The influence of genre pedagogy on students’ reading comprehension of short stories

Abstract

Aiming to improve the students’ reading comprehension skills in English, this current research describes the influence of Genre Pedagogy and the explicit instruction of reading strategies on student’s reading comprehension of short stories. The target context of this research was integrated by 28 eleventh graders from a public school in Barranquilla-Colombia. Considering the students’ needs and their context, this study followed a qualitative research, under the structure of an emancipatory action research cycle. Data was collected before, during, and after the intervention through several instruments such as a questionnaire, a teachers’ interview and a reading pre-test that were applied at the beginning to determine the need analysis. Then, during the implementation class observations, students’ journals were implemented to describe the effect of GBA (Genre-Based Approach) and explicit strategy instruction and finally, a reading post-test to establish how the intervention contributed to the progress of students’ literal and inferential comprehension levels. The implementation of GBA contributed to increase students’ involvement, interaction, and participation in English class. On the other hand, the explicit instruction of reading strategies allowed students to become more conscious of their reading process. The results imply that the combination of GBA and the explicit instruction of reading strategies have a positive influence on students’ performance and are effective to improve the students’ reading comprehension levels, therefore they should be considered to implement in English reading classes.