Essential Reading Comprehension Skills Free Essay Example

Reading is one of the most important skills that each person is to master if he or she wants to keep in touch with the world around him, Obe J. 2016 stated. Likewise, according to Estremera G. 2018 reading is a complex process that involves sensation, perception, comprehension, application, and integration. It is the process of making and getting meaning from printed words and symbols. Reading as a whole is a means of communication and of information and ideas.

Thus, reading and reading comprehension are interrelated skills.

In order for students to be able to comprehend what they are reading, they have to develop comprehension skills in reading. However, Former DepEd Sec. Abad deplored the performance of the pupil’s assessment test and said that, the low scores in English, Mathematics, and Science can be attributed to pupils’ lack of ability in basic reading and comprehension. It is concluded that there are seven skills in reading comprehension. There are some skills of reading comprehension needed to be assessed.

Mastering the skills will help readers having better comprehension of the text read.

Comprehension is acquiring meaning from the text. It requires a higher level of understanding. Obviously, it is right critically important to the development of a students’ reading. It is an active process that requires an intentional and thoughtful interaction between the reader and the text (from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Reading skills help an individual expresses thoughts, ideas, and feelings especially in interacting and communicating with others.It is through reading comprehension that what one perceives becomes meaningful and sometimes put into action.

The child as a reader can appreciate the value of reading and the importance of it through understanding. According to Candado, Jessie V. unless the pupils did not understand the text, they are not also motivated to read books and other reading materials

In compliance to DepEd order no. 43, S. 2002 or the No Read No pass. Then, in answer to DepEd Region IV-A No.18-312 dated June 5,2018 which enjoined support for their reading intervention program cited reports that ‘’there are still nonreaders in grades 7 and 8 and readers with poor comprehension in higher grades.

With this situation, the researcher decided to try using collaborative strategic reading Collaborative Strategic Reading according to Handoko 2017 the word ‘’Collaborative Strategic Reading ‘’comes from the word ‘’collaborative, the word strategic = strategy and the word ‘’reading’’.
A collaborative is several people or groups of people working together. Collaborative means several people work together in small groups towards a common goal. The students are responsible for one another learning as well as their own and reaching that goal implies that students have helped each other to understand and learn (Handoko 2017).

Handoko 2017 defined too that Collaborative Strategic Reading as combined teaching, the reading strategy used to stimulate the students’ comprehension on the text. It is a research-based instructional practice in teaching reading comprehension to students to enhance content area learning. CSR teaches students reading comprehension while working in small cooperative groups. CSR consists of four reading comprehension strategies that are applied before, during, and after reading. CSR strategies are to preview the text, click and clunk, get the gist, and wrap up. Collaborative Strategic Reading can help the students to understand the concepts of a reading text to enhance their comprehension. It is supported by Klingner,2004 who stated that the goals of CSR are to improve reading comprehension and increase conceptual learning in ways that maximize students’ involvement. In other words, the contribution of the Collaborative Strategic Reading is producing better comprehension of the students.

Ziyaeemehr (2012) stated that collaborative strategic reading is created to enhance students’ comprehension of text. Specifically, it is designed to teach and activate reading comprehension strategies. In this regard, students work in collaborative groups with defined roles to engage in reading.

According to Baberio ,2005 and Alqami 2015 collaborative strategic reading involves four main phases which are preview, click and clunk, get the gist, and wrap up. CSR takes advantage of the growing knowledge base which indicates that youngsters need to be taught specific strategies to enhance their understanding of the text (Vaughn, Elbaum, & Schumm, 1996) but should not be overwhelmed with so many strategies that they are unable to decide which ones to use. CSR teaches students four critical reading comprehension strategies, with specific procedures for how to apply them independently.

In addition, to enhance implementation of the strategies and to ensure that each student has maximum opportunities for practice, CSR is implemented in small groups (usually four or five students each), with each student in the group assuming a critical role (e.g., leader, clunk expert, reporter). Vaughn, S., Klingner, J. & Diane, P. 2016 stated that recently, The purpose of the preview strategy is to activate background knowledge and to generate informed predictions about the text to be read by scanning the material and searching for clues.

