READING SKILLS AND COMPREHENSION OF GRADE SEVEN LEARNERS

A Classroom Action Researches Presented to

the Faculty of the BSEd English Program
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION
University of Southeastern Philippines
Obrero Campus, Davao City

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

EDUC 11 – Student Teaching

EDSEL ROY V. HORMACHUELAS

BSEd – English 4E

VELMA S. LABAD, Ed.D.

Practicum Supervisor

April 28, 2017

Abstract
This action research aimed to find out the effectiveness of the seven-day oral reading
intervention to the reading comprehension level of Grade 7 frustration readers. The data were
gathered through Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (PHIL-IRI) for the pre-test and the
post-test and researchers-made reading test questionnaires for the intervention. The tests were
integrated with the reading comprehension skills namely: noting details, sequencing, cause
and effect, predicting outcomes, summarizing, making inferences, and applying adapted from
the different proponents of reading development. The findings showed that there was an
improvement of the students’ reading comprehension in oral reading. The researcher
recommended that other reading intervention strategies should be applied in addition to the
test questionnaires that were used in the intervention to have bigger improvement not only in
the students’ reading comprehension but also his/her pronunciation in oral reading.

Introduction

Among the four language skills, reading is possibly the most extensively and
intensively studied by experts in the field of language teaching. The main purpose for reading
is to comprehend the ideas in the material. Without comprehension, reading would be empty
and meaningless. Reading comprehension becomes especially important in the later
elementary grades (Sweet & Snow, 2003) and provides the basis for a substantial amount of
learning in secondary school (Kirsch et al., 2002). According to Dole et al. (1991), in the
traditional view of reading, novice readers acquire a set of hierarchically ordered sub-skills
that sequentially build toward comprehension ability. Having mastered these skills, readers
are viewed as experts who comprehend what they read. Without the skills of reading
comprehension students’ academic progress is limited (Alvermann & Earle, 2003).
In the global context, US Department of Education estimates that more than 30% of
the working age population could not comprehend well. Also, in the Philippine context, most
students’ reading comprehension scores remain low despite concentrated efforts to improve
reading instruction. Effective teaching of reading comprehension among students has turned
out to be an obstinate problem, which is evident in the poor performance of students in
achievement tests in both elementary and secondary education (Andas, 1999). According to
Quijano (2007), reading problems are the main culprit for the poor performance of some
students in the National Achievement Test. Hence, if a student’s reading comprehension is
poor, chances are his or her performance in other subjects will be compromised
This classroom action research was anchored with the theory of Barret which is The
Barrett Taxonomy (Clymer, 1968), designed originally to assist classroom teachers in
developing comprehension questions and/or test questions for reading, is especially useful for
classroom questioning in other content areas as well.
In my practicum, I have all witnessed cases where students were capable of reading
the words, but encountered much difficulty in comprehending the selection of text. With this
problem, I propelled to conduct an action research which sought to answer the following
questions:
1. What is the score of the students in the pre-test?
2. What is the score of the students in oral reading intervention in terms of Noting
details, Sequencing, Cause & Effect, Predicting Outcomes, Summarizing, Inferencing
and Applying?
 3. What is the score of the students in the post-test?
4. Is there any improvement of the students after conducting the seven-day reading
intervention?
The purpose of this action research was mainly to determine the effect of oral reading
intervention to the reading comprehension skill of the frustration readers through a seven-day
reading intervention. Also, it determines if the Grade 7 frustration readers improve their
reading comprehension skill.

Intervention Phase

This action research was conducted at one of the national secondary schools of Davao
City, Philippines. Furthermore, the participants were Grade 7 secondary students from the
said school. The participants were students who got a score ranging from 0 to 3 points, which
indicates a low level of reading comprehension in the oral reading pre-test that I have
administered. Two participants are then randomly picked.
I had used a standardized questionnaire from the Philippine Informal Reading
Inventory (Phil. IRI) program for the pre-test and post-test. It is a questionnaire composed of
a reading passage with seven questions. While during the seven day reading intervention, I
adapted test questionnaires for a period of seven days targeting one reading comprehension
skill a day namely: Noting Details on day one, sequencing of events on day two, cause and
effect on day three, predicting outcomes on day four, summarizing on day five, making
inference on day six, and stating of opinion on day seven. All questionnaires were composed
of a reading passage with five follow up questions. These questionnaires were presented and
validated by the teachers and staffs of the Reading Center of the secondary school were the
study was conducted.
In the conduct of this action research, for seven days period, I always started the class
with asking the students how they’re doing; I recapitulated the lesson we did on the previous
day. Then, I would tell the class what reading comprehension skill we would develop today.
Individually, I would let the students read the reading passage and let him/her answer the five
follow-up questions. All of their responses and scores were tabulated and recorded. The
collected data of the study were then computed, analyzed, and interpreted as a response to
address the problem of the study.
Findings and Discussion
Pretest
In the case of Student A, she got two points out of seven items in the evaluation and
had eight miscues upon reading the passage in the pretest.

