Project READ (Reading Enhancement and Development) and Its Impact to Academic Performance in English of Grade 7 Non-Readers

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The most important academic goal of reading is comprehension. Without comprehension, reading would be empty and meaningless. Comprehension is the active process of constructing meaning from text. It involves understanding vocabulary and concepts, making inferences, and linking key ideas. Knowledge of vocabulary is very important for reading comprehension. As students learn to decode text of increasing difficulty, they are more likely to encounter words that are not part of their oral language, especially when they are exposed to expository texts. Despite the complexity of thenature of reading -comprehending and gaining vocabulary, the researcher believes that a continuous diagnosis and assessment on the reading skills of the learners should be in place. Widespread interests in improving students' reading skills have been themajor concern of schools nowadays. Assessment in reading has been required in order to address students' specific needs. It is in this premise that the researcher undertook this study.

METHODS

The study used a descriptive design to assess PROJECT READ inimproving the academic performance in English of Grade 7 non-readers of Lumampong National High School-Indang Annex during the school year 2017-2018. From five hundred eighty (580) Grade 7 students who got the pre reading test, twenty of them fell under frustration level. They are identified as non-readers. These non-readers were set as respondents of the study. They were given different intervention activities for seven months. A homogeneous purposive sampling was applied in the study since all the respondents have shared characteristics.

RESULTS

The computed test value, which is 28.88, is greater than the critical value that is 2.015 at 0.05 level of significance, so it can be concluded that there is a significant difference between the test scores before and after the reading remediation. This points out that the students' scores in the pretest and post test are very different. The students scored higher in the post. This means that they tend to improve their performance in the post test and that they learned something and improve their reading comprehension when provided with varied reading materials. Based on the computed general average in English of the respondents which is 79.04 during elementary and 79.20 during the Grade 7, it showed that reading remediation enhanced or improved the non-readers' performance in English.

DISCUSSIONS

There is still chance for the students to improve their reading comprehension abilities if appropriate reading materials will be provided to them and teachers will use more effective teaching techniques