Developing creative reading skills through graphic organizers among Saudi EFL learners

Although creative reading is a core higher-order literacy skill, it remains one of the most neglected dimensions of reading pedagogy in English as a foreign language (EFL), and no previous experimental study has examined the effect of systematic graphic organizer instruction on creative reading skills in Saudi higher education. This study addressed that gap by investigating the effect of a graphic organizers-based instructional program on Saudi EFL students’ creative reading skills. A quasi-experimental design was employed with 43 male freshmen EFL students at Al-Jouf College of Technology in Saudi Arabia, randomly assigned to an experimental group ( n = 22) taught through five types of graphic organizers (Venn diagram, Know–Want to Know–Learned [KWL] chart, concept mapping, fishbone diagram, and circle map) over eight weeks, and a control group ( n = 21) that received conventional instruction. A validated creative reading skills test measured four sub-skills: originality, flexibility, fluency, and elaboration. One-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) revealed a statistically significant difference in favor of the experimental group, F (1, 40) = 43.67, p < .001, with a large effect size (partial η 2 = .52), indicating that the teaching method accounted for approximately 52% of the variance in adjusted post-test scores; the experimental group's raw gain (10.32 of 26 marks) was double that of the control group (5.14). Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) confirmed significant advantages across all four sub-skills, with large effects for flexibility ( η 2 = .28), fluency ( η 2 = .23), and elaboration ( η 2 = .19). These findings indicate that structured, multi-organizer instruction produces practically substantial, not merely statistically significant, gains in the creative reading skills of Saudi EFL college learners. The study contributes a validated, replicable instructional model for EFL teachers, provides curriculum designers with evidence for embedding visual-strategic creative reading tasks in Saudi technical education materials, and identifies gender-inclusive, multi-site, and longitudinal replications as priority directions for future research.