Chapter I

Rationale of the Study

Reading Comprehension is one of important skill in English

and it gives many benefits to everyone. Furthermore, as stated by

Home Arete Journal Vol.4, no. 1 (2016), reading comprehension is

one of the reading competencies that every student has to

develop. However, there are still students who are below the

proficiency level of reading comprehension despite the reading

instructions and strategies provided by the teachers for the

improvement of students’ reading comprehension. For example,

students should know how to develop an essay, take notes when

listening to a spoken text such as in discussions and/or reading

a written text.

Due to the importance of reading comprehension, several

studies have been taken as to what can make reading comprehension

more effective. Broadly, in the last decade, developments and

changes, which have occurred in the reading comprehension of the

classroom setup, have greatly improved the knowledge about the

nature of reading comprehension. One of the pieces of evidence is

the multimodal inferences which enable the students to make

inferences visually and verbally by using the clues of the texts,

and integrating it with the students’ background knowledge, and

creating mental images in the minds. Further to that the

importance of inference making ability for successful reading

comprehension increases across the grade levels, so learners

should be given numerous opportunities to practice and transfer

their skills to a variety of text forms and topics. Thus, it

demonstrates that with adequate support, all students, including

those with disabilities and those at high risk of academic

failure, can successfully learn to make inferences and develop

their reading comprehension. Besides that, Moreno (2011), claimed

that the use of multiple representations has been recognized as a

very powerful way to facilitate understanding. Making multimodal

inferences is an effective strategy for developing students'

reading comprehension.

According to UNIV 200 Spring (2017), there are five

dimensions of multimodal, it involves several modes such as

visuals, gestures, aural, spatial and linguistics. But this

research will focus only the modes that have mentioned namely:

Visuals, Aural, and Linguistics. Additionally, making multimodal

inferences is an effective strategy to improve students’ reading

comprehension skills, and their reading skills develop

significantly, as proposed by Brown and Abewickrama (2010) and

Gail (2017).

This study aims to investigate the development of reading

comprehension of Grade 12 GAS students at Phinma Araullo

University using multimodal inferences. This study presents

outcomes of research that examined students’ reading

comprehension using multimodal inferences. The study conducted

among 25 students from grade 12 GAS to prove that through

Multimodal Inferences the reading comprehension of the students’

developed significantly. Key findings revealed that Multimodal

Inferences developed the reading comprehension of students’ and

there is significant difference on reading comprehension among

grade 12 GAS students after the Multimodal Inferences. The

findings suggested that the teachers and students should

maximized the use of Multimodal Inferences in order to develop

the reading comprehension of the students.

VARIABLES OF THE STUDY

Independent Variable

 Multimodal Inferences

Dependent Variable

 Reading Comprehension