Promo Trip: READ All You Can

By: Stephen Tracy E. Tabamo

Reading comprehension is among the basic skills that should be taught to

children in the first years of elementary school. If they can acquire reading
comprehension skills, they can be successful in both school courses and life. Acquiring
reading comprehension skills seems to be even more important and functional
especially in elementary school that is the first period of children's school years.
Students use these skills in all their courses, and their academic life is directly affected
by such skills. (Papatga, 2016)

As a language teacher, one of the major problems I encounter is the poor

comprehension of my learners. Even if the instructions given are basic, they are not
able to follow it especially when it is stated in pure English. Since they were not
immersed to a classroom where English is the medium, when they step to Senior High
School and enter classes like Oral Communication, English for Academic and
Professional Purposes, and the like which require the use of English in the
performances and assessments, they are culture shocked and caught flat-footed. They
perform poorly because they cannot comprehend. This is something that must be
addressed immediately.

Reading competence is regarded as a vital skill for academic survival and

success. According to Villamin (1994) reading is a four-step process: word perception,
comprehension, meaning reaction in prior knowledge and idea integration into one’s
background experience. Roldan (1993) likewise defined reading as the bringing of
meaning to instead of the gaining of meaning from the printed page or simply the extent
of the reader’s knowledge or experience as the basis of comprehending the texts. By
comprehension, it means, he claimed, understanding printed symbols and giving
meaning to them. Polloway, Patton, Serna, et al. (2018), on the other hand, posited that
comprehension, a vital learning skill, is meaning construction from a given written text
anchored on a coordination of a series of interrelated data sources.

Reading is the cheapest ticket towards one’s dream world. Through reading, one
can travel to places abroad or even be in a situation he or she desires most to be in.
Academically speaking, reading does wonders. Reading is not just a concern in English,
it is being applied across all disciplines. When a learner fails to comprehend, everything
falls into shambles, but when he performs well in terms of comprehension all problems
will be solved.

The author is a Teacher II at Baras-Baras High School, Tarlac City.