St.

Paul College of Ilocos Sur

(Member, St. Paul University System)

St. Paul Avenue, Bantay, Ilocos Sur

DEPARTMENT OF ARTS AND SCIENCES IN TEACHER EDUCATION

THE USE OF THE GUIDED READING COMPREHENSION PROGRAM TO

IMPROVE THE READING COMPREHENSION OF STRUGGLING GRADE II
READERS OF PUDOC ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Candidates:

Connie Joy Omaoeng

Lyka Mae Peralta

Flordeliza Ines

Ashley Cyril Perilla

Adviser:

Mr. Henry Buemio

September 2016
 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

There is not an area in the school curriculum that does not demand an ability to read.

Reading skills are an important tool that pupils need to become academically successful. Good

readers are better students than poor readers in every subject area. Even when a pupil is studying

practical or mathematical subjects he or she has to read instructions before starting to solve the

task. When reading a text the goal is to understand its content. It is a process that exceeds

decoding, and includes comprehension processes of the word, sentence, and text level. A child

who does not learn to read and comprehend in the early school years has severe difficulties also

in studying other school subjects. (Bowyer-Grane & Snowling 2005, 190; McGee & Johnson

2003, 49.)

The term "struggling reader" implies that all struggling readers belong to a single

category. Anyone can struggle, for different reasons, and no one struggles all the time. No two

struggling readers read the same way. Students who, for various reasons, miscomprehended the

reading process and have not put together a reading system that helps them construct meaning,

are struggling readers. We may see students who spend all of their energy sounding out words

without really internalizing what the words are "saying." Some students look at each word and

even read many words, but they are not thinking about what they are reading. Other students may

be trying to read books that are too difficult for them and as a result, they struggle even more

with reading. Struggling is not the same thing as failing; struggling means trying hard and still

losing meaning. Reading is not energy efficient for struggling readers.

 Guided Reading Comprehension Program is a program where in the struggling readers

are given an enrichment activity to improve their reading comprehension. The pupils will be

undergoing in the Guided Reading Comprehension Program for ten sessions.

Enrichment programs for children are important, especially when it comes to the benefits,

these programs can provide in the long-term. When your child is enrolled in these programs that

are well structured with an excellent curriculum, you will find that their skills and abilities will

be enriched far beyond anything you could have imagined. With that being said, there are many

different types of enrichment programs available for children, and choosing something that will

work well will be very important.

Some of the areas where a child will benefit a great deal will be speech and drama.

Although there are many other children available, these will prove to be some of the most

utilized areas in a child’s life.

Enrichment programs in general will have a main focus, and that focus will be to improve

your child’s ability to learn. In order for a young child to learn some of the most important facts

that have to do with social situations, will be their ability to understand and comprehend proper

speech. With an enrichment program a young child will discover to carry on conversations,

initiate greetings, and make introductions as though it were completely natural to them. By

learning proper speech they will also have the ability to react to all different types of situations,

as well as voice themselves properly in handling negative criticisms. Pragmatic skills are also

important for a young child to learn such as sarcasms, descriptions, and idioms. With a properly

structured enrichment program all of these areas will be addressed properly and help a child use

these skills and abilities throughout their life.

 With this significance of comprehension in a learner’s life, there are many programs,

traditional and digital, integrated in schools which will develop one’s reading comprehension.
Statement of the Problem

The study will test the use of the Guided Reading Comprehension Program to improve

the reading comprehension of struggling Grade II readers of Pudoc Elementary School, school

year 2016-2017.

Specifically, it will seek to answer the following questions:

1. What is the level of comprehension of the struggling Grade II readers in the test given

before the Guided Reading Comprehension Program?

2. What is the level of comprehension of the struggling Grade II readers in the test given

after the Guided Reading Comprehension Program?

3. Is there a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test score of struggling

Grade II readers after the use of the Guided Reading Comprehension Program?

Hypothesis

There is no significant difference in the pre-test and post test scores of the struggling

Grade II readers before and after the Guided Reading Comprehension program.

