Improving the Critical Reading Skills of Grade 12- FBS2 Students of Guiuan

National High School through Modular Communicative Activities

Introduction and Rationale

Nowadays, the use of technology in reading instructions achieved a more

advanced learning experience. This is just one of the strategies that educator can use

to uplift the poor reading performance of students.

Reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a reading

material. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are

written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text or a message. Proficient

reading depends on the ability to recognize words quickly and effortlessly.

The educational system is following the trend toward globalization. The present

uptake which is the revision of the curriculum into the K to 12 was patterned after the

curricula of other more advanced and more progressive nations. The enhancement

has once more put the basic competencies on reading, writing, listening, and

speaking.

Reading is the true backbone of most learning. After all, everything starts with

the written words whether it is Math, Science or even Home Economics. As students

go up the educational ladder, more reading is usually required as subjects become

more packed and challenging. The difficulty degree simply increments not the other

way around.

Cariño (2000) said that the reading aspect of English should be utilized and

developed among students with great awareness and responsibility. The learning in

reading the English context specifically comprehension aspect is an important

program in the high school level. In addition, Department of Education released an

order to prove intensive support to schools that did poorly in the National Achievement

Test. The directive, which is addressed to education officials and principals, was

issued after more than two-third of participating high school finished with “lower

average” and “poor” scores. Furthermore, pointed out in the results of the assessment

tool were to serve as a basis for designing appropriate interventions at the institution,

division, regional and national categories to enable every child to read and write at his

grade level (Corpus and Lucas 2007).

Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading. Therefore, the primary purpose

of reading instruction is to help students develop the skills and strategies needed to

successfully construct from text. Students must read a lot in order to develop their

understanding and comprehension of the meaning of the words. They must establish

sufficient reading fluency to allow the students to pay attention on gaining meaning

from the words instead of decoding it rather than simply mastering isolated skills. The

students must be able to organize multiple strategies before, during and after reading.

Furthermore, students must develop their knowledge on different topics in order

to understand a wide array of words. Overall comprehension materials must teach

students on how to intentionally interact with the words or text to create meaning.

Reading for value means basically determining the truth, worth, and importance

as well as urgency of the meaning conveyed. This matter of considering the context is

a mark of a mature mind. The thinking reader never loses sight of the place and time

of the composition and the possible prejudices of the author. That is, he never loses

sight of the larger contexts of place, time, and who is speaking. He does not “swallow

whole” whatever has been put in to print.

 This action research is one of the answers on poor reading performance among

Grade 12 FBS (Food and Beverage Servicing) 2 students. This action research

designs reading activities which would cater the needs of the Grade 12 FBS2 students

in the Senior High School of Guiuan National High School. Last school year, under the

advisory class of the researcher, these group of students showed low performance in

the subject Reading and Writing Skills which resulted to low grades. This circumstance

motivated the researcher to conduct this study.

The Modular Communicative Activities in Critical Reading Skills is a material

designed by the researcher which consist of different reading texts followed by

comprehension questions which would develop skills in answering facts or information,

analysis, critical thinking, analytical thinking, and eventually, comprehensive and

professional writing of the Grade 12 FBS2 students.

Literature Review

Carrell (2007) and Lynch and Hudson (2007) recognize reading as probably the

most important skilll in academic contexts (as cited in Grabe, 2018) because most

students in academic settings learn a second language – especially English – to gain

information through reading (Carrell, 2016). Similarly, Huckin and Bloch (2010) view

reading as the most important skill to be mastered for the students in a second

language academic environment. According to Huckin and Bloch (2010), reading is

used not only to transmit academic knowledge but also as a secondary source to

obtain information which may have been missed during the class discussions or

lectures. Due to the role of reading in ESL and EFL instruction, it has been a main

focus of research.
Although many people think that they know what reading is, they have difficulty

defining it. For Eskey (2012), reading is “acquiring information from a written or printed

text and relating it to what you already know to construct a meaning for the text as a

whole”. He characterizes reading as “an invisible process” (Eskey, 2012) for it does

not generate any product that can be seen, heard, or responded to. This hidden

process is probably “the most thoroughly studied and least understood process in

education”.

