Monster stories as an useful tool for students of eighth grade at Rosa de Jesús Cordero high school

Abstract

Reading is crucial in the process of learning a foreign language. Thus, this research aims to provide reading alternatives to work with students inside and outside classrooms. It implements activities to go along with the stories in order to assess the students’ comprehension of the readings. The characters of the stories involve all different kinds of monsters, and the plots reveal everyday life situations with a message hidden inside. The three reading strategies this research focuses on are skimming, scanning, and making inferences. By doing so, the students can analyze a reading by searching for general information. Also, they can locate specific information in a text. Finally, they are able to draw conclusions from the data they have available in the stories. The tasks consist of questions about these three proposed reading strategies. The students selected for this study were eighth graders of Rosa de Jesus Cordero high school, and the treatment was administered to sixteen girls. The results reveal the effectiveness monster stories have when working on skimming, scanning, and making inferences. It is established that monster stories can be favorable to develop reading strategies, but they are not completely effective.