THE EFFICACY OF MULTIMODAL VS. PRINT-BASED TEXTS FOR TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION SKILLS TO IRANIAN HIGH SCHOOL THIRD GRADERS

Literacy education, specially teaching reading comprehension, for today’s students whose environment is replete with visual, electronic, and digital texts, has experienced a “paradigm shift” (Bearne, 2003). Within the context of this changed literacy pedagogy, it is timely that challenges and implications of multimodal texts for reading comprehension education to be taken into consideration. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the effect these multimodal texts might have on reading comprehension proficiency of Iranian high school third graders. To this end, the first phase of the study included a sample of 60 high school students who were homogenized and divided into experimental and control groups using an OPT (Oxford Placement Test). After a six-week period of using multimodal texts, a sample reading section of PET (Preliminary English Test), served as the posttest, was administered to the participants of both groups so as to measure their reading comprehension proficiency. The results illustrated that the idea of the effectiveness of using multimodal texts in L2 reading classrooms to improve student’s comprehension process was supported. In the second phase of the study, a questionnaire was used to gauge the participants’ perceptions and attitudes towards different modes of a text such as image, video, and audio. The present study would contribute new knowledge to the field by paving the way for more studies on multimodal textbooks, which many believe will be a regular part of our classrooms in the future. It suggests that if schools continue to invest heavily in textbooks, they will need to more carefully consider both the print and visual versions of the texts.