3.2. Instrument
In each group that is, group A and B there were 100 students. To determine the proficiency level of the participants an OPT (Oxford Placement Test) with about 100 questions on grammar and written structures was administered as a pre-test. Based on the scoring standards of the OPT, the students were assigned to the aforementioned groups. Therefore, in each group there were about 60 students.
In addition to the OPT (Oxford Placement Test) which was administered as a pre-test to establish the proficiency level of the two groups of students, the material or rather the text that was used for instruction for students of group A, sophomores who were undertaking 4 credits in "Reading Comprehension" was "Discovering Fiction" by Judith Kay and Rosemary Gelshenen, Student Book 1, Cambridge University Press, and students of group B in the fourth semester who were studying "Simple Prose" 2 credits by Dr. Abbas Ali Rezai and Helen Ouliaeinia, SAMT Publication. The whole spring semester was devoted to teaching the lessons whereby the students were given instructions and directions to comprehend the texts they were studying. No special treatment was given to any of the groups. At the end of the teaching period that lasted for nearly 12-14 weeks, a TOEFL post-test was given to cover the research question regarding the effect of a narrative text genre over a non-narrative genre in reading comprehension.