Impact of Using Parallel Text Strategy on Teaching Reading to Intermediate II Level Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of parallel reading text (English and Arabic) on English as a Foreign language (EFL) Intermediate II level students’ at Birzeit University in terms of reading comprehension, vocabulary retention, and sentence structure awareness. The sample for this study is 38 undergraduate students of the aforementioned level in two class sections during the fall semester of 2019-2020. One reading text from the course textbook was selected for this experimental study. The controlled group was instructed with an English only reading text while the experimental group used a parallel text of the same reading passage. A pretest on the reading text was used as an instrument to measure the reading skills of vocabulary, reading comprehension, and sentence structure prior to teaching the text for both sections. Six weeks later, a post-test was administered to both groups to assess the impact of parallel reading text in comparison to monolingual English text on students’ reading skills. Results of the post-test showed an increase in the average scores of both groups. There was a noticeable increase of the average scores in the vocabulary section and sentence structure awareness of the post-test among students of the experimental group compared to the average scores of their peers in the controlled group. Nevertheless, the results did not reveal a significant difference between using the two techniques in regard to reading comprehension and sentence structure awareness.