The Impact of a Drama-Based Multi Modal Teaching Approach on the Reading Comprehension of Senior High School EFL Students

Abstract

Traditional high school English reading classes focus primarily on explanation and practice exercises, neglecting contextual experience and multi-channel processing. As a result, students have long been weak in reasoning reading comprehension, perception of text structure, and use of reading strategies. To explore the impact of a drama-based multi modal teaching approach on senior high school EFL students’ inferential reading comprehension, text structure comprehension, and reading strategies. A six-week quasi-experimental study involved 60 senior high school students randomly assigned to an experimental group (drama-multi modal instruction) and a control group (traditional lecture). Both groups studied the same six compulsory texts and completed identical pre- and post-tests measuring inferential reading comprehension, structural awareness and self-reported strategy use. Descriptive statistics and paired-samples t-tests compared learning gains. The drama-based multi modal intervention produced large, broad-based gains:(i) Inferential reading comprehension improved by +5.04 points (+21.1 %; d ≈ 3.7, p< .001);(ii) Holistic text-structure awareness rose by +3.90 points (+16.4 %; d ≈ 3.0, p< .001);(iii) Reading-strategy use and meta cognitive control expanded by +4.24 points (+18.3 %; d ≈ 4.1, p< .001). The pedagogical implications of this study include(i) Embed multi modal interaction and explicit strategy teaching in lesson;(ii) Integrate drama with reading to drive curriculum reform;(iii) Raise pedagogical awareness and implementation quality via sustained teacher development. Based on the results of the study, we suggest: (i) Incorporate real-life drama tasks in practice;(ii) Operate a continuous “task–assessment–feedback” cycle with diverse evaluations;(iii) Foster a low-anxiety, high-support classroom to secure full student engagement.