Significance of the Study

The findings of this study will redound to the benefit of the following:

1. Teachers

In the part of the teacher, this research would help empower teachers with reports and

actionable date at the learner and school level.

2. Pupils/Learners
 As the main beneficiaries of the findings of this research, their needs in reading will be

addressed properly by their English teacher to improve their comprehension, vocabulary and

fluency.

3. Parents

In the part of the parents, this research would make them acquainted with the technology of

reading to be able to guide their children at their reading comprehension level.

4. Researchers

In the part of the researchers, the results of this research would give them a sense of

accomplishment.

5. DASTE Students

In the part of the future third year DASTE students, the results of this research can be used as

a basis for a new study or a development.

Scope and Delimitation

This research will focus on the use of the Guided Reading Comprehension Program to

improve the reading comprehension of the selected struggling Grade II readers of Pudoc

Elementary School school year 2016-2017. The respondents of this research are the selected

struggling Grade II readers.

Definition of Terms

Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to construct or derive

meaning (reading comprehension). Reading is a means of language acquisition, of

communication, and of sharing information and ideas.

Reading comprehension. The ability to read text, process it and understand its meaning. An

individual's ability to comprehend text is influenced by their traits and skills, one of which is the

ability to make inferences.

Guided reading is 'small-group reading instruction designed to provide differentiated teaching

that supports students in developing reading proficiency'. The small group model allows children

to be taught in a way that is intended to be more focused on their specific needs, accelerating

their progress.

Scholastic Reading Counts! It is an independent reading program which combines reading

practice and software-based reading assessment, reading motivation program that provides

remediation and academic enrichment activities designed to raise student achievement in Grades

K-12.

Lexile Measure. A unit for measuring text difficulty based on the variables of syntax and

semantic difficulty. Semantic difficulty refers to the level of familiarity or frequency of the text’s

vocabulary and syntax refers to the level of difficulty in terms of sentence length. The Lexile

scale is a developmental scale for reading that ranges from below 200L for beginning-reader

level to 1700L for advanced level.

Below Basic Readers. Those pupils who are still learning to read and having difficulties in

understanding the text..

Basic Readers. Those pupils who are beginning to understand the text.
Proficient Readers. Those pupils who have a dept, skilled, and expert mean having great

knowledge in the text.

Advance Readers. Those pupils who are far on or ahead in development or progress.

Conceptual Framework

INPUT PROCESS OUTCOME

Pre-test Guided Reading Improved

Comprehension Reading
Comprehension
Program of Grade II
pupils

Figure 1. Paradigm of the Study

The conceptual framework of the study is based on this paradigm. The input box
contains the pre-test score of the struggling Grade II readers. The process that will be used in
this research is the Guided Reading Enrichment Program. The outcome box contains the
improved reading comprehension of Grade II pupils.
Review of Related Literature

Reading with comprehension, as described by Hume and Snowling (2011), is one of the

primary goals of early education. Learning, whether in an academic setting or on one’s own

tends to be highly dependent on the comprehension of information from text sources (McKeown,

1990). To quote the largest children’s literacy non-profit organization in the United States,

“Reading is Fundamental.” Reading truly is fundamental in every academic discipline (White,

2004;Lei, Rhinehart, Howard & Cho, 2010) due to the way we share information(Tarchi, 2010).

Many of the skills and strategies required for reading comprehension are already present in

beginning readers in their ability to comprehend the spoken word. As with the spoken word,

meaning is often deeper than a single word, single sentence, or even single paragraph. Readers

must make use of their existing knowledge to make the inferences necessary to uncover these

deeper meanings(Hirsch, 2003). However, while a beginning reader might possess a reasonably

advanced listening comprehension ability there remains enough difference that reading education

continues well beyond their education for listening and speaking. Enough information is

removed in the transition from experience and conversation to text that skills and strategies a

reader might use when talking with peer or instructor are suddenly unavailable. Because of this

simply being able to decode the individual words, word meanings, and sentences (including

syntax) is simply not enough to facilitate reading comprehension(Adams 1977).