The primary goals of previewing are to generate interest and questions about the text the students will read; stimulate students’ background knowledge and associations with the text; provide an opportunity for students to make informed predictions about what they will read and learn, and learn from and expand on the information provided by peers. (Vaughn, S., Klingner, J. & Diane, P. 2016)

Previewing is a skill that can be used throughout the day and across the curriculum. It does not need to be used only when students are implementing CSR, but can be used to preview a class day, current events, or a new topic the teacher is presenting prior to actual instruction.

Whereas previewing is a skill that is used prior to reading, click and clunk is a self-monitoring strategy that is implemented during reading. When students click, they recognize material that they know something about, and perhaps they can extend the information provided in the text. When students clunk, they identify words or concepts that they don’t understand and need to know more about in order to understand what they are reading and learning. (Vaughn,2016)

Students are taught to click and clunk while they read by writing down words that represent each of these. Then after students have read a designated amount of text, they discuss their clicks and clunks. The emphasis in the groups is on solving clunks. Students are taught clunk strategies, and the clunk expert in the group guides students through the strategies in an attempt to de-clunk words or ideas that students do not know. (Vaughn,2016)

These strategies are referred to as &dquo; fix-up strategies,&dquo; as they help students repair meaning that is lost until they understand the clunk. Students work cooperatively to solve clunks, and they make notes to obtain assistance from the teacher.

Like click and clunk, get the gist is practiced during reading. The purpose of this strategy is to teach students to identify the most critical information about what they have just read, or, in other words, to identify the main idea. This is frequently suggested as an important reading comprehension skill, and although many teachers ask students to tell them the main idea, few teachers teach youngsters how to identify the main idea.

In the get the gist strategy, students are taught to identify the most important point in the text by rephrasing the key idea in their own words, limiting their response to 10 or fewer words (Fuchs et al., 1997). The intent is to assist students in providing the gist in as few words as possible while conveying the most meaning and excluding unnecessary details.

Wrap up is like the preview in that it occurs only once during the process, but it is different in that it occurs after the students read the entire text. Students are taught to wrap up by identifying the questions that a good teacher would ask about what they just read.

The purpose of wrap up is to teach students to identify the most significant ideas about the entire passage they read and to assist with understanding and remembering what they have learned. Students practice the gist strategy after every two paragraphs, but they wrap up only at the end of the material they have covered for the entire period, usually about 12 to 14 paragraphs.

Handoko 2017 stated that CSR provides meaningful roles for each group, the students become a more active and independent reader, providing student-led instruction that is highly useful for students in comprehending content area text as well as deciphering vocabulary and multisyllabic words, CSR provides peer interaction that occurs as students’ works in heterogeneous group that can promote interest and persistence in the reading text, CSR makes students actively construct knowledge about the text in a social environment through interacting with the other members of their group and improve students’ accuracy and fluency of oral reading and makes gain in word identification and comprehension.

Thus, the Department of Education (DepEd 2000) intensifies reading literacy in schools by forcing the program called’’ Every Child A Reader Program’’ (ECARP). Abad , F.(2000) is expecting that no pupil will be promoted to higher grades unless he/she manifests mastery and basic literacy skills in a particular grade. But in HPES Main real situation of reading comprehension level performance of the Grade 6 can be shown in this figure.

Then, realizing several ways on how to have a better comprehension of the text as mentioned above, it indicates that reading comprehension is highly important. Because of the importance of reading comprehension, it is considered why the researcher would like to pursue this study and because at Hugo Perez Elementary School Main conducted an early reading assessment and PHIL-IRI last June 13-14, 2019. Results showed that only 109 out of 183 Grade 6 pupils have their comprehension level on their grade which means that 74 pupils fell in the lower level of comprehension.

The cited situation prompted the researcher to undertake this study, to have a clear and realistic picture of the collaborative strategic reading in improving the comprehension skill of Hugo Perez Elementary School Main Grade 6 pupils.

The teacher researchers developed a lesson plan incorporating Collaborative Strategic Reading. Tool: Contextualized and Localized Instructional learning material with (7) lessons where its objectives are based on the least mastered skills in reading comprehension. The development of the CSR lesson followed the CSR four strategies.