Short stories reading as a technique for teaching simple past tense at preparatory schools in Zawia-Libya

Abstract EN

The researcher of this study tried to use reading short stories as a technique for teaching simple past tense at preparatory schools.

The study supposes that short stories can be a rich source of events and actions that happened in the past.

Learners may learn and understand simple past tense through reading and understanding short stories.

The researcher examines the effect of this technique in teaching simple past tense by using two sources of data collection.

These sources are tests and questionnaire.

The practical part of this study took place in Alsafa Private School.

The subjects involved in this study( N = nineteen ) are in the third year of the preparatory school whose ages are about fifteen years old.

Procedures of this study were: Two short stories were selected to be read aloud by the subjects of this study with focusing on simple past tense forms, pronunciation and time expressions etc.

The affected time for every story was ( forty ) minutes a day for three days.

After the reading, subjects did two tests, i.e.

( 1 ) multiple choice questions test for every story, then ( 2 ) responses to the questionnaire.

The results of the analysis of tests and the questionnaire show that the use of reading short stories is a helpful echnique for both teaching and learning simple past tense at the preparatory school.