Unfortunately, despite the clear importance of reading comprehension, public schools

often stop reading instruction in the fifth or sixth grade (White, 2004; Lei, Rhinehart, Howard &

Cho, 2010). Although there have been efforts to improve the reading instruction students do

receive, (Campell, Hombo & Mazzeo, 2000) research by the National Assessment of Educational
Progress has found that comprehension scores remain low. Further, an international assessment

found that only 8.6 percent of students are proficient at the highest reading level (OECD, 2007).

While instruction may end as early as fifth or sixth grade, issues with reading comprehension are

not unique to youth populations. Issues with reading comprehension can be found even among

college students who may struggle with comprehending and identifying important information in

textbooks, scholarly books, and journal articles (Lei, Rhinehart, Howard & Cho, 2010). Once in

college, coursework rarely focuses on reading comprehension despite college students spending

the majority of their academically focused time reading and studying (Shaw, 1999). Regardless

of evidence for student difficulties, many professors expect that their students are already

proficient in reading comprehension due to their academic level (Shefield, R.M., Montgomery,

R.J., & Moody, P.G., 2005) and often believe that college level texts are no more difficult than

texts students were exposed to earlier in their academic careers (White, 2004; Lei, Rhinehart,

Howard & Cho, 2010). Increasingly, research has indicated the importance prior knowledge, or,

all of the information a reader possesses prior to a reading task, has on reading comprehension.

Further, a number of strategies for improving reading comprehension have been developed,

ranging from bottom-up strategies of manipulating the text itself before the reader processes it to

top-down strategies providing the reader with tools to actively apply to improve their

comprehension. This review will discuss a variety of the contributing factors to a reader’s

comprehension of a text focusing on top-down and bottom-up processing, the associated

interventions, and finally will culminate with a description of an underutilized empirically

supported comprehension strategy

What is reading comprehension and how do we test it?

Until the mid-1970’s reading was generally considered to be simply retrieving an

author’s message by decoding the words of a text (McKeown, 1990; Adams & Collins,

1977). Gradually our understanding of reading comprehension has become more complex,

recognizing that the reader derives both implicit and explicit meanings from the text (McKeown,

1990; Adams & Collins, 1977). An explicit understanding of a text is one in which a reader

develops a shallow understanding of a text by processing exactly what the author says from the

text in isolation from their prior knowledge and experience. If the reader understands the deeper

meanings of a text, beyond what the author directly states, they can be said to have an implicit

understanding of the text. At the most complex level, if a reader is able to understand the

information as presented by the author (both implicit and explicit) as well as how that

information integrates into the reader’s existing knowledge, we can say the reader has

successfully comprehended the material (Adams & Collins, 1977).

At first glance, reading comprehension appears to be a hierarchical bottom-up process

beginning with the reader’s ability to recognize the individual letters of a text. From this the

reader decodes each of the words that are then used to construct the sentences which form the

clauses and phrases the reader will use to extract information and meaning (Adams & Collins,

1977). However, as we will expand on shortly, research in the mid-1970’s discovered that the

processing of this text hierarchy is bidirectional and that reading comprehension is a dynamic

process of constructing coherent representations of inferences and ideas that utilizes both top-

down and bottom-up processing (Duke, Pressley & Hilden, 2004; Graesser & Britton, 1996;

Adams & Collins, 1977). Currently, most definitions of reading comprehension make note of the

important relationship between the text and the reader’s prior knowledge (Alfassi, 2004;
Meneghetti, Carretti & De Beni, 2006). This perspective appreciates the bottom up flow of

information as it is processed from the text itself and balances this with the top-down processing

of this information by higher level strategies, which include the use of existing reader knowledge

and the integration of new information with that knowledge. Existing reader knowledge will be

used in a top down manner to make inferences regarding the meanings and significance of

unfamiliar terms and topics that are being processed upwards from the text. The readers

knowledge of the relationships between ideas will be used to draw connections between ideas in

the text that are not explicitly stated as well as connections between new information in the text

and their existing knowledge structures.

