The Effects Of Textbook Illustrations On The Reading Comprehension Of Elementary Students

Reading comprehension continues to be a crucial part of most people’s lives. It isan important issue to study how to read more materials and extract informationquickly in a short time, which always gains people’s concern and interests.Illustrations are usually used to enhance people’s ability on reading comprehension.In recent decades, there have been more and more studies about the illustrations inreading comprehension home and abroad, on which a certain amount of researcheshad been publicly reported. However, previous researches focused mainly onmaterials based on non-language related subjects’ instruction (science, psychology,mathematics, etc.). English textbook, especially elementary English textbook whichcontained a great quantity of illustrations were excluded.The current study focused on this topic. The study was conducted to discusseffects of different types of illustrations (complete illustrations, partial illustrations)on the EFL elementary students’ reading comprehension in different proficiencylevels (high and low). Effects of textbook illustrations on the reading comprehensionwere studied among elementary students of grade five. Based on the readingcomprehension test, they were divided into two groups (High proficiency and lowproficiency). They read passages (text-only, text with complete illustrations, text withpartial illustrations) excerpted from Starting Line, a students’ book used by theElementary school attached to the Hunan University. With the purpose of discussingthe effect that the illustrations types on the subjects’ reading comprehension, a3(texttypes: text-only, text with complete illustrations, text with partial illustrations)×2(question types:“wh” questions and cloze) analysis of variance (ANOVA) wasemployed. And a further analysis focused on subjects’ reading proficiency as it relatedto performance on comprehension questions for the study. A split was used to dividethe scores into “low” and “high” proficiency groupings. A3(text conditions)×2(question type)×2(proficiency level) ANOVA was employed in the study.The results indicated both text types and proficiency levels had significant effecton the reading comprehension. Condition that presented text alone, with noillustrations, resulted in the overall best comprehension. The results also showed thatthere were no statistically significant differences between the subjects’ performanceunder the text with complete and partial illustrations, however, neither of illustrations appeared to benefit test performance. As for the proficiency levels, results showedthat those with high proficiency performed better than those with low proficiencyoverall on the comprehension scores. However, there were no interactions betweenproficiency levels and text types.In sum, the results of study showed that the availability of illustrations can hinderrather than help reading comprehension. Therefore, The design and application ofillustrations on Primary English textbook needed to be considered with the function ofillustrations and followed the rule of moderation, and also had to match with thelearning tasks and students’ language proficiency levels, so as to help fill the gap inapplied research on the effects of illustrations on textbook reading.