The Impact of Implementing Graphic Organizers on Improving EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension of Narrative Texts and Motivation

This research investigated mainly the effectiveness of implementing graphic organizers (GOs) on improving EFL students’ reading comprehension of narrative texts and motivation. EFL learners may face many difficulties when they analyze literary texts in terms of comprehending the story line with all its elements of fiction. The study was conducted on EFL students enrolled in a literature course at a university level. The data were collected using a mixed-method approach including quantitative data employing reading tests and questionnaires, and qualitative data using class observation. The study implemented three cycles, each one utilized a particular method of teaching short stories. The results show that the students’ performance was significantly higher when the EFL learners used graphic organizers to comprehend the story line of short stories when compared to using the story grammar (SG), more specifically the linear pattern. Students’ motivation was also enhanced in relation to reading and learning English literature. They developed more self-confidence and trusted their abilities to do well in literature classes. Their language anxiety was decreased as they improved in understanding narrative texts and were able to perform better in class activities. They also exerted effort to participate and were willing to work independently on reading tasks. All of this resulted in enhancing their motivation.


INTRODUCTION
Teaching literature in the EFL classes has various benefits to EFL learners in terms of enhancing their language skills, cultural awareness, self-motivation and critical thinking skills (Lazar, 1993). Short stories tend to be a valuable source for developing the learners' language skills, enhancing personal growth, and increasing cultural understanding (Abu Zahra & Farrah, 2016;Violetta-Irene, 2015;Thiyagarajan, 2014;and Khatib & Rahimi, 2012). Reflecting on my teaching experience in the field of literature to English major students, I have noticed that students struggle with narrative texts in terms of comprehending the stories and analyzing them implementing the elements of fiction. Even though the students look up difficult vocabularies in order to understand a short story, they still experience difficulty in understanding a story line. Failing to comprehend the story, many students fail to pass their tests successfully; and consequently, they become de-motivated and their language learning anxiety increases.
Many reasons can be attributed to this failure. The first one can be related to the immense vocabulary the students might have to learn in order to access the text. Another reason can be related to the figurative language they have to deal with in literary texts; as these texts can be read at two The Impact of Implementing Graphic Organizers on Improving EFL Students' Reading Comprehension of Narrative Texts and Motivation 121 reading and to be actively involved in the reading process (Koda, 2005). Reading comprehension occurs "simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with the written language" (Sen, 2009, p. 11). Reading comprehension is a complex process that encompasses "decoding, word reading, and fluency along with the integration of background knowledge and previous experiences" alongside with the reader's (Klinger and Geisler, 2008, p. 65).
To activate a reader's schemata of comprehending a text, a number of cognitive reading strategies are involved that include recognizing, decoding, ordering, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and generalizing (Reutzel and Cooter, 2004). In addition, there are more strategies that can be related to analyzing text structure (Dymock and Nicholson, 2010). Analysis of text structure involves the identification of genre and text type, which is one of the important factors in the reader's strategy use (Wu, 2003). Two main genres are used in classrooms: narrative and expository. While expository texts convey facts and information, narrative texts involve telling a story that includes a series of events that have causal or thematic relationships (Wu, 2003). The two types have their unique text organizations, positing different comprehension processes that EFL learners should be aware of.
This study opted for using two main strategies: story grammar and graphic organizer as an integrated approach to develop English major students' reading comprehension of short stories. This approach involved other cognitive reading strategies such as questioning, visualizing, and synthesizing. Questioning strategy is useful in terms of facilitating students' command of the basic story elements. While visualizing strategy tends to focus on enhancing learners' mental image of both narrative and expository texts (Pressley, 2000), synthesizing strategy helps learners better understand in depth the elements of fiction such as the setting, characters, conflict, resolution and the ending of a story (Cooper, 2006). With such strategies, EFL learners of literature could engage them in analyzing narrative texts by applying textual schemata. Textual schemata derives from the theory of schema which is based on the belief that "every act of comprehension involves one's knowledge of the world as well" (Anderson et al. 1984cited in Al-Issa, 2006. One effective strategy to understand a story is the narrative structure, which is known as story grammars. A story grammar (SG) is defined as "the basic structure of a narrative text" (Amer, 2003, p. 64), and it is represented as 'rules' that are used to describe the common and consistent features found in stories (Mandler, 1984). These rules are related to the different components of a story, how these components are arranged and interrelated. Examining the structure of a narrative text, stories can be divided into three main parts: beginning, middle, and end. Such division can be used to understand the story line, yet it might not be an effective strategy with students who experience difficulties to understand the story at the figurative level. Students believe that to understand a text, they need to understand all words in a story. This could seen as a linguistic problem and time-consuming. Even though learners tend to look up these vocabularies, yet their comprehension of a narrative text do not improve significantly. Moreover, learners attempt to read a story by reading it in "bits and pieces" (Sam D & Rajan, 2013, p, 155) and, consequently, they tend to fail to understand the main idea/s of a narrative text. They may face difficulties to understand the main conflict in a story, how it is solved, and analyzing the character/s with reference to the significance of the setting. Failing to do so, their performance in tests may end up with scoring low grades, and eventually, this may result in de-motivating them and increasing their learning anxiety as they do not trust their abilities to successfully comprehend a narrative text.
