READING COMPREHENSION

STRATEGY OF GRADE 9 PM
Introduction
Reading comprehension is the ability to process text, understand its meaning, and to integrate
it with what the reader already knows. Fundamental skills required in efficient reading
comprehension are knowing meaning of words, ability to understand meaning of a word from
discourse context, ability to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and
references in it, ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents, ability to identify the
main thought of a passage, ability to answer questions answered in a passage, ability to recognize
the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage and determine its tone, to
understand the situational conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining etc. and
finally ability to determine writer's purpose, intent and point of view, and draw inferences about the
writer. There are specific characteristics that determine how successfully an individual will
comprehend text, including prior knowledge about the subject, well-developed language, and the
ability to make inferences from methodical questioning & monitoring comprehension like: "Why is
this important?" and "Do I need to read the entire text?" are examples of passage questioning.
Instruction for comprehension strategy often involves initially aiding the students by social and
imitation learning, wherein teachers explain genre styles and model both top-down and bottom-up
strategies, and familiarize students with a required complexity of text comprehension. After the
contiguity interface, the second stage involves gradual release of responsibility wherein over time
teachers give students individual responsibility for using the learned strategies independently with
remedial instruction as required. The final stage involves leading the students to a self-regulated
learning state with more and more practice and assessment. The teacher as reading instructor is a
role model of a reader for students, demonstrating what it means to be an effective reader and the
rewards of being one.
 It is important to know about the reading techniques that the grade 9 pm students use. We are
trying to comprehend what will be the most effective and least effective reading techniques that
have been used so we can talk about their techniques that are easy to learn and use by the
students. Do students fully understand what they are reading? Are they able to express verbally or
written communication what they have read? Professional teachers need to guide students to
become independent and effective in our fast-paced, fast-growing society. To do this we need to
start with the basic skill that is used throughout life; and that skill is reading comprehension.
We already knew that there are many reading techniques that can easily use by the students so
that they can comprehend and understand what the students will read and study. Students can also
learn comprehension skills through education or instruction and some learns by direct experience.
Proficient readings depends on the ability of the subject to recognize words quickly and effortlessly
Over the past few decades, research has revealed a great deal of information about how
readers get meaning from what they read and about the kinds of instructional activities and
procedures that are most successful in helping students to become good readers.
For many years, reading instruction was based on a concept of reading as the application of a
set of isolated skills such as identifying words, finding main ideas, identifying cause and effect
relationships, comparing and contrasting and sequencing. Comprehension was viewed as the
mastery of these skills. One important classroom study conducted during the 1970s found that
typical comprehension instruction followed For many years, reading instruction was based on a
concept of reading as the application of a set of isolated skills such as identifying words, finding
main ideas, identifying cause and effect relationships, comparing and contrasting and sequencing.
Comprehension was viewed as the mastery of these skills. One important classroom study
conducted during the 1970s found that typical comprehension instruction followed what the study
Theoretical Framework
Teaching Reading Comprehension In teaching reading comprehension, the teacher needs some
strategies to make the students comprehend the reading texts. According Brown (2000: 306 311),
the following are seven strategies which can be applied in the teaching reading comprehension in
the classroom:
Identifying the purpose in reading
By knowing the purpose of what the reader reads, the reader can throw the unwanted distraction or
information. By doing this, students know what information they want to know in reading the texts.
(Brown, 2000: 306).
b) Using graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom up decoding (especially for the beginning
level learners)
At the beginning levels of learning English, one of the difficulties that students encounter in learning
to read is making the correspondences between spoken and written English. Here teacher also need
to teach how to read the sound words with sort vowel sound such as (bat, leg, wish, etc) and the
sound words with final silent “e” such as (late, time, bite, etc). (Brown, 2000: 306).
Using efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension (for intermediate to
advanced levels)
In advanced learner, teacher can apply reading fast to reduce time consuming in reading. Readers
do not need to pronounce every word and do not need to know the meaning of every word but the
comprehension of the text is more important. (Brown, 2000: 306)
d) Skimming the text for the main ideas
Skimming is the one of the most valuable reading strategies for learners. Skimming consist of
quickly running one’s eyes across a whole text (such as an essay, article, or chapter) to find out
 e) Scanning the text for specific information
Scanning is quickly searching for some particular piece or pieces of information that the reader
needs in reading a text. Scanning exercises may ask students to look for names or dates, to find a
definition of a key concept, or to list a certain number of supporting details (Brown, 2000: 308)
f) Using semantic mapping or clustering
Readers can resume the long string of ideas or events by grouping the important key of the word
they get from the reading. The strategy of semantic mapping, or grouping ideas into meaningful
clusters, helps the reader to remember the contents of the text. (Brown, 2000: 308).
 
