A short stories - based program in developing second year university students’ legal vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension

Abstract

The present study was an attempt to determine the effectiveness of designing a program based on short stories to develop students' legal vocabulary. Participants were 100-second year college students, law department from a private university in Saudi Arabia. The experimental group (N=50) used short stories technique to develop their vocabulary acquisition; whereas the control group (N=50) was taught their vocabulary through their prescribed book. The pre-post test comprised three parts, the first part included reading a short story with ten questions related to this passage, the second comprised vocabulary questions and finally translation questions that included a list of words to be translated into Arabic and vice versa. Results of the t. test analysis revealed that the short stories techniques yielded significant effects on students' vocabulary acquisition, i.e. the experimental group outperformed the control group.