Enhancing Students' Referential and Inferential Reading Comprehension through Directed Reading-Thing Activity

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Students of Calauag National High School (CNHS) show lack of reading comprehension skills as evidenced by results of national standardized tests. Due to this situation, the researchers endeavored to implement a reading intervention using the strategy called Directed Reading-Thinking Activity for the students of CNHS aimed at improving their reading comprehension skills. The present action research focuses specifically on the effect of Directed Reading Thinking Activity to students' referential and inferential comprehension skills.

METHODS

Using purposive sampling, the researchers chose one hundred fifty-two (152) Grade 7 students of Calauag NHS as participants in the study. They were pre-tested using a researcher made reading comprehension test to measure their current level of referential and inferential comprehension. They were exposed to Directed-Reading Thinking Activity for twenty (20) weeks. After which, the students were post-tested to measure the same variables.

RESULTS

Referential reading comprehension of the students improved as shown by the posttest mean (3.7) which is higher than pretest mean (3.1). In the same manner, inferential reading comprehension improved as evidenced by increase in mean from 2.38 pretest mean to 3.01 post-test mean.

Using the .05 level of significance, the computed t-value for referential comprehension is 10.259 which is far higher than the critical value. This means that there was a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores regarding the students' referential reading comprehension.

The computed t-value for inferential reading comprehension was 10.02 which is far higher than the critical value. This means that there was a significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores regarding the students' inferential reading comprehension.

DISCUSSIONS

Use of Directed Reading-Thinking Activity during the reading intervention program was found to be effective for improving the referential and inferential reading comprehension of students.

The results of the post-test indicated that Directed Reading-Thinking Activity was an effective strategy for improving the comprehension skills of students. It confirmed the claim made by Yazdani and Mohamaddi (2015) and Somadayo, et. al. (2013) that the steps involved in DRTA, namely making predictions, confirming and refuting predictions, and modifying predictions helped in keeping students engaged in the materials that they read, thereby improving their comprehension levels.