Gaining awareness about the characteristics of fluent reading may facilitate our

understanding of this invisible process. Many researchers agree that fluent reading is

rapid, purposeful, interactive, comprehending, flexible, and gradually developing

(Grabe, 2009).

Grabe (2009) points out that to make connections and inferences to understand

the overall meaning in a text, readers need to read rapidly.

He adds that reading is purposeful because readers have a purpose for reading

such as getting information or entertainment. Reading is interactive because readers

benefit not only from textual information but also from their world knowledge in trying

to comprehend a text. In addition, fluent readers do not worry whether they will

understand a text as they start reading. They simply expect to understand what they

read and so reading is about comprehending. Finally, reading develops gradually.

Readers do not reach sudden or immediate development in reading. Long-term effort

and gradual reading result in fluent reading.

Everybody who is given the opportunity and guidance can learn to read.

Moreover, people learn to read, and to read better, by reading (Eskey, 2012). For
reading comprehension, a reader has to coordinate many sub-skills and strategies

(Coady, 2013).

Clarke and Silberstein (2007), who characterized reading as an active

comprehension process, suggest that students should be taught strategies to read

better and should be provided with various approaches to texts such as using pre

reading activities to enhance conceptual readiness, applying strategies to cope with

vocabulary, syntax and organizational structure (as cited in Grabe, 2009).

Research in second and foreign language instruction has begun to focus on the

strategies used by readers (Carrell, 2016) and the findings of studies reveal that

strategy use enhances reading comprehension and without strategies most readers

will have difficulties in grasping the meaning of the written word (Allen, 2013). To

understand the necessity and usefulness of reading strategies better, it is essential to

have an idea about the learning strategies in general, which will be discussed briefly

in the next section.

Pearson and his colleagues (1992) define reading comprehension strategies

as “conscious and flexible plans that readers apply and adapt to a variety of texts and

tasks” (as cited in Allen, 2013). Some examples to the strategies commonly used by

strategic readers are: previewing a text, predicting what will come later in a text,

summarizing, learning new words through the analysis of word stems and affixes,

recognizing text organization, generating appropriate questions about the text,

clarifying text meaning, using context to maintain comprehension, and repairing

miscomprehension (Grabe & Stoller, 2009).

Another definition proposed by Barnett (2008) considers reading strategies as

“the mental operations involved when readers approach a text effectively and make
sense of what they read”. Skimming, scanning, reading for meaning, activating general

knowledge, making inferences, separating main ideas from supporting details,

recognizing cognates and word families, guessing word meanings from context and

evaluating those guesses are the examples to these problem-solving techniques.

Grabe and Stoller (2009) point out that developing strategic readers is a

requirement of academic reading instruction and in every reading lesson strategy

should be introduced, practiced and the use of them should be discussed. The

empirical studies conducted into reading strategies and their relationship to successful

and unsuccessful second language reading are many in number (Carrell, Pharis &

Liberto, 2007). Carrell and her colleagues highlight the fact that research into

strategies suggests that less successful learners can improve their skills by getting

training in strategies used by more competent learners.

Successful learners have an awareness of their strategy use and why they use

strategies (Green & Oxford, 2005). These learners are able to adjust their strategies

to language tasks and to their needs as learners. Less successful learners, on the

other hand, cannot choose the appropriate strategies or decide on how to connect

them to have a useful “strategy chain” although they are able to identify their own

strategies.

Carrell, Pharis and Liberto (2007) compare reading strategies with learning

strategies and claim that as less competent learners benefit from getting training in

strategies evidenced by effective learners, less successful readers can improve their

reading ability through training in strategies employed by more efficient readers.

 Overall improvement in reading comprehension is dependent on the

improvement of skills and strategies and explicit training of strategies has often

produced gains in comprehension (Nagy & Herman, 2005).

Various researchers have given different names to different types of strategies.

Likewise, reading strategy taxonomies vary according to researchers.

Barnett (2008) categorizes strategies into two, as text-level and word-level

strategies. Text-level strategies are exemplified by skimming for having a general

understanding, scanning for details, predicting the content, using the background

knowledge and titles or pictures for comprehension. Such strategies are related to the

reading text as a whole or to large parts of the text so they are also named as “general

comprehension”.