g) Guessing when you are not certain
Brown (2000: 309) states that guess are an extremely broad category. Learners can use guessing to
their advantages to:
(1) guess the meaning of a word,
(2) guess grammatical relationship (e.g., a pronoun reference),
(3) guess a discourse relationship,
(4) infer implied meaning (“between the lines”),
(5) guess about a cultural reference, and
(6) guess content massages,

Those micro skills can be used for the teacher as strategies to overcome the difficulties in the
students’ reading comprehension. Moreover, the students should encourage themselves to be
strong readers. Strong reading comprehension skills help the students in all the other subjects and
in the personal and professional lives on their future.
Conceptual Framework In this study, the researchers
believe that reading comprehension will depend on the profile of the students. In term of their
learning skills and understanding has a direct relation to the comprehension ability of the students.

Reading
Comprehension Skills
 
1. Word Perception
2. Noting Details
3. Getting the Main
Idea
4. Sequencing Events
5. Predicting
Outcomes
6. Following
Directions
Statement of the Problem
1. What is the profile of the respondents in the following terms?
1.1 Age; and
1.2Gender?
2. What is the best strategy to use in student?
Hypothesis
There is no varied reading comprehension strategy
Significance of study
Student:
They can use what’s the best strategy for them to easily comprehend something they are reading.
Teacher:
The teachers can use the best strategy or technique to the students. The students will easily
understand what the teachers are teaching.
Administration:
If the best strategy is suited to the students the administration can implement this strategy to
officially teach it to student.
Scope and Limitations
The academic limit: Grade 9 PM session of Upper Villages Christian Academy (UVCA) Time and Place
Limit: The study was conducted in the second quarter of the school year 2018-2019 at Upper
Villages Christian Academy (UVCA).

