CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
While the ability to read and furthermore, to understand what is written, is critical to
success in our educational system, our nations report card in reading achievement is lackluster at
best. Moreover, comprehension problems become most apparent when students are faced with
textbook material (Best, Floyd, & McNamara, 2008; McNamara, 2001).
Reading problems stem from several sources. First, the student may not be able to read
the words themselves. Indeed, word decoding development and deficits are the concern of many
researchers and educators, particularly for younger children and children with learning deficits.
However, this concern has sometimes led to the neglect of the counterpart of word decoding:
sentence comprehension. Numerous problems can occur for the reader at the comprehension
level. Understanding how the words come together in each sentence can be a challenge. Or, the
student may understand each word and even each sentence, but fail to understand the
relationships between the sentences and the meaning of the text as a whole. Further, the
stumbling block may not be sufficient reading ability to understand more familiar genres of text,
but rather, the student may only falter when faced with challenging, knowledge demanding text.
The reader may lack the requisite knowledge. More importantly, the student may lack the reading
strategies necessary to overcome such challenges. Understanding how the words come together in
each sentence can be a challenge. It is clear that many readers lack sufficient reading abilities and
knowledge to understand the genre of texts that pervade their classroom lives. World knowledge
is particularly helpful to understanding text genres such as narratives or novels. But students
need domain-specific knowledge to understand their textbook material. Domain knowledge refers
to knowledge about the topic of the text such as knowledge about science, history, or about
specific topics, such as cell mitosis, heat exchange, or World War II. Textbook materials, in
particular, tend to be challenging for most students because they often lack sufficient domain
knowledge. Textbooks contain unfamiliar words, unfamiliar concepts, and have structures
particularly germane to instructional textbooks. In addition, textbooks tend to have numerous
cohesion gaps, posing additional hurdles for many students. Cohesion gaps occur when there is
little conceptual overlap or explicit connections between sentences. Cohesion gaps force readers
to access knowledge to make connections between sentences. Critically, making these
connections requires both general and domain knowledge. Thus, the challenges posed by poorly
written text are compounded for students with less knowledge about the domain (e.g.,
McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996; McNamara, 2001).
Readers may encounter any number of roadblocks in the path to comprehension.
Regardless of the locus of the reading problems, teaching strategies is one of the most effective
means of helping students to overcome them. Strategy instruction across a variety of domains
builds on the notion that less skilled students should learn strategies that mimic those exhibited by
skilled students or that compensate for processes exhibited by skilled students. The underlying
assumption is that the processes or skills induced by the strategies become more automatic with
practice. Strategies provide the means to tackle complex problems in more efficient ways and,
with practice, the strategies lead to skills that become automatic and quick over time.


STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
This study aimed to determine the reading strategies and its influence in reading
performance of elementary pupils of Ipil Central Elementary School.
Furthermore, it sought to answer the following questions:
1. What are the reading strategies employed by the teachers in teaching reading?
2. What are the factors that influence the reading performance of the pupils?
3. Do reading strategies influence the reading performance of the pupils?
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
The outcome of this study will provide information regarding reading strategies and its
influence to the reading performance to the pupils. This may yield finding which would be useful
to the following:
Teacher the outcome of the study will help the teachers be informed about the
importance of employing reading strategies upon teaching reading to the pupils. This
study would serve as a challenge on their part to use various reading strategies for the
betterment of the reading performance of the pupils.
School the result of the study will serve as a feedback to the school regarding the
commonly used strategies employed by the teachers in teaching reading. Through this,
they can suggest better ways, techniques and strategies to the teachers in order to aid
common reading problems and eventually develop a high reading performance to the
pupils.

SCOPE AND DELIMITATION OF THE STUDY
This study states the scope and the limitations of the study.
This study focused on the strategies employed by the teachers of Ipil Central
Elementary School.
It covers the teachers in all the grade level of Ipil Central Elementary School and
they were composed of teachers.










