One of the most valuable skills a person can acquire is the ability to read well. It is difficult to discover any ability in the school, in the home, in business, or in any other field of endeavor today that does not require reading. People read to get information, to buy things wisely, for recreation, and for a great many other reasons. More reading is being done today than it ever was in the past. According to Smith (1988) reading is an important factor that greatly affects an individuals’ adjustment in life.
It is a key to success in school, to the development of out-of school interests, to the enjoyment of leisure time and to the personal and social adjustment. It helps one to adjust to his/her age mates, to become independent from parents and teachers to select and prepare for an occupation and to achieve social responsibilities. Villamin (1999) considers reading as an essential key that unlocks the door to the world of enlightenment and enjoyment and the basic tool for learning in the content field. The absence of reading skill will greatly affect an individual’s adjustment in life.
William Gray, known as the father of reading defines reading as a four- step process: perception of the word, comprehension of its meaning, reaction to the meaning in terms of prior knowledge and integration of idea into one’s background of experience. In every chosen field, the proficiency in reading is extremely important because it plays a vital role in achieving success. The ability to read well, leads many students to be competent and be more confident in meeting all the challenges in the field of studies.
As defined in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to construct or derive meaning. It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas. Like all language, it is a complex interaction between the text and the reader which is shaped by the reader’s prior knowledge, experiences, and attitude. It is one of the best ways of broadening one’s knowledge and expanding one’s horizon. The ability to read means the ability to comprehend any printed text.
Reading skills and ability play a vital role in raising academic performance of every individual specifically the high school students. With the fast pace of life today and the great knowledge explosion, there is so much printed material around us that the ability to read rapidly has become a most important asset. Rapid reading habits enable a student to accomplish more in a comparatively shorter time, to finish the school requirements, and still have time for leisure or recreational reading.
But in spite of the proliferation of different printed reading materials, it’s quite distressful to accept the fact that mostly of the students today are still experiencing difficulties in reading. This is evident in their academic performance in school. The development of varied printed materials cannot solely solve the upsetting problems in reading. Department of Education has been applying varied interventions and innovations to respond to these problems, many schools are using the DepEd programs about reading like the Phil-IRI for elementary and SRI for secondary; nevertheless non-readers in many public schools still cannot be eradicated.
As a result, performance indicators of many schools are affected. The inability to read by these students may cause drop-outs or failure. A number of struggling readers have been increasing yearly, specifically in public schools. This present scenario is quite alarming thus reading interventions must be given immediate emphasis. One intervention that could be applicable for the existing problem is remedial reading. Reading remediation can be identified as a general process of re-teaching. It can be directed toward each child’s specific needs and inadequacies.
Various remedial measures could be used by any educational institution to diagnose factors responsible for reading disabilities and to improve those who are poor or indifferent readers. Villamin enumerates the basic principles or remedial reading. They are as follows; treatment must be based on the understanding of the instructional needs, remedial instruction must be organized, reading process must be made meaningful to the learners, every child’s principle must be considered, reading activities must be encouraging, materials and activities must be suitable to the child’s reading ability.
Such principles mentioned, once applied to actual remedial reading instruction might contribute a lot for the success of the program. Background of the Study One of the usual dilemmas of reading teachers in high school is the inability to read and comprehend by the students specifically the grade seven learners. In fact mostly of the public high school English teachers are experiencing this. Some of the learners had been promoted from elementary even they are not proficient in reading and comprehending as well.
Same situation is happening in San Cristobal National High School, a school that is located in the remote barrio in San Pablo City. A school that lies beneath the mountains of Mt. Cristobal and Mt. Banahaw where the usual residents’ source of living are farming and hog raising. Due to the barrio’s distant from the city, the former Brgy. Chairman, Gabriel Enabore together with the Brgy. Council prepared an ordinance of establishing a Baragay High School, presented it to the City Mayor for approval and endorsed to the Ministry of Education.
Upon approval of the city government through the Ministry of Education, the Barangay High School was established immediately to respond to the immediate needs of the residents in the area. However there were no enough budgets for the purchase of lot and for the construction of the high school building as a result, the high school students were temporarily housed to the elementary school. Mr. Venus Avanzado, a former part-time CAT instructor of the school that time, donated a parcel of his land to be utilized in putting up the high school building.
Almost all the parents of the high school students are grateful due to the establishment of the said school; nevertheless, since most of them are not well educated, they are not aware of monitoring the status of their children in school. After 18 years of teaching fourth year students in San Cristobal National High School, the researcher was designated to attend the K-12 training and was also assigned to teach the Grade 7 formerly first year high school students. During the first year of teaching in grade 7, the researcher became quite alarmed of the up growing number of students having difficulty in reading.
The former freshman teachers in fact admitted that mostly of the freshmen students can read but without comprehension. These students cannot read within, between and beyond the lines, in short they are considered as struggling readers. As shown in the Secondary Reading Inventory Test (SRI) records, the researcher noted that a number of first year high school students fall under frustration level. For this reason the academic performance of these students declined as proven in the NAT result record.
Aside from the NAT records, the academic performance of a number of students in every grading period in English is not increasing due to their difficulties in reading and comprehending as well. This current scenario prompted the researcher to conduct a study to address the needs of the students and the school as well. In the light of these observations, it is out timely to conduct this study to find out some possible variables about remedial reading and its affect on the academic performance of the Grade 7 learners in San Cristobal National High school, San Pablo city for the school year 2013-2014.
Theoretical Framework Murray’s Interactive Theory cited by Tejero (2010) postulates that reading is an interaction involving the reader and the text being read. Meaning it is not only in the mind of the person during the reading act nor is it only in the text being read. It is instead the interaction between the text read and the reader’s various sources that determine the amount and type of comprehension that take place. Reading models have been conceptualized in the following; bottom-up, top-down and interactive models.
For Gough’s bottom-up model mentioned by Tejero (2010) his essential element is the text rather than what the reader brings to the text. Goodman’s (1985) top-down model cited also by Tejero (2010) focuses attention on the reader. Thus the reader brings information based on past experience. On the other hand, Rumelhart (1985) also cited by Tejero (2010) postulates interactive model which is the combination of bottom-up and top-down views of reading. For him a reader may be top-down if he is reading familiar material and bottom- up when reading unfamiliar information.
Other related theories of reading are; The Traditional view, the Cognitive view, the Metacognitive view. In the traditional view of reading, novice readers acquire a set of hierarchically ordered sub-skills that sequentially build toward comprehension ability. McCarthy (2004) has called this view 'outside-in' processing; referring to the idea that meaning exists in the printed page and is interpreted by the reader then taken in.
This model of reading has almost always been under attack as being insufficient and defective for the main reason that it relies on the formal features of the language, mainly words. The Cognitive view The 'top-down' model is in direct opposition to the ‘ bottom-up' model. According to Nunan, et. al (2005), the psycholinguistic model of reading and the top-down model are in exact concordance. From the study of Goodman (1966) as cited by Paran, (2002) presented reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game, a process in which readers sample the text, make hypotheses, confirm or reject them, make new hypotheses, and so forth.
Here, the reader rather than the text is at the heart of the reading process and structure. The Metacognitive view involves thinking about what one is doing while reading. Klein et al. (2004) stated that strategic readers attempt the following while reading: Identifying the purpose of the reading before reading Identifying the form or type of the text before reading thinking about the general character and features of the form or type of the text. For instance, they try to locate a topic sentence and follow supporting details toward a conclusion.
