USING THE ENGLISH FAIRY TALES YOUTUBE CHANNEL TO SUPPORT EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION OF NARRATIVE TEXTS

Abstract

Reading comprehension is an important skill for junior high school students, particularly in understanding narrative texts, yet students may experience difficulties in identifying and interpreting information in such texts. Although audiovisual media have been increasingly used to support English language learning, empirical evidence regarding the use of specific YouTube-based narrative materials in reading instruction remains limited, particularly in the context of Indonesian junior high schools. This study investigated the use of the English Fairy Tales YouTube channel in teaching reading comprehension of narrative texts to eighth-grade students at SMP Negeri 26 Pontianak in the 2024/2025 academic year. A pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design was employed involving 30 students selected through cluster random sampling. Students’ reading comprehension was measured using a 20-item multiple-choice test covering five aspects: main idea, details, inference, reference, and vocabulary. The students completed the pretest before and the posttest after two treatment sessions using videos from the English Fairy Tales YouTube channel. The results showed an increase in the students’ mean score from 69.83 (SD = 5.94) in the pretest to 90.00 (SD = 6.82) in the posttest. A paired-samples t-test indicated a statistically significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores, t(29) = 24.82, p < .001, with a 95% confidence interval for the mean difference of [18.51, 21.83]. The effect size was large (EF = 4.53). These findings indicate substantial improvement in students’ reading comprehension scores following the intervention. However, because the study did not include a control group, the findings should be interpreted as evidence of improvement after the intervention rather than definitive evidence that the English Fairy Tales YouTube channel alone caused the improvement.