The Effectiveness of Reading and Listening to Children’s Literature on English L2 Reading Comprehension

Sammanfattning: This study investigates the effectiveness of children’s literature on English reading comprehension in an L2 classroom context. Children’s literature has a major part in teaching L1 in Swedish primary schools, and although it is a trustworthy method in developing reading comprehension skills, it is not used to any great extent in the English education. Thus, the aim of this study is to examine to what extent reading comprehension is fostered by using children’s literature from a second language perspective. Previous experimental research has, however, shown positive results on children’s literature as a means for teaching L2 reading comprehension. In this research synthesis, we will critically analyse, compare and discuss published research based on empirical data to provide and present the reign believes in children’s literature on L2 reading comprehension enhancement. Based on the findings presented in this paper there is a correspondence between the usage of children's literature and positive results in L2 reading comprehension development. However, solely reading children’s literature might not be the most efficient method in enhancing L2 reading comprehension. Based on the findings presented in this study listening to the text whilst reading can to a greater extent improve on listening comprehension results, which can be connected to the theory of Dual Coding (Paivio, 1986). Furthermore, no research on this area has been done in a Swedish context, which indicates that further research needs to be done in order for the results to be more applicable to our future profession.