Story grammar takes as well into account the gradual development of the story line as presented in Figure 1. The figure represents the development of the action in any story. It starts with the exposition, which means how the story begins or unfolds to the reader. Learners might find information about the setting or they the characters are introduced to the readers. Then, the action starts to rise up. All plots have a problem, and if they do not then, there is no plot. With the rising action, the problem or conflict begins to intensify until it reaches the climax, which is when the conflict arrives to its highest point and usually seen as the turning point in the story. Afterwards, the action starts to fall down exhibiting what the characters do in the story to solve the problem until they reach the resolution which tells how the characters solve the problem and it ends.
This kind of story grammar is referred to as the linear pattern, and teachers tend to use direct instruction to help EFL learners to identify the elements of the plot structure. Teachers might apply some effective questioning strategies to accompany this structure to help learners comprehend the story line (Burns et al., 1999;Leu and Kinzer, 1995;and Amer, 1992). Some guiding questions were developed by Cooper (1986, p. 382-384) and learners may use them to focus on the relevant elements of the plot structure. These guiding questions are stated below: Setting: Where did the story happen?/When did the story happen? Characters: Who was the story about?/Who was the most important person in the story? Problem: Did the people have a problem?/What was the big problem that the story was about? Action: What did the people do to solve the problem?/What were the important things that happened in the story? Resolution: How did the people solve the problem?/ How did the story end? Theme: What lesson could we learn from the story? This strategy might be useful to EFL students to improve their reading comprehension according to a number of previous studies in the field. In Amer's study (1992), he researched the effects of using story grammar and direct instruction on EFL sixth grade students' reading comprehension of narrative text. The outcomes show that implementing direct instruction in story grammar yielded in positive results, as students were able to develop their mental representation skills of the story. Another study was conducted by Dimino, et al. (1990) who taught story grammar to at-risk secondary students' comprehension of literature. They compared the performance of two groups: story grammar and traditional, and the findings showed that the former group did far much better than the latter group.
Story grammars have taken a step further to include the use of graphic organizers (GOs) to help EFL students better comprehend the story line. Graphic organizers are defined as "visual representation of information in the text" (Jiang & Grabe, 2007, p. 34). They are considered as a reading strategy that could help to improve learners' reading comprehension of both literary and non-literary texts, and they "approach reading differently from the traditional, linear text presentation" (Chang, et al., 2002cited in Manoli & Papadopoulou 2012. Graphic organizers are based on Ausubel's cognitive theory (1960) and the schema theory (1984). It is argued that comprehension of texts involves cognitive processing of information as GOs activate the learner's prior knowledge and help to retain information to access a text. They may help learners to find and organize relations, depict structural patterns pertinent in stories, locate information and key vocabulary in a text, and summarize main ideas.
There are different types of graphic organizers depending on the different kinds of texts and what purposes they serve. For teaching narrative texts, the story mapping is used. Story maps (See Appendices A & B) help learners to map the main elements of fiction, such as setting, characters, conflict and plot, and to visualize the ideas and their relations using a specific structure (Boulineau et al., 2004). These graphic organizers may compensate for the shortcomings of the traditional linear pattern and its associated traditional questions as they help EFL learners to gradually understand a story by making connections between their previous knowledge and the reading texts, understanding the events in relation to other elements of fiction, organizing specific details, and understanding the underlying message; theme (Reutzel, 1985as cited in Amer, 2003. Another useful map for reading stories is the character mapping (See Appendix C). This mapping focuses on analyzing a character in terms of specifying their actions and reactions in the story, drawing closely on their feelings and attitudes, and describing their physical appearance in relation to the events in the story. These maps could be used as pre-, during-or post-activities, and teacher-constructed, student-constructed, and teacher/student-constructed can be applied in pedagogical contexts (Manoli & Papadopoulou 2012). The choice of teaching methods and approaches are open for teachers to choose what suit their classes.
Using story mapping pedagogically sounded as an effective tool I could utilize in my literature classes according to some empirical studies. Khatib and Faruji (2012) found a positive impact of GOs on the development of students' vocabulary knowledge. Sam & Rajan (2013) investigated the implementation of GOs on students' reading comprehension. They found that the experimental group outperformed the control group in identifying the main ideas, supporting details and understanding vocabulary.
Being aware of the limitations of the reading strategy that I have been using, I wanted to address a change in my teaching practice. Therefore, this study opted for investigating the usefulness of implementing the story grammar strategy; mainly the graphical organizers, to measure its effectiveness in my literature classes to improve my students' comprehension of narrative texts. Enhancement of motivation was included in this study to fill in gaps left in the literature as there are very few studies that took into account the effects of story grammars on students' motivation. To carry out this study, I posited the following research questions.