CHAPTER II
THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
RELATED LITERATURE
As cited in Villamin, 1999, Innovative Strategies in Teaching Reading that reading is
the key that unlocks the door to the world of enlightenment which is the basic tool for learning in
the content fields. In our daily lives, 80 percent of the things we do involve reading. We read
street signs and advertisements, menus in restaurants, recipes from cookbooks, how to do things,
etc. Several years ago reading was regarded as a leisure time activity, largely for enjoyment.
Nowadays rapid change, the knowledge explosion, and tremendous advances in science and
technology call for efficient reading. It has been said that with millions of good books in the
libraries, a good reader could hardly read one percent of these during his lifetime. Todays faster
living means faster learning.
Reading enables man to ponder the mysteries of the world, explore accumulated
knowledge and contemplate the unknown. From this search, he begins to uncover some answers
to questions, he is stimulated to raise more questions, and to continue his pursuit for deeper
understanding. It can be one of mans ingredients for blending his inner psychological world with
the outer social world, and immerging into a new world of thought, imagination and reality.
To read efficiently is to approach every reading task with a clear and definite purpose and
the flexibility to adjust reading strategy to the purpose on hand. Different purposes demand
appropriate comprehension and retention levels and therefore the use of different reading
strategies or approaches. These strategies include skimming, scanning, intensive reading, and
extensive reading. Skimming as reading strategy skimming refers to the method of glancing
rapidly through the reading selection or text for the purpose of extracting the thought, the gist or
main points. In skimming the reader disregards about two-thirds of the selection, paying attention
only to the essential elements. In other words, skimming involves surveying which parts of the
text contain the most important information and reading only those parts worth spending time on.
Scanning, the rapid search for the specific information or for an appropriate answer to a
particular question is referred to as scanning. It is useful strategy for data gathering and for note
taking in scanning, the reader is concerned only with facts and information that he needs. Speedy
retrieval of specific information or fact underlies the scanning strategy. Intensive reading, this is
a reading strategy which is characterized by deliberate attention and deep concentration. It is
reading for details. It is aim at perceiving implications. It is concerned with a profound and
detailed understanding of the text. Extensive reading, on the other hand is a comprehensive
reading of long texts or books for the express purpose of discerning global meaning in the art of
extensive reading. It is reading imaginatively, creatively and critically. Although there is no
absolute distinction between intensive and extensive reading, it has been observed that before a
student can successfully undertake extensive reading he must have experienced intensive reading.
Children read well or poorly for certain definite causes and a teacher must be able to
make an analysis of each case and determine just the points of strength or weakness before she
can intelligently give help.
The factors may be grouped into the intrinsic and the extrinsic. Those factors which are
within the individual are what may be considered as intrinsic factors. These are the factors that
influence the acquisition of reading ability intelligence, emotional stability, associational abilities,
memory span, the physical condition, environment, and readability of the reading materials.
Intelligence is an important factor in reading ability. Studies show that correlations are as
high as 0.906 between scores on intelligence tests and scores on reading comprehension tests. The
average correlation between reading age and mental age is about 0.60. This indicates mental
maturity is essential for success for reading. The emotional stability is another factor. Personally
disturbances may be temporary or relatively permanent blocks to effective and efficient reading.
The development of a good emotional climate for learning is one of the reading teachers first
responsibilities. Associational abilities are essential to the reading process. The pupil must be
able to make associations between symbols and the facts or objects they represent. He must be
able to sense relationships. Some children need special instructional method to establish
association, such as the use of kinesthesia (also spelled kinaesthesia) and tactile aids to learning
how to read. Memory span has also been found to have a significant on reading ability. In a
study of pupils from grade II to XII it was found that the group mean scores on memory span
tests where consistently higher for good readers than for poor readers. Retention is a serious
problem if memory span deficiency exist. The physical condition of the pupil has a strong
influence on his chance on reading effectively. Vision, hearing, general health status are factors
which affect reading ability. The reading performance is to be expected from the pupil who is
physically fit. Another important factor is language facility which includes use of words,
understanding of sentence structures and usage. There are also outside factors which are direct
bearing on reading ability. The environment in which reading is done has a strong influence on
the readers ability. Most people have difficulty reading in a noisy room. Readability of the
reading material is a strong factor in the reading process. Length and complexity of the
sentences, vocabulary load, quality of personal references all combine to determine the
readability of the material.
Related Studies
As cited in Reading Proficiency, Reading Strategies, Metacognitive
Awareness and L2 Readres, Meena Singhal (April, 2001) a number of studies have
attempted to conceptualize the notion of strategies used by language learners, as stated,
Oxford (1990) offers a useful and comprehensive classification scheme of the various
strategies used by learners. Within the broader context of reading strategies, the following
six strategies can more appropriately be referred to as sub-strategies. Cognitive strategies
are used by learners to transform or manipulate the language. In more specific terms, this
includes note taking, formal practice with the specific aspects of the target language such
as sounds and sentence structure, summarizing, paraphrasing, predicting, analyzing, and
using context clues. Techniques that help the learner to remember and retrieve
information are referred to as memory strategies. These include creating mental images
through grouping and associating, semantic mapping, using keywords, employing word
associations, and placing new words into a context. Compensation strategies include
skills such as inference, guessing while reading, or using reference materials such as
dictionaries. Metacognitive strategies are behaviors undertaken by the learners to plan,
arrange, and evaluate their own learning. Such strategies include directed attention and
self-evaluation, organization, setting goals and objectives, seeking practice opportunities,
and so forth. In the context of reading, self-monitoring and correction of errors are further
examples of metacognitive strategies. Learners also use affective strategies, such as self-
encouraging behavior, to lower anxiety, and encourage learning. Lastly, social strategies
are those that involve other individuals in the learning process and refer to cooperation
with peers, questioning, asking for correction, and feedback; for example, while reading,
a student may ask another individual for feedback about his/her reading responses.
