<![CDATA[This study investigated the effect of using Minangkabau folklore as English reading material on the narrative text reading comprehension of Grade 8 students at SMPN 1 Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, Indonesia, addressing the underrepresentation of local cultural content in EFL reading instruction. Grounded in Schema Theory (Rumelhart, 1980) and Culturally Responsive Teaching (Gay, 2000), a quasi-experimental nonequivalent control group design was employed with 56 students from two intact classes: an experimental group (n = 28) taught with Minangkabau folklore-based narrative texts (The Origin of Minangkabau, The Legend of Maninjau Lake, and Siti Nurbaya), and a control group (n = 28) taught with conventional narrative materials. Data were collected through a 20-item multiple-choice reading comprehension test based on the six-level taxonomy of Day and Park (2005), validated through a pilot test using the Pearson Product Moment Correlation and assessed for reliability using the KR-20 formula (r₁₁ = .864). Because the experimental group's posttest data violated the normality assumption, the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U Test was used for hypothesis testing. Results showed a significant improvement in the experimental group's comprehension from pretest to posttest (p = .018) and a significant, medium-sized difference between the experimental and control groups' posttest scores (p = .002, r = .422), with the experimental group achieving a higher mean rank (35.32) than the control group (21.68). These findings support Schema Theory and Culturally Responsive Teaching, although the pre-existing disparity between groups at pretest suggests that regression to the mean may have partly contributed to the result, and the findings should therefore be interpreted with appropriate caution.]]>