1-What is the impact of implementing graphic organizers as a reading strategy on improving EFL learners' reading comprehension of narrative texts? 2-What is the impact of implementing graphic organizers
as a reading strategy on enhancing EFL learners' motivation towards learning the English language and literature?

METHODOLOGY
To answer the above research questions, this research study was conducted following a number of procedures to collect, analyze and discuss the data.

The Sample
The study was conducted in a Department of English Language & Literature at a university in Bahrain. The participants were first year English majors doing their first literature course. The study was conducted in one intact group consisting of 30 students; male and female. Studies using intact groups are more likely to exhibit external validity because "they are conducted under conditions closer to those normally found in educational contexts" (Seliger and Shoamy, 1989, p. 149). All participants' anonymity, confidentiality and approval were sought and guaranteed.

Data Collection Method
The study drew on a mixed-method approach to cover the issue from different angles and to triangulate the findings to enhance its validity (Dornyei, 2007). While the quantitative data were collected from two tools; reading tests and The Impact of Implementing Graphic Organizers on Improving EFL Students' Reading Comprehension of Narrative Texts and Motivation 123 questionnaires, the qualitative data were collected from class observation.

Reading Tests
Three reading tests were administered and piloted to enhance their validity. The tests consisted of narrative texts; short stories, followed by multiple-choice questions. The questions examined the students' understanding of the main elements of fiction; the plot, character, setting, conflict, solution and theme. The pre-cycle test aimed to identify the students' reading comprehension level of short stories. Cycle 1 and Cycle 2 post-tests were administered and aimed to measure any improvements in the students' reading level of narrative texts after the completion of each cycle, which implemented a different strategy.

Questionnaires
Three questionnaires were administered, and they were in the form of statements where the responses were given on a 5-point Likert Scale. The questions were devised into five motivational constructs: attitudes, language anxiety, autonomous learning, self-efficacy, and effort and willingness to communicate. The questionnaires aimed to identify the students' motivation towards reading English stories; their degree of anxiety when reading a narrative story, their learning autonomy in completing a reading task, and their readiness and willingness to discuss narrative stories. However, the questionnaires of Cycles 1 and 2 aimed further to measure the students' motivation and attitudes towards the intervention after each cycle.