The respondents of the study includes 81 students out of 102 total population of the grade 9 PM
session. The research focused on the reading comprehension strategies most use or suited to the
Definition of Terms
The following terms are defined below for better understanding of this research which involves
dictionary and operational meaning.
Academic Performance – refers to how students deal with their studies and how they cope with or
accomplish different tasks given to them by their teachers.
Comprehension – understanding, grasping of the meaning of something.
Following Direction – ability to follow printed and written directions may be viewed as a survival
reading skills.
Getting the Main Idea – ability to indicate what is being said and about the topic or subject matter.
Noting Details – taking notes of the important details in a conversation and in an article.
Predicting Outcomes - ability to predict things that might happen next.
Reading - is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of deriving meaning
(reading comprehension) and/or constructing meaning. It is the mastery of basic cognitive
processes to the point where they are automatic so that attention is freed for the analysis of
meaning.
Reading Comprehension – defines as the act of grasping the meaning, significance, or nature of an
idea with the intellect and specifies understanding as its closest synonym.
Sequencing Events – ability to determine the chronology of events in a passage which are not only
grammatically linked to one another, but are also logically related and sequenced.
Word Perception - the ability to identify words and understand their meanings.
Word Recognition – define as a process of producing sounds represented by symbols and putting
them together into words.
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES
This chapter presents literature in foreign and local regarding the problem. Research and studies
done by different person all over the world are mentioned here, and everyone agreed that reading
comprehension skills of pupils at present must be given full attention because it does affect their
performance in class and with their future endeavors.
Related Study
Foreign Study:
If the struggling readers in your content classroom routinely miss the point when "reading"
content text, consider teaching them one or more of the seven cognitive strategies of highly
effective readers. Cognitive strategies are the mental processes used by skilled readers to extract
and construct meaning from text and to create knowledge structures in long-term memory. When
these strategies are directly taught to and modeled for struggling readers, their comprehension and
retention improve.
Struggling students often mistakenly believe they are reading when they are actually engaged in
what researchers call mindless reading (Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004), zoning out while
staring at the printed page. The opposite of mindless reading is the processing of text by highly
effective readers using cognitive strategies. These strategies are described in a fascinating
qualitative study that asked expert readers to think aloud regarding what was happening in their
minds while they were reading. The lengthy scripts recording these spoken thoughts (i.e., think-
alouds) are called verbal protocols (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). These protocols were categorized
and analyzed by researchers to answer specific questions, such as, What is the influence of prior
knowledge on expert readers' strategies as they determine the main idea of a text? (Afflerbach,
1990b).
Local Study:
The main purpose for reading is comprehension. Students who reach high school level are expected
to have developed their reading comprehension skills. High school students are asked to
comprehend, analyze, synthesize and evaluate large amounts of information.
Most of the teachers of English observe in their classes that whenever the lesson is on reading,
some of the students could hardly answer simple questions such as noting details which concern on
the literal questions that can be found in the text and are directly stated. Most of them could not
even make inferences about things not directly stated in the text. Others have difficulty recalling
previous knowledge which they can make use to increase their reading comprehension.
Reading Comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text or message. This
understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger
knowledge outside the text or message (Rayner, Foorman, Perfitti, Pesetsky & Seidenberg, 2001).
 Reading comprehension is a skill that can be strengthened and improved through more reading
practice. Pressley (2003), as cited by Pardo (2004), stated that increasing vocabulary, extensive
reading and critical reading are some of the practices that can be used to strengthen and refine the
person’s ability to comprehend any text. However, reading comprehension fails for a number of
reasons. One of the reasons is the lack of knowledge base. This deals on how much knowledge a
reader has about the subject he or she is reading. When the reader is more familiar with the
happenings in the text because they likely are similar in many ways to his or her own life
experiences then he or she can easily generate the necessary inferences from the text.
Reading Comprehension according to Basaraba (2013) is a complex process that requires different
building-block skills. One model of reading comprehension proposes that understanding what we
read is really the result of three levels of skills: literal comprehension, inferential comprehension
Research Design
The correlational method was used in this study, because in this method, it is easy to identify the
variables; likewise it is easy to generate data. This study tried to define the reading comprehension
abilities of the student.
The study focused at the present condition. The purpose was to know the comprehension ability of
the student.
Description of Respondents
The respondents of the study were the selected Grade 9 students PM session Upper Village
Christian Academy
Population
The subjects of this study were the 102 of Grade 9 students PM session, specifically under the
sections of Ecclesiastes, Psalms, and Proverbs of Upper Villages Christian Academy enrolled during
the academic year 2018-2019.
Sample and Sampling Technique
The researchers used the Slovin Formula to determine the number of the respondents. Stratified
random sampling was used in this study. This method was done by first assigning numbers to the
participants of the population assembling them in a sample frame. The formula for the Slovin is n =
N / (1 + Ne2).
The computation for finding the sample is as follows:
Where, N = 102(Total population of Grade 9 students in the sections: Ecclesiastes, Psalms, and
Proverbs of Upper Villages Christian Academy)
 e = 5% (Margin of Error)
n = N / (1 + Ne2)
n = 102 / (1 + 102(0.05)2)
n = 102 / (1 + 102 (0.0025))
n = 102 / (1+ 0.255)
n = 102 / 1.255
n = 81.27
n = 81
Instrumentation
The classroom learning environment questionnaire was used as the main instrument of the study.
The classroom learning environment questionnaire is consisted of 10 items.
Data Gathering Procedures
In order to conduct the study, the researchers used the following procedures:
The researchers asked permission from the Principal of Upper Villages Christian Academy before the
administration of the questionnaires to the target population of the respondents.
The questionnaires were administered to the selected Grade 9 pm respondents through the
assistance of their specific English teacher.
After the respondents had answered the questionnaires, the researchers collected it.
The researchers then get the grades needed to correlate it to the respondents’ answers on the
questionnaire.
Then, the data collected were tallied, analyzed and validated with the help of an English Teacher.
Research Locale
The study was conducted in Upper Villages of Christian Academy. The school started Its operation
under the name of Upper Villages Christian Academy in June 2004 having 69 pupils from N-K-P to
grade 1 with 2 rooms and 3 teachers, may 27,2005 the DepEd permit to operate was granted.
Enrollees increased every year and it’s continue to grow through the guidance of our lord.
In S.Y 2008-2009, the school offered NKP and a complete elementary education. Goodness
continues as the school acquired an adjacent lot and construction of a 5 door building commenced.
January 2009 the new building became the new home of elementary pupils. In the succeeding
years, the felt he continued trust of our community, there was an unexpected increase of enrollees,
the administration necessitated to acquire an additional lot of 1300 SQM. Just behind the
elementary building. An additional classroom was built, it is more conductive and suitable for
learning and became the home our high school students which started its operation in SY 2009-
2010
The school’s recognition from DepEd was granted in March 2011. Within this year the school
acquired again an additional lit of 4 600 SQM at the back of the high school building and the
construction of the covered court was started October 2012 and became operational by 2013. In
this same year also, when we received the Recognition of NKP and Elem.
June 2014, when the Board of Directors decided to apply for the opening of the Senior High School
and the application was sent August 15, waiting for an approval. In this school year, the
construction of K to 12 building has started and projected to be finished before the school year
ends. October 2014 when the school celebrated its 10th year founding Anniversary
Luckily permit to operate for the Senior High School was granted October 2015 and was approved
to offer academics and ICT. School Year 2015-2016 marks the highest enrollees in the history of
Statistical Treatment of Data
this study employed statistical tools such as frequency and percentage distribution and likert scale.
We used the frequency and percentage distribution to describe the respondents in terms of age and
gender.
P=(F/N)100%
p= percentage
f= frequency
n=no. of respondents
We also used the Likert Scale to determine the results on the effects of strict teaching.
*Ranking Method
R=R1+R2
2
R1=the rank of one variable as arranged in chronological order
R2= the ranks of the other variable
Percentage
This is used as a descriptive statistics to describe the relationship of a part to a whole.
 
