Abstract

• This study is designed to investigate the effect of contextual instruction in teaching reading comprehension at the high school level to help students connect their reading materials to the reallife situations. This study is an experimental research and the design adopted was nonequivalent control group posttest-only design, one of the quasi-experimental designs. Simple random sampling technique was used in this study involving (139) participants who were Grade Ten students from two basic education high schools. In order to measure their reading comprehension, the posttest containing seen passages and unseen passages was administered to the students who received contextual instruction and those who did not after giving the treatment. Moreover, the students’ attitudes of the experimental group towards contextual instruction were examined by using a set of questionnaire. The data from the students were analyzed by using the independent samples t test and descriptive statistics. According to the results, there was a significant difference between the students who were exposed to contextual instruction and those who were not. Therefore, this study showed that contextual instruction can give a positive contribution to teaching reading comprehension to high school students.