The Effectiveness of a Web-Based Multimodal Interactive Story on Upper-Secondary Students' Reading Comprehension in English

Sammanfattning: The current study investigates the effectiveness of a multimodal interactive story, student use and perceptions of the interactive story, and one teacher’s beliefs regarding the use of multimodal resources in upper-secondary L2 literature education. The study aims to draw conclusions on the potential effectiveness of the tool, student interaction behaviour with interactive story, student perceptions on the tool, and teacher receptibility toward new multimodal tools. Findings revealed that no statistically significant differences were found within or between groups in regard to the effectiveness of the interactive story from pre-test to post-test scores in the control and treatment groups. Students chose to use the help functions significantly more often than not in the interactive story, and significantly selected multimodal help aids more than the unimodal help aid. In regard to student perceptions of the interactive story, a significantly greater number of students felt visual help enhanced their understanding of the story. Overall mean scores from student five-point Likert-scale survey questions indicate generally positive attitudes toward the interactive story. Finally, the findings revealed the teacher was receptive toward the utilisation of multimodal tools but expresses concern about the realistic implementation of such tools in her classroom due to lack of resources and time restraints.  This research contributes that student engagement increases when presented with multimodal resources and the need for teachers to be provided allocated time to learn and implement new digital resources.