The Effect of Mastery Learning Strategy on EFL Preparatory School Students Achievement in Literary Text

Abstract

Mastery Learning strategy is an instructional strategy and educational philosophy; this strategy is presented for the first time in (1986) by Benjamin Bloom. According to this strategy, the students must achieve a level of mastery in knowledge before going to learn subsequent information. If a student does not achieve mastery on the test, they are given additional support in learning and reviewing the information and then tested again. Most of EFL students at Iraqi schools find difficulties in mastering the literary text due to a variety of reasons in teaching materials or in adopted methods. This study aims at finding out the effect of Mastery Learning Strategy on EFL preparatory school students’ achievement in literary text. A sample of (60) students have been randomly selected from the Iraqi EFL fifth preparatory school students from Saladin Governorate, Al- Ramah Al-awaly preparatory School for boys during the academic year (2020-2021). The students divided into two groups, (30) students as an Experimental Group and (30) students as a Control Group. Both groups have been equalized in their age, parents’ level of education, their degrees in English language subject in the previous grade of the academic year (2019- 2020), and their level of achievement in the pre- test. Both groups have been taught by the researcher himself and exposed to the same instructional material from English for Iraq/ 5th class (students’ book and literature focus). The Experimental Group has been taught according to Mastery Learning Strategy, while the Control Group has been taught according to the conventional method. An achievement test has been constructed, validated, and applied on the two groups. The obtained results have been collected and analyzed statistically. The results of the current study show that the achievement of the experimental group who has been taught by Using the mastery learning strategy is better than that of the control group who have been taught by using the traditional method. This means that mastery learning strategy proves to be more effective than the traditional technique, in teaching literary texts. Finally, the study ends up with some conclusions, recommendations, and suggestions for further studies.