Enhancing EFL Reading Comprehension and Attitudes Through Augmented Reality: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Digital reading platforms have attracted growing interest in enhancing EFL reading comprehension and attitudes. This study examined the effects of Augmented Reality (AR)-integrated textbooks on Indonesian EFL students’ reading comprehension and attitudes relative to printed textbooks. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design involved 104 first-year English majors, assigned to an AR group (n = 52) and a print-based control group (n = 52). Over five weeks, both groups studied equivalent content under comparable conditions. Comprehension was assessed before and after the intervention, while attitudes were assessed post-intervention using a 15-item questionnaire covering utility, development, enjoyment, and escape. A 2 × 2 mixed-design ANOVA was used in this research and showed a clear improvement in comprehension from pretest to posttest. This improvement was comparable between the AR and print-based groups, indicating that AR did not yield an additional comprehension advantage beyond conventional print-based instruction. In contrast, students in the AR group reported markedly more favorable reading attitudes than those in the print-based group, and this advantage held consistently across all attitude domains examined. These findings suggest that AR offers an engaging multimodal format strongly associated with more favorable reading attitudes, even though it does not produce greater short-term comprehension gains than print-based instruction.