In the case of Student B, she got three points out of seven items in the evaluation
and had ten miscues upon reading the passage in the pretest.
Day 1- Noting Details (Oral Reading)
 The title of the reading passage Students A and B had read was entitled The
Queen and the Troll. In case of Student A, she had a difficulty in pronouncing some
words. She mispronounced “castle” to “castel,” “hopped” to “hop-ped.” She also
wrongly enunciated “mud” as “mood,” and “should” to “shold.” In the five item oral
evaluation Student A got three points out of five items.
In case of Student B, while reading the passage she mispronounced “castle” to
“castel” and “ears” to “ers.” She read fast but failed to pause whenever there is a
period. Student B also got three points out of five items in the oral evaluation.
Day 2- Sequencing of Events (Oral Reading)
The paragraph was entitled The Warm Coat. In case of Student A, she
mispronounced “thought” to “toot,” “heard” to “herd, and “flew” to “flow.” In the
oral evaluation Student A only got two points against five items.
On the other hand, Student B also had a number of wrong pronunciations. She
mistakenly articulated “thought” as “toot,” “heard” as “herd,” and “where” as
“were”. Student B only had one point out of five items. Their points showed that
they had poor ability to retell the events within a given text in the order in which
they occurred.
Day 3- Cause and Effect (Oral Reading)
An answer sheet was given to both Student A and Student B wherein there were
five sentences. They were asked to identify the clause that showed the cause and the
other clause that showed the effect for each sentence. In case of Student A, she
scored six points out of ten items.
In case of Student B, she got eight points out of ten items. It was fair enough
and higher than the score of Student A. Based on the result of their intervention for
this day, it indicated that they already had an average knowledge on how to identify
cause and effect in sentences.
Day 4- Predicting Outcomes (Oral Reading)
Another reading passage was presented to the students but it had no title. In case
of Student A, she did minor miscues. She mispronounced the words “jumped” to
“jump-ped,” and “snooze” to “snozz.” Sadly Student A got zero points in answering
the questions that were asked to her.
In case of Student B, she wrongly enunciated “jumped” to “jump-ped.” Same as
Student A, Student B had no correct answers in the questions asked. Based on
Student A and B’s answers, they do know somehow how to predict outcomes. Its
just that they lacked the English language skills to translate their answers from
Visaya to English. That was why both Student A and B had no scores in the
evaluation for predicting outcomes.
Day 5- Summarizing (Oral Reading)
 The students were given an answer sheet wherein there were five short
paragraphs with a corresponding multiple choice question for each paragraph. In
case of Student A, she only scored one point out of five items.
In case of Student B, she got two points out of five items. It showed that both
Student A and B had difficulty in determining the main idea of the paragraphs they
read.
Day 6- Making Inference (Oral Reading)
In case of Student A, she mispronounced the words “plopped” to “plop-ped,”
“couch” to “coach,” “noticeably” to “noticeable.” Student A only got one point over
five items in answering the questions asked to her.
In case of Student B, she wrongly enunciated the words “noticeably” to
“noticeable” and “pizza” to “peeza.” Student B scored four points out of five items
in answering the questions asked to her.
Day 7- Applied (Oral Reading)
The students were asked to read the story entitled The Blind Girl. In case of
Student A, she mispronounced the word “groping” to “grouping.” Student A got
zero correct answers in the five questions asked to her.
In case of Student B, she also mispronounced the word “groping” to
“grouping.” Student B had no scores in the evaluation that she tried to answer.
Post Test
The reading passage in the post test was entitled Galileo the Scientist. In case of
Student A, she mispronounced the name “Aristotle” to “Aristol” and the term
“theory” to “teyore.” Student A got four points out of seven items in the evaluation
and five miscues upon reading the passage.
In case of Student B, she mispronounced the name “Aristotle” to “Aristol.”
Student B got four points out of seven items in the evaluation and got five miscues
upon reading the passage.
The scores of Student A and B in the pretest compared to their scores in the
post test indicated that there were increased of scores and at the same time decreased
of number of miscues.
Conclusion

Based on Student A and B’s results that showed moderate development in reading
comprehension and pronunciation from pretest to post test due to the intervention that
were applied by the researcher, I therefore conclude that the seven day reading
intervention have a positive affect to the reading comprehension and pronunciation of
 the respondents.
Recommendations
Although the Seven Day Reading Intervention had a good result that showed
positive effect to the respondents’ reading comprehension there are still things that I
would want to include to improve the results of the intervention.
I recommend the use of the Assisted Reading strategy by Shany, M.T. and
Biemiller, A. (1995). In this strategy the teacher does not only listen as the respondent
reads and take notes of the reader’s miscues. The teacher also corrects the reader if he or
she commits mistake. In this way the reader would know the proper enunciation of the
words that he or she mispronounced. In this strategy you should have a large amount of
time allocated for your intervention if you have a lot of respondents so that you can
finish monitoring and correcting all their miscues one by one.
Repeated Reading is also a good intervention strategy wherein the respondents read
again and again short passages until they acquire acceptable level of fluency. In such
manner, they can focus on understanding the content and they use less time on reading
the words.
Reference
Alvermann, D., & Earle, J. (2003). Comprehension instruction. In A. P. Sweet & C. Snow
(Eds.), Rethinking reading comprehension (pp. 12– 30). New York: Guilford Press.

Dole, J. A. (1991). Effects of two types of prereading instruction on the comprehension of

narrative and expository text. Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 142–159.

Kirsch, et al. (2002). Reading for change: Performance and engagement across countries.

Rathvon, N. (1999). Effective school interventions: Strategies for enhancing academic

achievement and social competence. The Guildford Press. New York: NY

Shany, M.T. & Biemiller, A. (1995). Assisted reading practice: Effects on performance for
poor readers in grades 3 and 4 . Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 382-395.

Sweet, A. P., & Snow, C. E. (2003). Rethinking reading comprehension. New York: Guilford
Press.