ISSN: 2226-6348
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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.
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