Learning English through short stories

Today EFL students comprise a great part of the college population. In order to attain their academic goals, these students need to improve their second language proficiency in the four basic skills, i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing. Teachers of college level EFL students are faced daily with maximizing studentsʹ progress in these skills and at the same time, with keeping students interested and motivated in their lessons. How we as teachers use and feel about the language has a significant effect upon our studentsʹ abilities to learn. Language experience takes advantage of studentsʹ interests and knowledge and facilitates the comprehension of the language within the context and also acts as a facilitator of language acquisition. To study the positive ʹeffects of the narrative text genre over a non-narrative (expository) text genre in reading comprehensionʹ at the intermediate level of language acquisition, a study was conducted at The Islamic Azad University, Maybod Branch (Yazd). About 200 students from two levels of language proficiency participated in this study (freshmen and sophomores). Drawing upon the importance of text choice and studying literature in SLA the results of the study showed that the narrative text genre and language proficiency level were influencing factors in not only improving the participants reading comprehension but also somehow helped the students to acquire native like competence necessary for communication.