RESEARCH ABSTRACT

There is a generally accepted reality among first and second language reading

researchers and practitioners that learners who study in a second or foreign language are

almost always at a disadvantage, particularly in the area of reading. In light of this

learners who register for high school study each year in Sta. Rita District, Sta Rita, Samar

are very often under prepared for high school education and many of these learners also

have low levels of reading ability. This has an adverse effect on their chances of

academic success. In order to meet the reading needs of these learners, educators need to

develop effective instructional means for teaching reading comprehension and reading

strategy use. It is evident from the volume and quality of research published that the

teaching of reading strategies enhances the learners' reading comprehension ability.

The purpose of this study was to:

 determine what reading strategies Grade 10 English learners use;

 determine what reading strategies should be taught;

 determine how and when reading strategies should be taught in Grade 10

English language learners of Dampigan National High School;

 determine what the effect of an implemented reading strategy program is

on the reading comprehension of the Grade 10 English learners

participating in this study; and

 provide guidelines in terms of the composition (i.e, format, outcomes,

content, teaching method, approach, etc.) of a reading strategy instruction

program.
 In this study a quasi-experimental pretest - posttest control group design was

used. The participants in this study included a total of 60 Grade 10 English learners from

Dampigan National High School. Two intact randomly selected classes participated in the

study. Both males and females participated in the study and ranged in age from 18 - 22

years.

The Reading Performance Test in English: Advanced Level (Roux, 1996) and a

Reading Strategy Questionnaire based on the work of Oxford (1990), Pressley and

Afflerbach (1995) and Pressley et al. (1995) was used in this study.

A t-test was used to determine whether the mean scores of the experimental and

control group differed statistically significantly from each other. Cohen's (1977) effect

size d was used to determine whether the mean differences were practically significant.

The results of the study revealed the following:

The results indicated that the learners who followed the reading strategy program

and received strategic reading instruction (experimental group) obtained both statistically

and practically significantly higher marks on the reading comprehension test (posttest)

than did the learners in the control group. The posttest results indicated that the learners

in the experimental group used certain strategies statistically (p<0.05), as well as

practically significantly (small to large effect size), more often than the learners in the

control group.

The reading instruction programme developed in this study focuses on five

reading strategies, namely guessing the meaning of words from the context, making

inferences, predicting what is to come in a text, identifying the main idea and

summarising.
 The programme presents an overview of the guidelines for a reading strategy

instruction program. It outlines the purpose, target group, content and other aspects,

instruction, classroom procedure and assessment concerning a meaningful reading

strategy instruction programme. English Second Language teachers may find it worth

their while to implement reading strategy training models of a similar nature in order to

develop their learners' proficiency in reading comprehension and reading strategy use.