THE DEVELOPMENT OF READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY USING DIRECTED READING-THINKING ACTIVITY THROUGH AN ELECTRONIC BOOK FOR ENGLISH STUDENTS

Abstract

The English language is the international language that it is used all over the world.When we have considered about  reading instructional methods in English language teaching, we have found that most Thai teachers teach reading skills by using the traditional method. That is, typically, students read aloud and translate, and then the class is ended. As a result of this teaching approach students could not summarise the main idea and probably didn’t understand what they had read. In addition, the reading book texts have too much content and are not interesting or motivating for their students. The purposes of this research were; 1) to construct and find the efficiency of an electronic book set at criteria 70/70 2) to compare reading comprehension ability using DR-TA through an electronic book between pre-test and post-test 3) to develop reading comprehension ability using DR-TA through an electronic book for 1^st  year students so that at least 70% of the group passed the prescribed pass level of 70%. The research methodology is One Group Pre-test / Post-test Design. The sample group is 30 1^st year English students, Faculty of Education, Loei Rajabhat University during their 1st academic year 2017, used cluster sampling by students class randomly selected. The instruments of this research were 10 lesson plans based on DR-TA, 20 electronic book titles, the reading comprehension ability test (during the lesson), and the reading comprehension ability test (pre-test, post-test). Research analysis was analyzed by mean ( ) standard deviation (S.D.), percentage, E1, E2, and t-test for dependent.

The findings were:

1) The efficiency of electronic book was 72.67/73.12 which is higher than the standard criteria. 2) The students reading comprehension ability using DR-TA through electronic books by post-test was higher than the pre-test at a statistically significant level .01 3) The students reading comprehension ability using DR-TA through electronic books resulted in  73.33% of the group passing a set of criteria at 70%, gained 73.10% of the score which was higher than the set of criteria.