In our school we have started with the enrollment for first year students, and a part of the process is to undergo a reading assessment exercise. This is in accordance with the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory Program of the DepEd that tends to classify students as "Independent, Instructional or Frustration" in the area of word recognition and reading comprehension. And with the general average of the students, we also used this reading assessment to determine the section the students should be in.
As I have observed, the students who I have handled has minor miscues in terms with their word recognition. But some of them can't even pronounce simple words like "floods" and "kitchen" properly. Their problems were mostly in answering the comprehension questions. This makes me wonder if the problem really is that they did not understand what they have read, or they did not understand the questions given to them. I have even asked one student if he understood what I asked him and he just gave me a blank look. This is alarming. Thousand of students in school who can't comprehend simple English will be a big problem not only to the teachers but also to themselves. Reading comprehension is a big factor for most of the books and references in other subject areas are written in English.
So what now? After classifying the students according to their level of competence in reading, what are we supposed to do?
I remember what we did when we first conducted Phil-Iri in our school two years ago. After the pre-test we had our remedial classes with the first year students where we teach English lessons focusing on reading comprehension. Personally I found it futile, for the strategies implemented were just in the surface level, and long lasting improvement was still to be seen. I am no expert when it comes to reading; and a bit of training and seminar focusing on these would really help us to become effective teachers.
Reading is something loved before being mastered. And in this day and age where students spend more time in front of the TV sets, it is really a challenge to us teachers to bring the love back to the books.