While research has yet to formalize exactly what demonstrates a reader’s true

comprehension of a specific text (Ozuru, Dempsey & McNamara, 2009), a number of assessment

methods can be employed to tease apart a reader’s comprehension including free recall, written

questions, and key-word sorting tasks to name a few of the popular ones. Free recall typically

reveals the reader’s explicit memory of the text, this can be considered a measure of the text-base

representation (McNamara, Kintsch, Songer & Kintsch, 1996) the reader has constructed, a

concept that will be expanded on in greater detail later. Written questions can be a little more

broad in their assessment and can tease apart a reader’s understanding of not only things specific

to the text but also the reader’s ability to apply the information to novel problems and integrate it

with prior knowledge (McNamara, Kintsch, Songer & Kintsch, 1996). Key-word sorting tasks

are also popular methods providing a better look at the reader’s understanding of the relationship

between concepts and ideas in the text. During this task the reader will sort key words into

categories representing relationships gleamed from the text. A reader’s comprehension can be

assessed by determining how strongly these key words are sorted according to their respective
categories before and after reading (McNamara, Kintsch, Songer & Kintsch, 1996). Other

popular strategies among instructors include essays, multiple choice questions, and vocabulary

definitions.

How does the text interact with prior knowledge and influence comprehension?

The prevailing method of differentiating between texts in discourse research is between

genres, particularly between narratives and expository texts. Children are typically exposed to

narrative type texts beginning from an early age. This early exposure tends to leave early

reader’s more familiar with the text structure of narrative genre texts compared to other

genres. Not only is this structure more familiar to early reader’s but compared to, for example,

expository texts, the structure of narratives is better documented in the scientific literature

. Further, the general text structure for narrative texts tends to be less variable than expository

texts making them easier for inexperienced and lower skilled reader’s to take advantage of their

prior experience with this type of text structure (Cote, Goldman & Saul, 1998).

Because of these differences in exposure and experience, particularly in regards to

children, a great proportion of reading research has utilized narrative type text structures.

However, while reader’s may be more familiar and have a greater level of exposure to narrative

type texts it is informational texts, or nonnarrative texts, that are most prevalent in academic

learning situations. Unfortunately much less research has been conducted looking at reading,

specifically reading comprehension and the meaning construction process, using informational

nonnarrative type texts despite their importance in academic settings. (Cote, Goldman & Saul,

1998)
 One aspect of a reader’s prior knowledge that can be exploited is the structure of the text.

Due to the early exposure to narrative texts experienced by many reader’s it is not surprising that

reader’s are familiar with the general structure of narrative type texts at an early age (Stein &

Policastro, 1984; Stein & Trabasso, 1982; Whaley, 1981). However, in regards to expository

texts, research indicates that reader’s understanding of text structure, as well as their ability to

utilize this understanding to their advantage, is still relatively undeveloped even beyond the sixth

grade level. (Heibert, Englert, & Brennan, 1983; Langer, 1986; Cote, Goldman & Saul, 1998).

The integration of more formal education regarding expository text structures could prove

worthwhile at earlier levels of reading instruction.

One of the primary differences between narrative and expository texts is their general

content. Early reader’s usually have a reasonable degree of prior knowledge regarding the social

and interpersonal relationships depicted in narrative texts as well as the everyday problems that

contribute to the story. The relationships and events of narrative stories are often intertwined

through a rather limited set of causal and temporal events of which the reader has little difficulty

connecting. Conversely, expository texts are often read in the context of learning new material

and thus often contain a large number of concepts and relations that are unfamiliar to the

reader. Less experience with content coupled with less experience with the text structure, which

tends to be less consistent and standardized across many types of expository texts, ends up

requiring reader’s to rely on a much broader range of logical relationships between different

pieces of information in the text. (Cote, Goldman & Saul, 1998)

