DEVELOPING GRADE 3 STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION OF FOLK LITERATURE TEXTS: A PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIMENT IN VIETNAM

Abstract

This study investigated an integrated, genre-sensitive instructional approach for supporting Grade 3 students’ comprehension of folk literature texts. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design involved 60 students in two intact classes at Tuc Duyen Primary School, Thai Nguyen, Vietnam. The experimental class received a focused lesson sequence integrating background-knowledge activation, active learning, genre-sensitive tasks, purposeful technology, formative assessment, and a four-stage reading process; the control class received regular instruction. Parallel 10-point assessments used different Vietnamese folk narratives but the same score structure: 7 points for text comprehension and 3 points for application. Achievement was reported as not completed, completed, or well completed. The classes were comparable at baseline on the ordinal achievement measure (Mann-Whitney U = 442.5, p = .906). At posttest, the experimental class had fewer students classified as not completed (13.3% versus 33.3%) and more classified as well completed (26.7% versus 13.3%). The posttest ordinal comparison favored the experimental class with a small-to-moderate rank-biserial association, although it narrowly missed the conventional significance threshold (U = 332.0, p = .052, rrb = .262). Classroom observations and learning products suggested stronger participation, collaboration, interpretation, and personal response in the experimental class. The findings provide promising but preliminary evidence for a coherent combination of comprehension supports in a Vietnamese primary-school context; the small, nonrandom sample, focused intervention, and absence of instrument reliability evidence require cautious interpretation and replication.