Class Observation
Throughout the study I kept a diary where I noted down the students' attitudes and behavioural performance during class activities. I adapted a rigorous manner in writing the diary to enhance the reliability and validity of my observations by: (1) taking notes during the class followed by (2) analysis and reflection on the notes to check out what was needed to improve my teaching practice and motivate my students to learn. Good preparation would help me as an observer to handle the situation effectively (Race, 2014) and to establish the ground upon which I could provide fruitful feedback, and to have a clear idea on what to observe and for what purpose (Richards, 2005).

Cycles of the Study
The study comprised three main phases: Pre-cycle, Cycle 1, and Cycle 2. They are shown in Table (1) below. As shown above, the three cycles consisted of two weeks each; six consecutive classes; 50 minutes each. All cycles collected the data in a rigours manner. Upon the completion of each cycle the questionnaires and the reading tests were administered. As for the observation, it took place during the teaching of the stories. The overall aim of the cycles was to evaluate the effectiveness of each cycle on the students' reading comprehension level of narrative texts and their motivation towards reading and learning literature.
The Pre-cycle phase was dedicated to introducing the course to the students, and two stories were taught following the traditional, usual practice where the focus was on dividing the story into three parts: beginning, middle and end. Some elements of fiction were introduced, such as character, setting, plot and conflict. Based on some weaknesses resulted from their reading test, negative attitudes from the questionnaire and class observation, Cycle 1 was introduced.
In Cycle 1, the students were taught two more stories. I implemented story grammar strategy following the linear pattern. Direct instruction and some guiding questions were used to help the students comprehend the story line, applying different elements of fiction. Some improvements were observed in their attitudes, motivation to read and class participation. However, the improvement was slight, so Cycle 2 was introduced.
In Cycle 2, the students were taught two stories as well applying the story grammar strategy by utilizing graphic organizers. Two types were chosen: story maps and semantic maps to apply different elements of fiction to understand the story line. Students' participation and engagement in class tasks were observed. Upon the completion, post-test2 and the questionnaire were administered.

Data Analysis
As for the reading tests, SPSS (paired-sample t-test) was used to investigate the differences between the pre-test and the two post-tests. The questionnaires were analyzed using Excel programme. Finally, class observation data was analyzed using content analysis method. The quantitative data will be presented in tables and charts below; whereas the qualitative data will be discussed in the discussion section.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
This section will, firstly, present the findings of the study that were collected from the reading tests and the questionnaires. Secondly, it will discuss the findings taking into account the data collected from class observation to answer the research questions and highlight the significance of implementing graphic organizers to improve the students' reading comprehension of narrative texts as well as enhancing their motivation towards learning the English language and literature. Table (2) gives descriptive statistics: the mean scores and the standard deviation of the students' performance on the three tests. Table (2) shows the students' performance on the three tests. The highest mean was scored on post-test 2 (graphic organizers), while the mean scores of the pre-test (traditional method) and post-test 1 (story grammar, the linear pattern) were relatively similar. The standard deviation of all tests was relatively small, indicating that the mean can be considered a reliable indicator of the performance of each student.

Findings of the Reading Tests
To examine how far the difference was significant between the three tests, Table (3) shows the level of the significance.
Table (3) indicates that there was no significant difference when the results of the pre-test (traditional method) and post-test1 (story grammar, the linear pattern) were compared; whereas there were significant differences when the results of the pre-test (traditional method) and post-test2 (graphic organizers). More interestingly, there were highly significant differences when the results of post-test1 (story grammar, the linear pattern) was compared to post-test2 (graphic organizers) in favour of the latter. This indicates that the students performed far much better after implementing the graphic organizers in their literature class.

Findings of the Questionnaires
The 5-point scale was collapsed into a 3-point scale to facilitate comparisons between the cycles. The questionnaires were divided into five sections; each dealt with a different motivational construct, which all helped to draw a bigger picture of the theory of motivation in L2 context. In each chart, related questions were grouped, and presented in relation to the three cycles.

Attitudes
This motivational construct measured two questions. The students were asked about whether they enjoyed studying English (Q1) and whether they found reading narrative texts in English interesting (Q2).
Chart 1 shows the attitudes of the students across the three cycles. It appears that the students highly enjoyed studying English and found reading stories interesting after using the story grammar, the linear pattern and the graphical organizers.

