The Role of Visualization in EFL Learner's Reading Comprehension and Recall of Short Stories

Generally speaking, lexical items that enter our minds through reading a textcommonly leave us with pictures, sounds, echoes, and feelings in the mind.While the ability to produce images in the mind in the process of readingappears to be vital for greater comprehension and recall of texts, research hasindicated that many poor readers seemingly do not visualize as they read. Onthe contrary, those readers who do typically visualize achieve greatercomprehension and recall (see Tomlinson, 1997). In this study, in line withWittrock’s ‘generative learning theory’ (e.g., 1992), two fairly homogeneousgroups of EFL undergraduates (N=50), after taking a reading comprehensiontest to ensure that their reading comprehension differences are not significant,were randomly assigned to attend a short-story course in two differentsections—one serving as the experimental and the other as the control group,both studying the same short stories, and both being taught by the researcher astheir instructor of the course. The experimental group was instructed how toform pictures in the mind—i.e., how to visualize—before reading, whilereading, and after reading a short story, for example, by being requested todraw pictures of the characters, scenes, or settings in the story as they perceivedthem. The control group, however, did not receive any training with respect toimagery production and was not told to practice visualization before, while, orafter reading the same texts as the experimental group did. The results of areading comprehension test on the short stories that had been discussed in bothindicated that the “visualizers” significantly outperformed the “non-visualizers”, i.e., the control group, on both tests.