Promoting Young Adolescents’ Reading Performance: Evidence from Narrative Transportation on Multimodality Readings

Abstract

There is a call for exploring the narrative transportation and reading performance among multimodality readings, i.e., single modality (text), dual modality (text + picture), and tri-modality (text + picture + audio). Altogether 42 junior high-school participants native in Chinese from an urban city in P.R. China were invited to the 90-minute experiment. The participants were administered English reading materials and a self-reported scale of transportation, along with a pretest to determine English proficiency level. The statistical analysis showed that (1) the transportation effect is highest in tri-modality readings, followed by that in dual and single modality readings. (2) There is no statistical difference between genders in relation to transportation effect. (3) Except for tri-modality reading, there is no statistical difference in relation to English proficiency for narrative transportation. The study results indicate that teachers could fully immerse students into narrative stories by pedagogically incorporating texts, pictures, and audios into reading materials.