CORRELATES OF READING COMPREHENSION AND ACADEMIC

PERFORMANCE IN ENGLISH OF GRADE 7 STUDENTS OF

CUYTING UY NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL

In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements in
( )

Presented to

April Marjorie B. Cardenas

MARCH 2017
 CORRELATES OF READING COMPREHENSION AND ACADEMIC

PERFORMANCE IN ENGLISH OF GRADE 7 STUDENTS OF

CUYTING UY NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL

Chapter 1

THE PROBLEM AND ITS BACKGROUND

Introduction

The school is an important agent in the formation of educational

enhancement of studying and learning capacity of learners because it can affect

educational performance of the students with teachers as the primary agents.

Schools assume the role of directing and providing the students with experiences

which will help them to discover the potential and talents of the students in

order to obtain a quality life.

As it is known, English has main four skills namely: Listening, Reading,

Speaking and Writing. The main goal of teaching these skills is to enable students

to interact successfully with native and non-native users of English in a variety of

social and academic settings. Reading is considered as the most important skills.

Clearly, reading is a pivotal skill for students which enables them to acquire

knowledge and develop their academic areas. The essential goal of teaching

reading is to train students to read efficiently and quickly so as to get

information and meaning from the written material rapidly with full

understanding and enjoyment. Reading is considered as an additional tool of

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communication to listening and speaking. People who have no chance to talk

with native speakers of the target language can have an access through reading

to their literature, journals, and then understand much about their civilization. In

this sense, reading is the window through which other cultures can be seen and

more general or specific knowledge can be gained (Kailani, et.al, 2008:85).

Reading is a subtle and complex process that involves sensation,

perception, and comprehension, application and integration. It is the magic key

to the world enlightenment and enjoyment for it is the basic tool for learning and

studying in all the subject areas (Alcantara, et.al, 2003:18). It means to say that,

reading is not just a simple matter of knowing the words and sentences but

intelligent reading requires an alert and critical mind to catch up what you read.

Alcantara also stresses that many students achieve accuracy in recognition and

pronunciation, but few succeed in comprehension. Whatever the motivation,

whatever the purpose, reading implies comprehension. Individuals must

understand what they read if it is to accomplish any purpose except to waste

time.

The ability to read is an essential skill for students to master because

information is presented in text throughout the world. Web sites, books,

magazines, and newspapers, while sometimes including pictures for visual

reference, utilize print to share information with the reader. Educational systems

also rely more heavily upon text as students reach higher grade levels. In early
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elementary grades, students do not typically have textbooks at home and they

primarily work with decodable readers and short stories borrowed from the

library. However, beginning around third grade, textbooks are introduced to the

home environment and students abilities to pull and process information from

textbooks becomes increasingly necessary for student achievement. By the time

students reach high school, many history teachers expect students to build their

background knowledge by reading at home and then demonstrate their

understanding during in-class discussions. English teachers also assign novels

and stories for reading at home. Unfortunately, textbooks are challenging for

students to access. Textbooks use advanced vocabulary, cover a vast number of

topics, use direct language that doesnt engage the reader, and lack the structure

that promotes reading comprehension (Bryce, 2011). In primary school, students

are still building their reading competence, but at the secondary level they are

expected to have the necessary skills. The students in higher grade levels are

responsible for reading and comprehending all of the directions, passages, and

other printed information (Crane, et.al, 2008).

National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES], (2005:2) defines reading

as an active and complex process that involves understanding written text,

developing and interpreting meaning, and using meaning as appropriate to type

of text, purpose and situation. Consequently, reading comprehension is

essential to develop students' reading skills. Moreover, (Paris & Hamilton, 2008)
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point out that "Without comprehension, reading words is reduced to imitating

the sounds of language, repeating text is simply memorization and oral drill."

Unsurprisingly, the English Language Curriculum Committee concludes that

reading comprehension is the most important skill to be taught in school and the

ability to read accurately and fluently is the most important need of the students.

The students will be trained for: (1) Information and understanding: collect data,

facts, or ideas; discover relationships, concepts, or generalizations; and use

knowledge generated from text, (2) Aesthetic Response: enjoy and appreciate

texts, relate texts to oneself, and respond sensitively to texts with diverse social,

historical, and cultural dimensions. (3) Critical Analysis and Evaluation: Use

personal and objective criteria to form opinions or to make judgments about

ideas and information in written texts. Obviously, reading comprehension

enables students to communicate effectively and appropriately with the written

text, and then obtain quality education.

Some students are able to sound out words although they do not know

what the words mean. In the real sense, this is not reading. What the students do

is nothing but word calling. When one reads, there must be comprehension;

otherwise no reading takes place. Comprehension takes place when there is

communication between the author and the reader. In plain language, it is

understanding what the author has written. There are generally manifestations

of comprehension: noting details, getting the main idea, inferring, predicting

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outcomes, drawing conclusions. Ones ability to comprehend, therefore, ranges

from reproducing the explicitly stated ideas in the text to producing mental

constructs creatively and with originality (Romero, et.al, 2009: 66).

Students are not performing well on their tests; it could be because they

are struggling to read and comprehend the test questions that they are being

confronted with. Students need practice reading in order to develop their

phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The

mastery of these skills will grant them access to increasingly complex knowledge

in other academic subject areas. School systems are often challenged to meet the

needs of students who are not performing at grade level expectations and

provide support services to help those students to close the achievement gap.

But observation revealed that many students in primary and secondary

grades still need to develop more in comprehension ability. As an agent in the

formation of educational enhancement of the students- an individual who

handles English subject particularly, more than 50 percent of the Grade 7

students of Cuyting Uy National High School in Malino, Jiabong Samar tends to

have poor reading comprehension.

It is for this reason that the researcher was motivated to conduct a

research study to a certain correlates of reading comprehension and academic

performance in English of the Grade 7 students of CUNHS in the District of

Jiabong, Division of Samar.

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Hopefully, such knowledge of correlation will help the school

administrators as well as the teachers to prepare and carry out an effective

reading intervention program for the better output so that the students will find

it meaningful and interesting and more productive.

The Researcher,

APRIL MARJORIE B. CARDENAS