Developing Advanced Reading Skills Through Extensive Reading: Findings from Palestinian schools
Keywords:
ER, school students, reading comprehension, English reading skills, vocabulary acquisition, Palestinian education, EFL teaching methodologyAbstract
The paper in hand aims to investigate the relationship between using the Extensive Reading (ER) approach to improve students' reading ability. The researcher conducted this study on school students in Palestine, implementing a controlled experimental design with both male and female school populations. Pre-tests and post-tests were used to evaluate students' vocabulary acquisition and comprehension. Results showed extremely statistically significant improvements in the experimental groups (p<0.0001), with female students' mean scores increasing from 60.81 to 83.50 and male students improving dramatically from 33.17 to 77.50. Post-test comparisons revealed the experimental groups significantly outperformed control groups in both female schools (83.50 vs 52.94, p<0.0001) and male schools (77.50 vs 49.43, p=0.0066). Students exposed to ER showed measurable advantages in vocabulary acquisition, reading comprehension, and overall reading skills. The study concludes that ER serves as an effective approach for enhancing students' language development and recommends implementing the ER approach to improve reading proficiency. School teachers are advised to encourage extensive reading of books and stories in foreign language instruction..
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