Reading Achievement of Short Stories as a Way of Literature Incorporation and Improving Iranian Students' Grammatical and Vocabulary Knowledge

This study was an endeavor to analyzed the effects of reading short stories on improving the grammatical and vocabulary knowledge of high school students in Kerman. To achieve this end, two intact classes of 52 female students who were selected based on convenience sampling, and regarding the placement test scores, 40 of them participated in the current study. The research was an experimental one and the participants were randomly divided into two groups of 20 students. The interventions administered for the experimental group involved teaching two short stories, i.e., the Beauty & The Beast and Robinson Crusoe. However, the control group received conventional method of teaching of grammar and vocabulary. The data were analyzed in quantitative way and statistical analyses were performed in SPSS software. The results indicated a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of posttest scores for the dependent variables after controlling the pretest at the P<0.001 level. Accordingly, it can be said that there is a significant difference in the scores of the dependent variables (grammatical and vocabulary skills) in the posttest. As a result, the present study revealed that reading the mentioned stories is an effective way for improving grammatical and vocabulary knowledge of high school students in Kerman.