october 2012 - TOJET the Turkish online journal of educational ...

TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology – October 2012, volume 11 Issue 4
possible to assign subjects randomly to groups (Ary, Jacobs, & Razavieh, 2002). That is, the groups were
naturally assembled through their class sections. The experimental group received the traditional teaching plus
WebQuests as supplementary activities. The control group received the traditional teaching only. The students’
comprehension performance in the post-test was compared for both groups in order to determine whether there
were significant differences between the groups in relation to the treatment.
Participants and Context
The study was conducted in a university first year preparatory program. The participants were 83 level three
male students in the science and engineering track in the Preparatory Year (PY) in King Saud University (KSU),
Saudi Arabia. Students were enrolled in the Intensive English program with 20 weekly contact hours for two
semesters and a summer. The program aims to develop students' English language proficiency and equip them
with the essential language skills needed for academic study and future professional life. There are six levels of
proficiency in the program where level six is for advanced learners and level one is for false beginners. Level
three is considered pre-intermediate. The students were selected using a simple random selection and two
sections were chosen to participate. There were 42 students in the experimental group and 41 students in the
control group. The two sections were used for a total of 10 sessions (50 minutes each) over a seven week period
in June-August 2011. The sections’ teacher is a native speaker of English and has taught English for seven years.
He has experience with using WebQuest, therefore, no training was needed.
In order to ensure that the subjects in this study were at the same proficiency level in reading comprehension, a
reading comprehension pre-test was assigned to both groups. The results of the pre-test show that the mean
averages of the subjects’ grades on the pre-test were very similar (see Table 1). These results were computed
through Independent Samples Test (t-test) and revealed at the p