The effect of using story maps in teaching story on reading comprehension

This study aims to investigate the effect of using story maps in teachingstory on 9th year students? reading comprehension at high school.The study used a post test controlled experimental pattern. The study wascarried out in 2005-2006 academic year spring term at Çanakkale High Schoolwhich is situated in the city centre of Çanakkale. There were totally 60 participantsin the study all chosen from the 9th year students. 30 of them formed the experimentalgroup and the other 30 formed the control group.Three different situations and three stories both chosen by experts, werestudied for three weeks with the participants of the experimental group and in thefourth week a situation and comprehension questions related with the story weregiven as a post test. The same stories were studied with the participants of thecontrol group in the same period by traditional method and afterwards in the lastweek a post test was administered.The data was collected through Story Evaluation Scale and ReadingComprehension Tests. Mean and frequency analysis, Cronbach?s Alpha, KR-20 andChi-Square Test were used to analyse the data.The results of the study conclude that there is a parallel effect between usingstory maps on the teaching of incident and situation stories; and also the use of storymaps is more effective compared to the traditional method on the 9th year students?finding the elements of a story and reading comprehension. The other result of thestudy implies that when compared to the traditional method there is not a significantrelationship between the use of a story map and place, time, main character,supporting character, climax, main body and conclusion sections which arementioned in the incident story.