The Effects of Storytelling Activities to Students’ Reading Skill

Abstract

Storytelling is one of teaching methods that can be applied in many levels of education. It is believed that teaching storytelling is entertaining for students and helps them to have more meaningful learning of the language. Storytelling activities also might help students to develop their language skill such as vocabulary enhancement and language features. This experimental study has been conducted in order to investigate the effects of storytelling activities to 7th Grade students’ reading skill and students’ perceptions towards storytelling activities. A pretest and a posttest were designed in the study to examine the effects of storytelling towards their improvement in reading comprehension. During 8 weeks experiment, the participants had various activities to give them more exposure to the narrative texts. They did not only listen while the teacher was delivering the stories but also actively involved preparing their story performances. The activities might facilitate students to read more, to write and rewrite the narrative that they had to present. Repeated reading may also help them to be fluent in reading. The data have been collected by doing pretest and posttest to compare their improvement in reading before and after the treatments. Besides, some interviews were also conducted to get to know students’ and teacher’s attitude towards storytelling. The result of the study indicated that there was a positive effect of storytelling activities to improve students’ comprehension of narrative texts.