According to a broad array of recent research Linderholm, Everson, van den Broek,

Mischinski, Crittenden et al, 2001; McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996; O’Reilly &

McNamra, 2007; Voss & Silfies, 1996 (6) how well a reader will comprehend a specific
expository text will be based upon a complicated interaction involving individual differences in

the reader (overwhelmingly influenced by prior knowledge) and various text features. Beyond

the text genre and individual differences in readers there are a number of different text

characteristics that will influence how easily the reader is able to construct a mental model of the

information in the text and this, in turn, will impact their comprehension and the integration of

new information with existing knowledge.

One of the more broad ways of looking at reading comprehension comes from an

examination of the different mental representations the reader produces when reading a

text. These mental representations are, in essence, the learning that has taken place and is

determined by the quality of the text-base representation of the target text as well as the use of

prior knowledge to integrate the text-base with existing knowledge structures (Cote, Goldman &

Saul, 1998). These two factors, text-base representation and prior knowledge, can be broke down

into a two by two graphic depiction of the mental representation produced by a reading task.

The use of prior knowledge in the construction of the reader’s mental representation can be

divided into either a high use of prior knowledge or a low use of prior knowledge while the text-

base representation produced by the reader can be described as high quality or low quality.

(Cote, Goldman & Saul, 1998)

The quality of the text-base constructed by the reader is going to be heavily influenced by

the connections between ideas across different sections of the text (Cote, Goldman & Saul,

1998). While various strategies and inferences made by the reader are going to have a large

contribution in the construction of the text-base there are some factors beyond the readers

control. For example the coherence of the text itself will influence the information acquired

from the text as well as the way this information is organized and explained (McKeown, 1990) A
texts coherence is determined by the author based on the words they use to make clear the

relationship between different ideas in the text as well as the way in which the author organizes

the information in a text (McKeown, 1990). In fact, text cohesion has been found to be a major

contributor to a readers comprehension (W. Kintsch & Vipond, 1979; van Dijk & Kintsch,

1983). Research has also found that increasing the cohesion of a given text can increase readers

comprehension, (Beck et al., 1991; Britton & Gulgoz, 1991). This should not be surprising, by

definition a highly cohesive text is going to contain much if the information necessary to

understand and connect ideas across different areas of the text; however, less cohesive texts will

tend to lack this information and in turn rely on the reader to contribute their own prior

knowledge to fill the gaps (Ozuru, Dempsey & McNamara, 2009). Because of this it makes

sense that the neither the mental representation of the text, largely influenced by the cohesion of

the text or the degree of topic-relevant prior knowledge the reader possesses will act alone to

determine their overall comprehension of a text, as shown in the diagram (Cote, Goldman &

Saul, 1998).

Prior knowledge or background knowledge refers to all of the accessible pre-existing

information a reader has stored in their long-term memory while topic-relevant prior knowledge

refers to the readers pre-existing knowledge related to the specific main concepts and ideas of the

specific text being read (Shapiro, 2004). As noted earlier, the information in an individual text

often assumes a certain amount of pre-existing knowledge and as such, tends to lack certain

information that is necessary for the construction of coherent mental representations of the given

text. One of the big reasons topic-relevant prior knowledge has such a large impact on reading

comprehension is because of this information gap. The lack of relevant information in the text

requires the reader to fill this gap with information from their prior knowledge (Kintsch, 1988,
1998). Research (Afflerbach, 1986; Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981) has demonstrated the large

effect of prior knowledge on reading comprehension, namely that a reader’s prior knowledge

both enhances and facilitates reading comprehension. This is particularly true for reading

comprehension of expository texts (Ozuru, Dempsey & McNamara, 2009). While the research

indicates that while a lack of topic-relevant prior knowledge can negatively impact a reader’s

comprehension, the breadth of their knowledge also affects the quality of the integration of

mental representations constructed by the reader. (McKeown, 1990)

