Prepared by: Jessa Mae G.

Laid
Nesty P. Sumando
Marvin P. Cabangil
Kisha Mae D. Fronteras
Sarah Mae Bangot
BSED Major in English-2D

Submitted to: Eliakim A. Balolot, LPT

Associate Language Instructor I

Building Competence: Significance of Reading Proficiency in Learning

Environment

II. INTRODUCTION
Among the four language skills, reading is possibly the most extensively and intensively
studied by experts in the field of language teaching. The results of the researches conducted
for many decades on nature of reading how people learn to process textual information have
contributed contrasting theories about what works best in the teaching of reading. As a result,
language educators can choose among a wide variety of teaching methods and techniques for
students learning to read in their second language (SL) or foreign language (FL). For students
who are learning a SL/FL reading is the most crucial skill to master due to several reasons.
First, students can usually perform at a higher level in reading than in any other skills. They
can quite accurately understand written materials that they could not discuss orally or in
writing with equivalent accuracy or thoroughness. Such condition will undoubtedly enhance
their motivation to learn. Second, reading necessitates very minimum requirements.
Different from speaking which requires opportunities to interact with sparring partner, or
from writing which needs a lot of guidance and time to practice, reading necessitates only a
text and motivation. Third, reading is a service skill. After learning how to read effectively,
students will be able to learn effectively by reading. Realizing how crucial reading is for our
students, we can see the great importance of developing their reading ability. To achieve it,
we should improve our reading lessons by implementing the best method and techniques
provided by theories. This article aims to describe principal theories of reading and examine
some tips and guidelines for implementing a theory of reading which will help us develop our
learner’s abilities.

III. ACTION RESEARCH PROBLEM

In the Philippine context of the education system, students from low-income families tend to
put work first at an early age instead of formal schooling. Poverty and lack of academic
resources also affect their cognitive development and socialization with people in the
academe. A child surrounded by teachers, books, or any reading materials has a clear vision
of the importance of education. The survey also shows that the Philippines ranked second to
the lowest in Science and Mathematics. Many academicians argue why the Philippines, one
of the best English-speaking countries globally, ranks lowest in the survey. They say that
education in reading here focuses on the primary word definition; this is important, but it is a
problem in the context of reading comprehension.

Many children in the United States haven’t fully developed their reading skills.
Between 2017 and 2019, the number of children in grades 4 through 8 reading at or
above their grade level decreased. In other words, the number of children who lack the
necessary reading skills increased. The National Reading Panel Report identified five
components vital to developing reading skills: phonological awareness, phonics,
fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Although each component is important in
developing a child’s reading ability, the following information focuses on four
comprehension strategies that are used to help increase the reading comprehension of
young children and older children who are struggling with reading.

Comprehension difficulties show when you only get parts of what you are reading. Students
and professionals will exhibit the following when they have reading comprehension
difficulties. First, we have the Difficulty reading out loud, when given age-appropriate texts,
students with poor oral language skills fail to read texts fluently. Their reading is chopped
with many sudden stops. Reading and retaining sight words like ‘eye’ in memory is hard for
them. The inability to decode words, if you have reading comprehension difficulties, you’ll
find combining phonic sounds to form a word challenging. Understanding words in their
context is slow and laborious. Poor writing skills, any form of long text is rife with spelling
mistakes and other grammatical errors. You might find that you avoid writing and struggle to
reach the word count in school essays. Limited vocabulary, limited vocabulary affects
reading comprehension. When unfamiliar with a word, you’ll stop trying to get its meaning.
If you come across too many new words, the text doesn’t flow, and you lose grip of the main
ideas. Similarly, you’ll struggle to learn and remember new words. Limited expression skills,
we use words to communicate how we feel. Poor comprehension skills automatically
influence communication skills. Word confusion-meaning and pronunciation, is a common
sign among people with poor reading comprehension skills. They will read “theirs” as “there
is” or “accept” as “except. Inability to recall what you read, or link text to old knowledge,
failure to remember what you just read or make connections to previous knowledge are the
most outstanding poor comprehension signs. You should be worried if you cannot answer
simple comprehension questions about what you just read out loud.
Reading comprehension is an essential skill for both students and professionals. Improved
understanding of text makes reading enjoyable. It is important to use reading comprehension
strategies to help you improve retention and comprehension.

