The Effects of Instructional Images on EFL Reading Comprehension: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

This project is a systematic review and meta-analysis examining the effects of instructional images on reading comprehension in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Instructional images are widely used in EFL reading materials, yet empirical findings regarding their impact on comprehension are mixed, and existing evidence is fragmented across disciplines, study designs, and image types. As a result, there is currently no clear quantitative benchmark for whether adding images to text reliably improves EFL reading comprehension, nor a systematic account of the variability in reported effects. The primary purpose of this meta-analysis is to estimate the overall effect of adding instructional images to text, compared with text-only presentation, on EFL reading comprehension outcomes. Using PRISMA- and PRISMA-S–compliant procedures, the review synthesizes experimental and quasi-experimental studies that include controlled comparisons of image-enhanced and text-only reading conditions. Random-effects meta-analytic models are used to compute pooled effect sizes and to quantify heterogeneity across studies. In addition, the meta-analysis examines theoretically motivated image characteristics—such as image design/type, signaling, semantic alignment with the text, and spatial contiguity—as potential moderators of comprehension effects. Paragraph-structure outcomes and eye-tracking measures reported in the literature are synthesized descriptively to support interpretation of heterogeneity, but are not treated as primary meta-analytic outcomes. The expected outcome of this project is a clear, outcome-level estimate of the effect of instructional images on EFL reading comprehension, along with evidence-based insights into design features that condition this effect. The findings are intended to provide a cumulative empirical foundation for theory development and instructional design in multimodal EFL reading research.