The effectiveness of story retelling on junior high school students’ reading comprehension and writing

Abstract

The poor performance of Nigerian students in the English language, both in internal and external examinations, poses a challenge to scholars of reading. This study sought to find out if story retelling as a technique of teaching reading comprehension and writing will in any way affect the ability of Junior Secondary School (JSS 3) students to comprehend text, retell given stories as well as improve their writing. The quasi experimental method was used to conduct the study. Eighty subjects in two junior secondary schools in Owerri, East of Nigeria, were grouped into Experimental and Control groups. Both groups were taught the same content of the school syllabus; the period of instruction was the same for both. However, while the Control group was taught using the conventional method, the Experimental group was taught through the use of story reading and retelling. At the end of the treatment, a post-test was administered on both the Control and Experimental groups. The transactional theory of learning which sees reading and writing as personal meaning-making processes was used to guide the study. The scores of students from their written retellings constituted the data and were analyzed using means and standard deviation. It was found that the performance of students (both Control and Experimental) in the pre-test were within the same range. But there was a marked difference between the performance of the Control and Experimental groups in the post-test. Noticeably, the Experimental group performed better in the post-test than in the pre-test, as well as better than the Control Group. The paper therefore concluded that the story retelling strategy was effective in improving the comprehension, retelling and writing of students.