The Effects of Twin Text Instruction with Different Readability Levels on EFL Children’s Reading Comprehension

In the present study, the i-1 method is applied to young EFL learners who have a low level of English proficiency as well as reading motivation. The experiment of twin-text instruction was conducted in a community English library center, AJU Good Dream Center, in Seoul, Korea. The participants of the experiment were 13 elementary school students who enrolled in an English reading program during the winter vacation. There were 9 female students and 4 male students, and their grades ranged from 1st to 6th. The whole experiment was conducted for fourteen sessions, where each session consisted of one pretest, twelve teaching sessions with 12 pairs of text sets about the same topic in the order of ‘i-1’ level non-fiction texts to ‘i+1’ level of fiction texts, and one posttest. The findings are as follows. First, the twin-text reading instruction had positive effects on young Korean EFL learners, especially when the i-1 method was applied to expository text to pair with narrative text. Statistical analyses demonstrated that the posttest scores are higher than the pretest scores after the twin-text instruction, and the positive effects were greater for those with a lower level reading comprehension ability. Also, the students agreed that the twin-text instruction is helpful for improving their reading comprehension ability, and those with a lower level of reading comprehension ability had a more positive evaluation of the twin-text instruction. These results suggest that the i-1 method in twin-text instruction can be a good solution to reduce inequality in English education.