Abstract:

This study aims to determine the effect of digital story-based language lessons on primary school 4th-grade students' reading comprehension skills. The method used in the study is a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design with a control group. The participants were comprised of 46 4th-grade students from the villages of Silvan district, Diyarbakır province. 23 students formed the control group and 23 the experimental group. The study was conducted in 10 weeks during the 2022-2023 academic year. The reading comprehension levels of the experimental and control group students were measured with the Reading Comprehension Test consisting of four reading passages and a total of twenty-four questions related to them. Within the scope of the research, eight reading passages including narrative and informative text types were prepared by the researchers in digital story format. Prepared digital stories and related activities for reading comprehension were employed in Turkish lessons with the students in the experimental group. The same text and activities were shared with the control group students and Turkish lessons were held simultaneously. After the applications ended, the reading comprehension skills of the students were measured again with the Reading Comprehension Test. An Independent Sample t-test was used to determine the significant differences between the experimental and control groups. The results indicated no significant difference between the groups' initial reading comprehension skill scores. On the other hand, a significant difference was found between the posttest scores in favor of the experimental group.

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