IV. PROPOSED LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Based on the aforementioned ideas, it is obvious that in order to teach reading effectively, the
teacher’s role to activate and build schemata is paramount. To achieve it, he should in
advance select texts that are relevant to the students’ needs, preferences, individual
differences, and cultures in order to provide meaningful texts so the students understand the
message, which entails activating existing schemata and helping build new schemata. Then,
after selecting the text, he needs to do the following three stages of activities to activate and
build the students’ schemata. Pre-reading activities, During-reading activities and Post-
reading activities.

Pre-reading activities
Pre-reading activities is aimed to activate existing schemata, build new schemata, and provide
information to the teacher about what the students know. In their report on the positive effect
various pre-reading activities had on reading comprehension, Chen and Graves (1995, 664),
define them as “devices for bridging the gap between the text’s content and the reader’s
schemata”. Various activities and materials can help the teacher introduce key vocabulary
and reinforce concept association to activate both formal and content schemata. Formal
schemata will be activated by employing devices such as advance organizers and overviews
to draw attention to the structure of a text. The content schemata will be activated by using
various pre-reading activities to help learners brainstorm and predict how the information fits
in with their previous knowledge.
One of the most important pre-reading activities proposed by schematic theorists’ is
prediction. According to Goodman (1988: 16), prediction is important because “the brain is
always anticipating and predicting as it seeks order and significance in sensory inputs”. Smith
(1994, 19–20) defines prediction as “the prior elimination of unlikely alternatives”.
According to him, predictions are questions the readers ask the world and comprehension is
receiving the answers.

Another pre-reading activity is previewing, where students look at titles, headings, and
pictures, and read the first few paragraphs and the last paragraph; these activities can then
help students understand what the text is about by activating their formal and contents
schemata and making them familiar with the topic before they begin reading in earnest.
Semantic mapping is another pre-reading activity that Carrell, Pharis, and Liberto (1989:
651) describe as a useful way to pre-teach vocabulary and to “provide the teacher with an
assessment of the students’ prior knowledge or schema availability on the topic”. This
activity asks students to brainstorm about the reading topic as the information is displayed on
a graphic “map.” As students make associations, the map becomes a thorough summary of
the concepts and vocabulary that they will encounter in the reading. It can also help build
schemata and vocabulary that students do not yet possess. Again, it is important to know
something about the students so the selected texts contain the type of material that is likely to
be familiar and interesting to them.
Reutzel (1985) proposes another type of pre-reading activity called reconciled reading
lesson, which reverses the sequence presented by many textbooks where the text is followed
by questions. Instead, the teacher develops pre-reading questions from the questions that
appear at the end of the reading. Although not all the post-reading questions can be easily
turned into pre-reading ones, this strategy can be invaluable to activate schemata.

During-reading tips
The activities carried out in during-reading stage include taking notes, reacting, predicting,
selecting significant information, questioning the writer’s position, evaluating, and
placing a text within one’s own experience. Due to the fact that most attention is often
paid to dictionaries, the text, and the teacher in English reading classes, these processes can
be the most complex to develop in a classroom setting. To encourage active reading, the
teacher is recommended to let the students to practice the followings are tips.

1. Making predictions: Students should be guided to master the skill to predict what is going
to happen next in the text because it is necessary to enable them to integrate and combine
what has come with what is to come.
2. Making selections: Proficient readers are more selective in what to read.
3. Integrating prior knowledge: To facilitate comprehension, the schemata activated in the
pre-reading section are required to be called upon.
4. Skipping insignificant parts: The more proficient a person reads, the more he will
concentrate on important pieces of information and skip unimportant pieces.
5. Re-reading: Students should be made aware of the importance of re-reading to increase
their comprehension.
6. Making use of context or guessing: encouraging students to define and understand every
single unknown word in a text is necessary. They should also be taught to use the context to
guess the meaning of unfamiliar words.
7. Breaking words into their component parts: To read more efficiently, students should
analyze unknown words by breaking them into their affixes or roots. Such analysis can help
them guess the meaning of a word so that they do not need to consult a dictionary and keep
the process of comprehension continuing.
8. Reading in chunks: To read faster, students should practice reading groups of words
together. Such an act will also improve comprehension.
9. Pausing: Good readers do not read with the same speed from the beginning to the end. At
certain sections, he will pause to absorb and internalize the material being read and sort out
information.
10. Paraphrasing: Some parts of texts might need to be paraphrased sub-vocally to verify
what it means.
11. Monitoring: Good readers always check their understanding to evaluate whether the text
or the reading of it, is meeting their goals
After-reading tips
Post-reading activities are essentially determined by the reading purpose and the information
type extracted from the text. According to Barnett (1988), post-reading exercises first
monitor students’ comprehension and then lead them to a deeper analysis of the text. In the
real world, the reading is not directed to summarize a text content or to memorize the
author’s viewpoint. The true goal of reading is to see into the author’s mind or to engage new
information with what one already knows. To let the students check the information they did
not comprehend or miscomprehended, holding a group discussion is recommended. Vaezi
(2006) accentuated that post-reading can stage generally take the form of these activities: (1)
discussing the text: written/oral, (2) summarizing: written/oral, (3) making questions:
written/oral, (3) answering questions: written/oral, (4) filling in forms and charts (5) writing
reading logs (6) completing a text, (7) listening to or reading other related materials, and (7)
role-playing