Formula:
%=f/n x 100
Where:
% = Percentage
F = Frequency of response, and
N= total number of respondents
This chapter presents, analyzes, and interprets the data gathered from the survey questionnaire
which focused on the Reading Comprehension Strategies.
 What is the profile of the respondents in terms of the following:
1.1Age; and
1.2 Gender?
Table 1.1
Frequency and Percentage Distribution of the respondents in terms of age

Age Frequency Percentage

14 23 28%

15 50 62%

16 6 7%

17 2 3%

Total: 81 100%

This table shows that majority of the respondents are from ages 15 years old with 50 frequency
(62%) and 14 years old with 23 frequency (28%); 6 of the respondents are from ages 16 years old
(7%); while 2 or 3% are 17 years old.
Chart Title

14 years old
15 years old
16 years old
17 years old
 Table 1.2
Frequency and Percentage Distribution of the respondents in terms of gender.

Gender Frequency Percentage

Female 36 44.44%

Male 45 55.56%

Total 81 100%

This table shows that the profile of the respondents in terms of gender. It can be seen that the total
number of the respondents is 81, 45 or 55.56% are male while 36 or 44.44% are female.
Female
Male
 Statement of the Problem 2
Questions Mean Rank Verbal Interpretation

1. I try to guess the main ideas of the text on the basis of pictures, 2.32 2 Sometimes
charts or figures.
2. I grasp the main idea of material while reading English. 2.28 3.5 Sometimes

3. I turn to dictionaries when coming across new words in the English 2.28 3.5 Sometimes
reading.
4. I do not bother with the grammatical structure of sentences while 2.06 8 Sometimes
reading in English.
5. I predict the main idea of the whole passage from its title or 2.34 1 Sometimes
subtitles.
6. I guess the meaning of new words by analyzing their roots or 2.25 5 Sometimes
prefixes or suffixes
7. I do not pay attention to the implied meaning of the reading 1.74 10 Sometimes
material.
8. When reading English articles, I skip the word that are new to me. 1.80 9 Sometimes

9. I pause and analyze structure of sentences when reading in English. 2.21 7 Sometimes

10.I guess the meanings of the new words in the context when reading 2.24 6 Sometimes
in English

As shown in the table Item no.5 ’’I predict the main idea of the whole passage form its title or
subtitle” got the highest mean scores of 2.34 interpreted as sometimes
While item no. 7 “I do not pay attention to the implied meaning of the reading material.“ got the
lowest mean scores of 1.74 interpreted as Never.
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS, CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This chapter presents the summary, conclusion and recommendation for the study. The conclusions
given were drawn from the result of the research survey. Moreover, the recommendations were
based from the findings and conclusion of the study.
Summary of Findings
The study aimed to determine the reading comprehension abilities of the students and to know
what the best reading comprehension strategy to use for students. One hundred two respondents
comprised the study. Results obtained show that majority of the respondents are from ages 15
years old with 50 frequency (62%) and 14 years old with 23 frequency (28%); 6 of the respondents
are from ages 16 years old (7%); while 2 or 3% are 17 years old. The male respondent is slightly
higher than the female respondents. In order to read comprehensively the majority of the
respondent’s reading strategies are: Predicting the main idea of the whole passage from its title or
subtitles. Trying to guess the main idea of the text based on the picture, charts or figures. Grasp the
main idea of material while reading English. And turn to dictionaries when coming across new words
in the English reading.
Conclusions
The researchers were able to arrive at these conclusions based on the finding of their study. The
most effective reading strategy of the respondent is by predicting the main idea of the whole
passage from its title or subtitle while the least effective strategy of the respondent is do not pay
attention to the implied meaning of the reading material.
Recommendations
Based on the foregoing findings of the study, the researcher recommends the following measures to
be done in order to further the purposes of this study.
The teachers need to generate question