Improving Junior High School Students’ Reading Literacy through Comic-Based Dialogue

Mul Hasana, Maulina Maulina, Maulina Maulina, Rahmat Nasrullah, Rahmat Nasrullah

Abstract


This Despite the growing use of digital comics in English language learning, limited research has examined the effectiveness of researcher-developed dialogue-based digital comics for improving reading literacy among junior high school students in under-resourced schools with limited internet access. Therefore, this study investigated the effectiveness of dialogue-based digital comics in enhancing students’ reading literacy in a remote educational setting. The study employed a quantitative pre-experimental approach using a one-group pretest-posttest design. Fifteen eighth-grade students from a public junior high school in South Konawe Regency, Indonesia, participated in the study. Reading literacy data were collected through a 15-item multiple-choice test administered before and after six instructional sessions using dialogue-based digital comics. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, the Shapiro-Wilk normality test, and a paired-samples t-test. The findings revealed that the mean score increased from 52.33 in the pretest to 65.33 in the posttest, with an average gain score of 13.00 points. The paired-samples t-test indicated a statistically significant improvement in students’ reading literacy (p = 0.005). These findings demonstrate that dialogue-based digital comics effectively support reading literacy development by providing contextualized visual and textual learning experiences and offer a practical instructional alternative for English language teaching in schools with limited technological resources.


Keywords


Dialogue-Based Digital Comics; Junior High School Students; Reading Literacy; Remote Education; Reading Comprehension

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.31004/jele.v11i5.3095

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