Using Digital Learning to Develop Secondary School Students’ EFL Reading Comprehension Skills

The present study verified the effectiveness of utilizing digital learning instruction on developing the reading comprehension skills of Egyptian EFL first year secondary school students. Sixty students took part in the current study and were equally divided into a control group and an experimental group by assigning a class for each group. The experimental students were taught reading comprehension skills by using the digital learning-based instruction, whereas the control group studied the same skills by using the regular method. Elicitation of data relied on the research design of pretest and posttest. The study analyzed the collected data by adopting the mixed method of quantitative and qualitative approach. The quantitative analysis relied on descriptive and inferential statistics. The descriptive statistics used mean scores and standard deviations of the two groups' pre-and-posttest performances. The inferential statistics employed the paired samples t-test and the independent samples t-test. Gained mean scores of both groups were computed to verify the effectiveness of digital learning-based instruction and regular instruction on developing the participants' reading comprehension skills. The results showed the higher gained mean score was in favour of the experimental group compared to the control group. The study strongly recommended the use of digital leaning-based instruction in teaching reading comprehension skills to first year secondary school students.