Furthermore, as cited Reading Strategies of Successful and Unsuccessful
Learners, much of the research in the area of reading strategies has stemmed from first
language studies in reading, a review of both the major research in first language and
second language learning is included. In many first language studies, the use of various
strategies has been found to be effective in improving students' reading comprehension
(Baker and Brown, 1984; Brown, 1981; Palinscar and Brown, 1984). Some studies
have also investigated the reading strategies used by successful and unsuccessful
language learners. In a second-language study, Hosenfeld (1977) used a think-aloud
procedure to identify relations between certain types of reading strategies and successful
or unsuccessful second language reading. The successful reader, for example, kept the
meaning of the passage in mind while reading ,read in broad phrases, skipped
inconsequential or less important words, and had a positive self-concept as a reader. The
unsuccessful reader on the other hand, lost the meaning of the sentences when decoded,
read in short phrases, pondered over inconsequential words, seldom skipped words as
unimportant, and had a negative self-concept.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
According to skills model, the traditional definition of reading comprehension as it is
interpreted by the authors and writers of basal readers and literature anthologies, results in the
teaching of reading through "separately defined" comprehension skills, and could be called a "
skills mode l." Skills, separately taught in a logical and sequential order, is thought to result in
the improved comprehension of textual material. The traditional skills mode l view of
reading is a bottom up or data driven processing model . In this view of reading, letters
are perceived in a left to right sequence until a word is perceived as a whole , meaning
is obtained and related to other words in the sentence , thus activating the dominant
schema and its particular concepts .
In addition to that, the "psycholinguistic model" of reading began to assert that
contrary to this view of reading as a sequence of skills which one could teach, reading is
in actuality a process of predicting meaning based on the reader's knowledge of oral
language syntax, semantics , and phonological cues. In other words, based on the
reader's store of information about how language works from his knowledge of oral
language , a reader already knows something about how words are ordered and what
kinds of meaning words possess in certain contexts . The early psycholinguistic model
is primarily a top down or conceptually driven model where the emphasis is on prediction
of meaning. Ultimately ,it is the rh-67 concepts which generate a search for the data or
words to confirm these predictions . (Goodman) Within this perspective Smith defines
reading comprehension as making sense out of what you read by using what you
know, or the theory of the world which you have in your head. Essentially the reader is
expected to use prior knowledge and experience with language to get meaning from print.
A characteristic in the development of both the skills and psycholinguistic theories of
reading comprehension is the use of paradigms or models from computer science .
(Goodman; LaBerge and Samuels; Ruddell ) Rummelhart's information processing
model integrates both the top-down and bottom-up processing concepts into his interactive
theory of reading comprehension. In this view, while the reader is processing features,
letters, spelling patterns, e t c. , at the same time he or she is also attending to
general context , syntax, and the semantic and syntactic environment in which the words
occur and from which an interpretation of meaning is made .
A more recent theory of reading comprehension is called schema theory" or the
schema perspective. The goal of schema theory is to describe interaction between what
is in the text and how that information is shaped and stored by the reader (Adams
and Collins). The under lying assumption is that meaning does not lie solely in the
print itself , but interacts with the cognitive structure or schemata already present in
the reader's mind. These schemata represent , in Ausubel's terms , the " ideational
scaffolding" or framework for understanding new information. Thus the reader has
present in cognitive structure schemata which constitute a cognitive filter through which
one views the world and from which one predicts or makes inferences about what is
read. Schemata, according to Rummelhart and Ortony, represent generic concepts
which are stored in memory. The way in which a particular concept is stored is not by
remembering that isolated event in its totality down to its most basic components , but
by identifying those aspects of the event related to other concepts already stored. We
make connections between the information in the text and what we already know. A
particular schema would be analogous to a play with its integral structure
corresponding to the script of the play (Rummelhat and Ortony) . So a schema
represent s generalized knowledge about a sequence of events and, as a play has a
cast of characters and a sequence of scenes , a schema has i t s parts and sequenced
events. 68-rh We comprehend the message in a text when we are able to call up the
appropriate schema , fitting it into an interpretation which allows us to see the text in a
certain way. What we store is the interpretation of the text , which we then call up
to make inferences about author's purpose , specific characters , and so on in other
similar texts . Generalized schemata allow us to learn or make sense of a wide array
of information or very abstract ideas , and these generalized schemata can be modified
or adapted as we learn new information. This idea is almost identical to the Piagetian
concepts of assimilation and accommodation except that schema theory limits the input
to printed material . In Piaget's definition assimilation takes place when new knowledge is
integrated into a preexisting knowledge base . Thus , accommodation occurs when the
knowledge base , or a schema is changed in order to fit in new information. We can
construct very specific schema to account for situations and events which occur
frequently in our environment . This allows us to process this information faster and
easier by helping us focus on a pattern of elements which occurs both in the stored
schema and in the text . A particular reader's interpretation of a printed message is
influenced by the reader's personal background and history, knowledge , and the
beliefs which are brought to bear in constructing schemata to provide the interpretative
framework for comprehending discourse. The effect of prior experience can be so
great that a reader may perceive only one interpretation for a text to the exclusion of
other possible interpretations . (Anderson, July, 1976) Anderson and others ( July,
1976) conducted an experiment with college students from two different disciplines .
Each group was asked to read two passages each of which was sufficiently ambiguous
so that it could be interpreted in ways related to either of the two disciplines . Scores
on multiple choice and other tests indicated that there was a striking relationship
between interpretation and professional discipline . Most subjects were unaware that
more than one interpretation was possible for each of the passages. The experiments
stated that the results indicated that high level schemata influenced the interpretations of
these passages. Schemata serve as the basis for making inferences or reading between
the lines and for making predictions based on observation of only part of the input .
Schemata also serve as the vehicles for searching memory rh-69 for previously read
material and reconstructing meaning.



CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
INDEPENDENT VARIABLE DEPENDENT VARIABLE



Figure 1.0
This figure shows the relationship between the independent variable to the dependent
variable. The expected outcome which is influences the reading performance of elementary pupils
(DV) which highly depends on the reading strategies (IV) employed by the teachers.
HYPHOTHESIS
The used of Reading Strategies greatly influence the reading performance of the pupil of Ipil
Central Elementary School.

OPERATIONAL DEFINITION OF TERMS
The terms that were used in the study were defined according to its definition and
how it was used in the study.

Reading strategies
Influences the
reading performance
of Elementary Pupils
Readingthis refers to the process of making and getting meaning from printed
word symbols. This is also a process of constructing meaning by interacting with
text.
Schemathis refers to a diagrammatic representation or an outline or model. It is
also a pattern imposed on complex reality or experience to assist in explaining it,
mediate perception or guide response.
Strategythis refers to the plan selected deliberately by the readers to
accomplish a particular goal or complete a given task.
Teachersthis refers to the advisers in all grade level of Ipil Central Elementary
School.
Pupilsthis refers to the children enrolled in Ipil Central Elementary School.
Influencethis refers to the power to change or affect someone or something; the
power to cause changes without directly forcing them to happen.
Factorsthis refers to something that helps produce or influence a result: one of
the things that cause something to happen.
Reading Strategythis refers to the methods used in reading to determine the
meaning of the text.





CHAPTER III
RESEARCH METHODOLGY
This chapter included descriptions of the research design, research locale, respondents of
the study, research instruments, and data gathering procedure.
RESEARCH DESIGN
This study used the descriptive-evaluative design. The researcher used the survey
questionnaire in gathering the data for interpretation and analysis.
RESEARCH LOCALE
The study conducted at Ipil central Elementary School located at Poblacion Ipil
Zamboanga Sibugay.


RESPONDENTS OF THE STUDY
The respondents of the study were the teachers of Ipil Central Elementary School of all
grade level. There were teachers in grade one (1), teachers in grade two (2),
teachers in grade three (3), teachers in grade four (4), teachers in grade five (5), and
teachers in grade six (6) who were given survey questionnaire.

RESEARCH INSTRUMENT
The research instrument used in the study was the survey questionnaire that was given to
the teachers. Printed books from Western Mindanao State University External Studies Unit-Ipil
Library were also used and also in the internet sources.
DATA GATHERING PROCEDURE
The researcher first asked the permission from the School Principal of Ipil Central
Elementary school to conduct the survey to their teachers with regards to the Reading Strategies:
Its influence to the Reading Performance of Elementary Pupils of Ipil Central Elementary School.
After the validation of the Survey Questionnaire that used in this study and after seeking the
permission, the researcher then disseminates it to the respective teachers in all grade levels. The
questionnaire was collected after two days it was given to the respondents. The data gathered out
of the survey was then subject for interpretation and analysis.