So far, there are three main

theories which explain the
nature of learning to read.
First,
the traditional theory, or
bottom up processing, which
focused on the printed form of
a
text. Second, the cognitive
view, or top-down processing
enhanced the role of
background knowledge in
addition to what appeared on
the printed page. Third, the
metacognitive view, which is
based on the control and
manipulation that a reader can
have on the act of
comprehending a text, and
thus, emphasizes the
involvement of the
reader’s thinking about what
he is doing while reading.
So far, there are three main
theories which explain the
nature of learning to read.
First,
the traditional theory, or
bottom up processing, which
focused on the printed form of
a
text. Second, the cognitive
view, or top-down processing
enhanced the role of
background knowledge in
addition to what appeared on
the printed page. Third, the
metacognitive view, which is
based on the control and
manipulation that a reader can
have on the act of
comprehending a text, and
thus, emphasizes the
involvement of the
reader’s thinking about what
he is doing while reading.
So far, there are three main
theories which explain the
nature of learning to read.
First,
the traditional theory, or
bottom up processing, which
focused on the printed form of
a
text. Second, the cognitive
view, or top-down processing
enhanced the role of
background knowledge in
addition to what appeared on
the printed page. Third, the
metacognitive view, which is
based on the control and
manipulation that a reader can
have on the act of
comprehending a text, and
thus, emphasizes the
involvement of the
reader’s thinking about what
he is doing while reading
So far, there are three main
theories which explain the
nature of learning to read.
First,
the traditional theory, or
bottom up processing, which
focused on the printed form of
a
text. Second, the cognitive
view, or top-down processing
enhanced the role of
background knowledge in
addition to what appeared on
the printed page. Third, the
metacognitive view, which is
based on the control and
manipulation that a reader can
have on the act of
comprehending a text, and
thus, emphasizes the
involvement of the
reader’s thinking about what
he is doing while reading
So far, there are three main
theories which explain the
nature of learning to read.
First,
the traditional theory, or
bottom up processing, which
focused on the printed form of
a
text. Second, the cognitive
view, or top-down processing
enhanced the role of
background knowledge in
addition to what appeared on
the printed page. Third, the
metacognitive view, which is
based on the control and
manipulation that a reader can
have on the act of
comprehending a text, and
thus, emphasizes the
involvement of the
reader’s thinking about what
he is doing while reading
So far, there are three main
theories which explain the
nature of learning to read.
First,
the traditional theory, or
bottom up processing, which
focused on the printed form of
a
text. Second, the cognitive
view, or top-down processing
enhanced the role of
background knowledge in
addition to what appeared on
the printed page. Third, the
metacognitive view, which is
based on the control and
manipulation that a reader can
have on the act of
comprehending a text, and
thus, emphasizes the
involvement of the
reader’s thinking about what
he is doing while reading
So far, there are three main
theories which explain the
nature of learning to read.
First,
the traditional theory, or
bottom up processing, which
focused on the printed form of
a
text. Second, the cognitive
view, or top-down processing
enhanced the role of
background knowledge in
addition to what appeared on
the printed page. Third, the
metacognitive view, which is
based on the control and
manipulation that a reader can
have on the act of
comprehending a text, and
thus, emphasizes the
involvement of the
reader’s thinking about what
he is doing while reading
So far, there are three main
theories which explain the
nature of learning to read.
First,
the traditional theory, or
bottom up processing, which
focused on the printed form of
a
text. Second, the cognitive
view, or top-down processing
enhanced the role of
background knowledge in
addition to what appeared on
the printed page. Third, the
metacognitive view, which is
based on the control and
manipulation that a reader can
have on the act of
comprehending a text, and
thus, emphasizes the
involvement of the
reader’s thinking about what
he is doing while reading
So far, there are three main theories which explain the nature of learning to read. First, the
traditional theory, or bottom up processing, which focused on the printed form of a text.
Second, the cognitive view, or top-down processing enhanced the role of a background
knowledge in addition to what appeared on the printed page. Third, the metacognitive view,
which is based on the control and manipulation that a reader can have on the act of
comprehending a text, and thus, emphasizes the involvement of the reader’s thinking about
what he is doing while reading.