Language anxiety
To measure this motivational construct, two questions were asked related to language anxiety. Question 3 (Q3) measured how far the students felt worried when reading short stories, and Question 4 (Q4) measured how far they felt nervous when reading short stories.
In Chart 2, the students responded to two questions which were related to their language anxiety when reading a story in English. The results from these two questions did not differ across the three cycles even though the students' worriedness and nervousness were decreased after using the graphical organizers. It shows that a large number of students felt worried and nervous when reading stories following the traditional method in the pre-cycle. However, this number was decreased relatively after the completion of Cy-  The Impact of Implementing Graphic Organizers on Improving EFL Students' Reading Comprehension of Narrative Texts and Motivation 125 cle 1 (story grammar, the linear pattern) and Cycle 2 (graphic organizers). Many students felt less much nervous and worried especially after Cycle 2.

Autonomous learning
To measure this motivational construct, two questions were asked related to autonomous learning. Question 5 (Q5) measured how far the students relied on the teacher's help, while Question 6 (Q6) measured students' independency in completing the reading tasks. Chart 3 demonstrates how far the students became autonomous learners in the literature classes. Remarkably, the number of students requesting the help of the teacher from beginning to end when they started reading a story in English (Q5) was greatly minimized after Cycle 1 (story grammar, the linear pattern) and Cycle 2 (graphic organizers). They were even able to carry out a reading task independently from the teacher (Q6) after the Cycles 1 and 2.

Self-efficacy
To measure this motivational construct, three questions were asked related to self-efficacy. Question 7 (Q7) measured how far the students felt confident when reading stories in English. Question 8 (Q8) measured the students' determination and whether they give up easily when the reading task was difficult, whereas Question 9 (Q9) investigated their literary analytical skills following the three cycles.
Chart 4 shows the responses of the participants in reference to one of the motivational constructs; self-efficacy. Interestingly, when it comes to Q7 the students were greatly confident of their performance and handling the reading tasks after the completion of Cycle 2 (graphic organizers) even greater than Cycle 1 (story grammar, the linear pattern). When it comes to Q8, it seems that the students had stronger determination about completing their literary reading tasks even if these tasks were difficult after Cycle 2 (graphic organizers). There was not much difference between the pre-cycle (traditional method) and Cycle 1 (story grammar, the linear pattern) regarding this point. Q9 signals a high difference between the three cycles. Students' literary analytical skills applying the elements of fiction were greatly increased after Cycle 2 (graphic organizers), but as far as the pre-cycle (traditional method) and Cycle 1 (story grammar, the linear pattern) are concerned, there was a light improvement in favour of the latter cycle.

Effort and willingness to communicate
To investigate this motivational construct, one question (Q10) was asked with reference to students' effort and willingness to communicate in literature classes.
The last chart exhibits the students' effort and willingness to communicate in the literature classes. A large number of the learners expressed their willingness to exert effort and participate in their literature classes after they found the treatments in Cycle 1 (story grammar, the linear pattern) and Cycle 2 (graphic organizers) beneficial.

