Narrative Structure as a Pedagogical Scaffold: A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Story of Kan'an (Surah Hud 11:42-43) in Improving Short-Term Arabic Reading Performance at Indonesian Madrasah Aliyah

Purpose - This study examines whether a three-stage narrative learning model structured around the story of Kan'an ibn Nuh in Surah Hud (11:42-43) produces significantly greater short-term gains in Arabic reading test performance than conventional grammar-translation instruction among Indonesian madrasah secondary school students. Design/Methodology/Approach - A quasi-experimental nonequivalent control group design was implemented at Madrasah Aliyah Negeri 1 (MAN 1) Banyuwangi, East Java, in January 2026 (N = 64; two intact tenth-grade classes of 32 each). Pre-test equivalence was confirmed through Mann-Whitney U test (p = .553) and Levene's test (p = .278). The experimental class received three 60-minute sessions structured across pre-reading, while-reading, and postreading stages grounded in NBL theory and Vygotsky’s ZPD. Both classes completed a validated 20-item multiple-choice instrument (Cronbach’s α = 0.830) that assessed vocabulary in context, reading comprehension, and grammatical structure recognition. Non-normal post-test distributions required the Wilcoxon signed-rank and Mann-Whitney U tests; the normalized gain (N-gain) scores and effect size (r) were used to quantify the magnitude of improvement. Findings - The pretest scores were statistically equivalent (p = .553). The experimental class mean rose from 65.00 to 87.66 against a rise from 62.81 to 77.19 in the control class. Mann-Whitney U testing confirmed a highly significant between-group difference (U = 178.000, Z = -4.571, p < .001, r = 0.808). The experimental class N-gain of 61.63% (moderately effective) was 1.8 times greater than the control class N-gain of 34.12% (small-to-medium, r = 0.296). The posttest score variance in the experimental class narrowed substantially (SD: 12.18–7.62), indicating disproportionate gains among the lower-performing learners. Originality/Value - This is the first study to operationalize the Kan’an narrative as the primary instructional vehicle—not supplementary text—within a fully specified three-stage reading model grounded in NBL theory and Vygotskian scaffolding. The findings suggest that culturally coherent Qur'anic narrative text selection is a substantively meaningful instructional variable in madrasah Arabic reading instruction, offering a replicable, technology-free model for classroom implementation. Paper type - Research paper