Readers take advantage of the incomplete information in a text to identify and cue

information from long term memory to fill in the gaps. When the reader has the requisite prior

knowledge this process allows them to rapidly access the relevant information contained in their

long term memory with little effort. Research has actually demonstrated that the impact of prior

knowledge on reading comprehension is even greater than that of reading skill (Ozuru, Dempsey

& McNamara, 2009). Returning again to our graphic representation of comprehension, the

greatest opportunity for learning can be found in the top right quadrant when the reader has

produced a high quality mental representation of the text and integrated this representation

effectively with their prior knowledge (Cote, Goldman & Saul, 1998).

Bottom-Up Reading Comprehension Problems

There are a large number of factors that can contribute to an individual’s inability to

comprehend textual material. These can range from biology including issues with any

component, or components, of the visual system or visual processing systems as well as non-

biological issues including basic literacy, various cognitive dysfunction, encoding and retrieval

issues, learning and memory problems, and so on. It is important to be able to narrow down
what factors are contributing to an individual’s difficulty in comprehending a text so an

appropriate intervention can be planned and enacted. These issues can form somewhat of a

hierarchy in terms of the potential interventions available depending on the particular area(s)

contributing to the difficulty. It is not difficult to see how difficulty in one of these domains can

compound with others to create increasingly complex issues for a reader trying to comprehend a

text. A student suffering from an undiagnosed biological condition contributing to a difficulty in

reading comprehension is going to be at a tremendous disadvantage from the start. Depending on

the severity of this issue it may not matter what reading strategies an instructor might convey to

the reader if they are physically incapable of reading the words in their proper order or have

difficulties in storing information from the beginning of the text for continued use through rest of

the text.

In truth, the numbers of variables that contribute to reading comprehension are

increasingly expansive the more specific you are. For example, I briefly mention the impact of a

person’s underlying biology on their ability to read and how issues in this domain can impact

comprehension in a number of different ways. The biology involved in the entire process of

reading can be seen as strongly influencing the bottom-up processing of information from the

text including the initial visual perception, the retrieval of existing long term memories, the re-

encoding of updated mental representations to long term memory and everything in between.

This is all incredibly important but beyond the scope of this paper. Similar levels of complexity

can be found in regards to any of the contributing factors to an individual’s ability to read for

comprehension depending on how specific and detailed you examine various components of the

process and the corresponding literature. It is useful to try and narrow the focus a bit while still

remaining as inclusive as possible.

Research Methodology

This research made used of a quasi-experimental research method. A quasi-experiment is

an empirical study used to estimate the causal impact of an intervention on its target population.

Quasi-experimental research shares similarities with the traditional experimental design or

randomized controlled trial, but they specifically lack the element of random assignment to

treatment or control. Instead, quasi-experimental designs typically allow the researcher to control

the assignment to the treatment condition, but using some criterion other than random

assignment.

Population and Sampling

The Grade II pupils of Pudoc Elementary School are the subjects of this research. There

are 144 pupils of the four sections in Grade IV. The researchers used the purposive sampling

technique to make the population representative smaller.

The respondents of this research are 10 pupils from the struggling Grade II readers of

Pudoc Elementary School.

Data Gathering Procedure

In able to generate data that are needed for this research, the researchers will seek

permission from the authority of Pudoc Elementary School, specifically in the principal of the

school, Nestor A. The researchers will also ask permission to the English subject teacher of the

struggling Grade II readers.

Data Gathering Instruments

The anecdotal and document analysis is the data gathering instrument that will be used in

the study. The researchers will get the data of the pre-test score and post-test score through
the questionnaires.

The researchers will use the questionnaire method in the Guided Reading Comprehension

Program.

Statistical Treatment of Data

The following statistical treatment of data will be employed to analyse ad interpret the

data.

1. Simple frequency count and percentage will be used to determine the number of

respondents.

2. T-Test. To determine the significant difference of the pre-test and post test scores.