Discussion of the Findings
The statistical findings helped to answer the first research question which investigated the impact of using graphic organizers on improving students' reading comprehension of narrative texts; namely, short stories. The findings of this study confirmed that implementing graphic organizers significantly improved the EFL students' reading comprehension of short stories. It was interesting to see that the students in Cycle 2 (graphic organizers) outperformed in their literary reading test compared with the results of test 1 in the pre-cycle (traditional method) and test 2 in Cycle 1 (story grammar, the linear pattern). The findings of Cycle 2 confirmed previous results in the field (Hernandez, 2014;Sam & Rajan, 2013;Khatib and Faruji, 2012;Amer, 2003). In Cycle 2, the students used graphic organizers to help them better understand the plot of a story visualizing relationships or concepts, using the spatial relation between the ideas, characters or themes. They could retain textual information by constructing visual representations to locate information and find relations between the different parts of a text (Amer, 2003), as well as activating their schemata (Al-Issa, 2006). This was also noticeable from the students' behavioural performance when working on the graphic organizers' tasks. Through class observation, they were more engaged and exerted more effort to analyze the stories they read. It was obvious that they started to handle the analysis of the stories more effectively after using the graphic organizers in which they started to fill in the gaps.
The findings also proved that in the pre-cycle (traditional method) showed that teaching EFL students short stories following the traditional method of dividing a story into three parts: beginning, middle and end, was not effective. As a result, Cycle 1 was introduced during which story grammar was implemented, following the linear pattern accompanied with some guiding questions. Following this teaching method, the teacher taught the short stories applying the five stages of the plot; starting from the exposition, moving to the rising action, climax, falling action, and finally the resolution. The teacher also assisted the students to better comprehend the stories by applying some questioning strategies about the main events, character, conflict, solution and theme. Based on previous studies, this strategy was effective (Burns et al., 1999;Leu and Kinzer, 1995;and Amer, 1992); however, and surprisingly, the findings of Cycle 1 (story grammar, the linear pattern) did not confirm this effectiveness as the students improved slightly, resulting in insignificant differences between the pre-cycle and cycle 1. This might be due to a limitation regarding the time frame set for the study. Students might have required a longer period of time to practice using this pattern. Yet, the individual marks of the students in the tests showed that few individuals benefitted better than others.
The findings of the questionnaires and class observation helped to answer the second research question which investigated the impact of using graphic organizers on enhancing students' motivation and attitudes towards reading and analyzing short stories. The findings validated the results from the tests and the class observations. Students' motivation was highly enhanced after using graphic organizers. The results from their post-test 2 and the questionnaires validated my observations notes in class. The students were highly motivated, and they exerted time and effort to work on the reading tasks. They were more engaged in class discussions regarding the elements of fiction. They were able to draw on comparisons between the characters, for example. Using the 'semantic maps' seemed to be an effective graphic organizer. The students were able to discuss the characters in more detail as they managed to analyze the character's actions, words, reactions, physical appearance and feelings. They found it really interesting to even visualize the character and draw a picture of him or her. In group discussion, they were able to respond to some analytical questions to justify the character's actions in the story. In addition, they seemed to better understand the story line and apply their knowledge of the elements of fiction. Working on the graphic organizers seemed to help them better locate information in the texts and provide simple analysis of the stories as they showed better abilities to draw on the dots and link between different elements of fiction. I believe that the implementation of story grammar and, more importantly, graphic organizers, students motivation can be increased, and, thus, students will form positive attitudes towards learning (Dickinson 1995;Ushioda 1996;and Dornyei 2011).
It is worth noting that even though the statistical findings of Cycle 1 (story grammar, the linear pattern) were not significant, yet the treatment had some positive impact on the students' motivation and attitudes towards learning and reading stories in English. Based on the outcomes from the questionnaires, the students' attitudes towards reading literature and the literature classroom were enhanced. In addition, they started to develop some autonomous skills to handle the literary reading tasks effectively, and they relied less on the teacher. Moreover, the students' learning anxiety decreased. This could be attributed to the increase of their self-confidence and their abilities as shown in the questionnaire. Based on the class observation, the teacher also noticed that their participation in the literature class increased as they showed interest in asking questions and responding to others, especially when their attitudes are compared to the findings of the pre-cycle (traditional method) where I observed that the students depended largely on me rather than themselves.

CONCLUSIONS, LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RECOMMENDATIONS
In conclusion, the findings of this study proved that the implementation of graphic organizers had a positive impact on the EFL learners' reading comprehension of narrative texts; namely, short stories. In addition, it greatly enhanced the learners' motivation and attitudes towards learning the English language and literature. The results of this study can be usefully used to help EFL learners become better readers of literary texts, and motivate them positively towards reading and learning literature.
There are some limitations of this study that should be addressed to maintain external validity and to generalize its findings. The study lacked a control group to safely attribute the improvement to the treatment given. Although I did my best to handle the cycles equally, some extraneous variables might affect the outcomes. However, I believe the triangulation increased the external validity as I used both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Moreover, I tested the immediate effect of the treatments, future studies can compensate for this limitation, and test the long-term effect of story grammars, more specifically the use of graphic organizers. Furthermore, one type of questioning was used; multiple-choice. In future studies, other types of questioning techniques can be explored.