The traditional bottom-up approach to reading was influenced by behaviorist psychology of

the 1950s, which claimed learning was based upon “habit formation, brought about by the
repeated association of a stimulus with a response” and language learning was
characterized as a “response system that humans acquire through automatic conditioning
processes,” where “some patterns of language are reinforced (rewarded) and others are not,”
and “only those patterns reinforced by the community of language users will persist”
(Omaggio 1993: 45-46). Behaviorism became the basis of the audio-lingual method, which
sought to form second language “habits” through drilling, repetition, and error correction.

Ausubel (cited in Omaggio, 1993: 58), made an important distinction between meaningful
learning and rote learning. An example of rote learning is simply memorizing lists of isolated
words or rules in a new language, where the information becomes temporary and subject to
loss. Meaningful learning, on the other hand, occurs when new information is presented in a
relevant context and is related to what the learner already knows, so that it can be easily
integrated into one’s existing cognitive structure. A learning that is not meaningful will not
become permanent. This emphasis
on meaning eventually informed the top-down approach to L2 learning, and in the 1960s and
1970s there was an explosion of teaching methods and activities that strongly considered the
experience and knowledge of the learner.

According to Block (1992), there is now no more debate on “whether reading is a bottom-up,
language-based process or a top-down, knowledge-based process.” It is also no more
problematic to accept the influence of background knowledge on readers. Research has gone
even further to define the control executed by readers on their trial to understand a text. This
control is what Block has referred to as meta-cognition. In the context of reading, meta-
cognition involves thinking about what one is doing while reading. Strategic readers do not
only sample the text, make hypotheses, confirm or reject them, and make new hypotheses
while reading. They also involve many activities along the process of reading, whose stages
can be divided into three, i.e. before reading, while reading, and after reading. The activities
the readers involve before reading are to identify the purpose of the reading, identify the form
or type of the text. In the second stage (while reading), they think about the general
character and features of the form or type of the text—such as trying to locate a topic
sentence and follow supporting details toward a conclusion, project the author’s purpose for
writing the text, choose, scan, or read in detail, make continuous predictions about what will
occur next based on information obtained earlier, prior knowledge, and conclusions obtained
within the previous stages. Finally, in the last stage, they attempt to form a
summary, conclude, or make inference of what was read.

V. REFERENCES

Pradani (2021). The Importance of Reading To Expand Knowledge(PDF) THE

IMPORTANCE OF READING TO EXPAND KNOWLEDGE
(researchgate.net)https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352020734_THE_IMPORTANC
E_OF_READING_TO_EXPAND_KNOWLEDGE What Causes Reading Comprehension
Problems? (Important Facts) | Iris Reading Activities to Improve Reading Comprehension |
Red Apple Reading Blog Improving Reading Comprehension Through Higher Order
Thinking Skills McKown and Barnette(2007) Microsoft Word - Improving Reading
Comprehension.doc (ed.gov) Sircey, Pardede (2008). A Review on Reading Theories and its
implication to the Teaching of Reading S.L. (2017).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321228081_A_Review_on_Reading_Theories_and
_its_Implication_to_the_Teaching_of_Reading Building middle school teacher capacity to
implement reading comprehension strategies for improved student academic performance.
Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1896117562 Tracey, D.H., & Morrow,
L.M. (2006) Lenses on reading: An introduction to theories and models. New York &
London: The Guilford Press. Wells, G. (2007). Semiotic mediation, dialogue and the
construction of knowledge. Human Development, 50 (5), 244–274. Wilkinson, I. A., & Son,
E. H. (2011). A dialogic turn in research on learning and teaching to comprehend. In M.L.
Kamil, P.D. Pearson, E.B. Moje, & P.P. Afflerbach (Eds.), Handbook of reading research
(Vol. 4 pp. 359-387). New York & London: Routledge.