The Impact of Blending Phoneme in Mother-tongue on Reading Ability of Pupils in English 3

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Pupils in Grade 3 mostly have problems in reading. In most cases, they can read the words in Mother-Tongue yet find it hard to speak the words in the English language. This study is aimed at identifying activities that could help pupils to start learning how to communicate with Mother-Tongue and soon translate to any languages especially English. Phoneme blending is a phonetic awareness assessment of the ability to identify a word when hearing parts of the words in isolation. Before, children need to become aware of how the sounds in words work to learn how to read. They must understand that words are made up of speech sounds or phonemes.

METHODS

Descriptive research design was used. After the Pre-Test on Oral Reading Progress given last June 2016, where 14 out of 30 pupils were found to be at Frustration level in reading. These 14 pupils were chosen as research participants where they were made to undergo phoneme-associated activities packaged at the intervention strategy "Let's Do Then You Do" anchored on skills enhancement in word recognition and comprehension. Post-Test was given last December 2016. For the analysis of the result, the researcher used the descriptive comparative method employing Paired Sample T-Test and Eta2 Test in order to come up with the significant impact and magnitude effect of the intervention on the reading ability of the pupil-research participants.

RESULTS

Considering that English as subject was introduced in the second semester of the school year, there were causes that hinder pupils to read such as 1) confusion of the utterances of words learned in Mother-Tongue as to how it must be read in English, 2) sometimes teachers may also fail to let pupils understand why words are read in English differently, 3) bridging reading in English is quite difficult because Mother-Tongue and Filipino are syllabic while English is 80% phonetic with 45 phonemes but the skills applied to reading were the same in all languages.

DISCUSSIONS

Reading is an activity characterized by translation of symbols or letters into words and sentences. Children are able to read when they were properly oriented with the letter sound and their reading ability develops through blending phonemes especially when phonemes were properly taught in Mother-Tongue. Based on the findings of the study, it is highly recommended that the plan of actions stipulated in this study be used by teachers to develop the reading ability of pupils in English. Prior knowledge has always been a great help and serves as their bridge as they learn other languages.