Offer high-interest text alternatives and choice alongside short stories to sustain engagement during strategy instruction¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

Because some students found single-theme short stories boring, the article recommends that the curriculum "should also provide high-interest alternatives and choice." The same strategies can be taught with brief topical texts such as news articles, informational passages, and infographics, graded readers or micro-stories, with varied themes and lengths and optional audio or visual scaffolds. Offering two or three thematically diverse text options per unit, pre-teaching key vocabulary, and chunking longer texts can maintain engagement while keeping strategy instruction consistent.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Strategy instruction itself remains consistent across the alternative text options

Constraints¶

• Recommended in response to approximately 20% of respondents in this study reporting they did not enjoy short stories

Target Learners¶

• EFL learners who do not engage with single-theme literary texts

Target Learning Goals¶

• Sustained engagement while learning reading comprehension strategies in L2

Related Strategies¶

• Rich Library: Multimodal Resources
• Selecting Culturally Responsive Texts
• Sustained Silent Reading
• Literature Circles
• Offer instructional choices to students to increase engagement and agency
• Devote weekly intervention time to reading a wide range of texts

Examples¶

-

Key Sources¶

• Üstündağ-Algın, P. (2025). Explicit Instruction of Reading Comprehension Strategies Using Short Stories with EFL Students. MEXTESOL Journal, 49(4). https://www.mextesol.net/journal/