Unlike text-level strategies which are related to the text as a whole, word level

strategies are related to the smaller parts of a text such as words (Bezci, 1998 as cited

by Abdul-Majeed & Muhammad, 2015).

Among the word-level strategies are the identification of the grammatical

category of words, recognition of words through word families and word formation and

guessing word meanings from context. As these strategies are used to cope with

individual words, they are also called as “local linguistic” (Block, 1986), “word-solving”

(Hosenfeld as cited in Barnett, 2008), and “word-processing.”

In second language reading literature, apart from the word and text-level

strategy classification, reading strategies are also classified as cognitive and

metacognitive. This common categorization is not related to strategies being word

level or text-level but has a broader perspective in looking at reading strategies

(Chamot, 2007). Recent second language research views reading comprehension as

a “constructive process” in which cognitive and metacognitive strategies are used to

develop the understanding of the text (Dole et al., 1991 as cited in Allen, 2013).

The above literatures gave the researcher a broader understanding of the

classroom issue and helped the researcher in developing modular communicative

activities.

Research Questions

This study is designed to evaluate the effects of Modular Communicative

Activities in improving the critical reading skills of Grade 12 FBS2 students of Guiuan

National High School.

Specifically, it seeks to answer the following questions:

1. What is the mean score of the students before and after the use of Modular

Communicative Activities in improving the critical reading skills?

2. Is there a significant difference in mean scores of the students before and after

using the Modular Communicative Activities in improving critical reading skills?

3. What implication can be deduced from the result of this study for the

enhancement of Modular Communicative Activities in improving critical reading

skills of students?

Scope and Limitation

This study will be limited only on the effects of Modular Communicative

Activities in improving the critical reading skills of Grade 12 FBS2 students of Guiuan

National High School S.Y. 2020-2021. This study will use self-made questionnaires.
This study will be concluded on the third quarter of the school year. The participants

are limited to those who are currently enrolled in Grade 12 FBS 2 and at the same

time, were enrolled in Grade 11 HE2 last school year. The data will be collected

through pretest and posttest. The researcher will use t-Test to find the significant

difference of the two means of the tests.

Research Methodology

The researcher will utilize the descriptive – comparative method where the

research itself will consider two entities: pretest and posttest of the students after the

use of Modular Communicative Activities for the improvement of critical reading skills

of students. Descriptive will be used in getting the mean of the test results of the Grade

12 FBS2 students. Descriptive research design is a valid method for researching

specific subjects and as a precursor to more quantitative studies (Shuttleworth, 2008).

The pretest will be given to the Grade 12 FBS2 students. After this, the modular

communicative activities will be utilized. To see the improvement in the crtical reading

skills of students, pretest and posttest will be compared. The significant difference of

the pretest and posttest will be computed using the t-test. The data and information

gathered will be systematically checked, computed, tabulated and interpreted.

Sampling

Purposive sampling will be used in the choice of Guiuan National High School

as the venue of research. The total number of respondents will be the 42 Grade 12

FBS2 students with 12 males and 30 females. The respondents will be purposively

selected because the researcher wanted to help her previous students.

 Purposive sampling will be used in cases where the specialty of an authority

can select a more representative sample that bring more accurate result than by using

other probability sampling technique (Explorable.com, 2009).

Data Gathering Method and Ethical Issues

The researcher will ask permission to the school head to conduct study on

improving the critical reading skills of the students through modular communicative

activities.

In this study, the researcher will gather the data through pretest and posttest.

The pretest will be administered by the researcher to the Grade 12 FBS2 students. It

will be followed by the utilization of Modular Communicative Activities. The utilization

of the materials will run for two weeks.

After the Modular Communicative Activities will be fully administered and used,

the researcher will conduct the posttest. The researcher will compare the mean of the

pretest and the posttest to determine if there is a significant difference of the means.

Data Analysis

The study will use the following statistical treatment of data:

Mean

M= ∑M
N

Where:

M = mean of the students’ scores

∑M = sum of the students’ scores

N = total number of students

t-Test

In this formula, t is the t-value, x1 and x2 are the means of the two groups being

compared, s2 is the pooled standard error of the two groups, and n1 and n2 are the

number of observations in each of the groups.