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Abstract
Reading in English can be challenging. Learners frequently struggle to identify main ideas, infer meaning, interpret vocabulary, and track the sequence of events within a text, a recurring pattern that motivated this research. Given this challenge, the study set out to assess how students’ reading comprehension changed following the use of digital comics. Data were collected from thirty-three eighth graders at María Angélica Idrobo High School participating in this one-group, pre-experimental study. The intervention took place in four periods of regular English class. A pretest and a posttest measuring four areas, main ideas and details, vocabulary in context, sequencing, and inference, were administered. A Likert scale questionnaire served to measure the learners’ views regarding digital graphic narratives as reading material. The results of the descriptive statistics indicated that the proportion of correct pretest responses was 54.04%, whereas the posttest percentage of correct answers was 71.21%. A t-test for related samples indicated that the observed gain reached statistical significance, t(32) = 6.39, p < .001. The participants’ perceptions of the reading material were positive overall with regard to ease of comprehension of the digital comics and their usefulness in the English classroom. Thus, digital comics appear to function as a potentially useful multimodal tool for supporting EFL reading comprehension. Since the design did not incorporate a control group, causal interpretation should be made cautiously.
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