Reading Aloud and Silent Reading: A Comparative Analysis of the Use of Two Reading Strategies on Reading Comprehension

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Many reading comprehension measures require the students to read silently. When students read silently, important information may not be identified. It may also be difficult to detect a student who is choosing not to read the passage. For this reason, investigating whether there is a significant difference in comprehension under silent and oral reading conditions is important to determine under what conditions reading comprehension should be measured accurately.

METHODS

The research design was a quantitative comparative study aimed to identify the implications of reading aloud and silent reading on the dependent variable -reading comprehension. The participants were 100 Grade 10 students found as Frustration Readers from the pre-test of Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI). Each student was exposed to two assessment conditions, the oral and silent reading comprehension passages from Phil. IRI. The data obtained from the student's scores was analyzed using the Pearson Product Correlation.

RESULTS

The analysis of the scores obtained by the respondents showed that: 1) scores of reading aloud showed consistency better than the scores of the students in silent reading based on the standard deviation; 2) following the effect size analysis stated by Cohen (1977), the Cohen's Delta obtained from the test scores of students using silent reading and reading aloud showed that there was a small significant difference between the two reading modes; and 3) using the Holian Performance Report Descriptor, it was found that the scores of the students using reading aloud and silent reading both qualify the students only to Did Not Meet Expectations (DNME) saying that they were not able to reach expectations.

DISCUSSIONS

The two reading modes equally affect the students' reading comprehension and even though silent reading obtain higher scores in comprehension than reading aloud, they both only qualify the students' scores to below satisfactory. The researcher encourages the future researcher to use a bigger population of student respondents for it might contribute to a varied data results. Since it was found that with silent reading, student respondents are able to score higher than with reading aloud, the school may enrich the use of the reading mode by giving students reading modules which helps them increase their level of comprehension or utilize it more often that it will eventually be efficient for the students to reach satisfactory level.