Now, the old view of comprehension has been replaced by a conceptual model that has been influenced by the research on recall and memory.
According to Anderson , there are three different types of reading models. They are known as bottom-up, top-down and interactive models. Anderson has explained that the readers are very used to two models which are the bottom-up and top-down approaches but he has also emphasised that the best description of the model is the interactive model.
Nuttall , on the other hand, has proven that the readers usually adapt to the models when they read the written texts and this is what interactive model is all about. On the other hand, Carrell, Devine and Eskey have stated that the good readers should be able to continually leap from one type of model to the other type according to what and how they read. Therefore, this model emphasises on the bottom-up model which helps the readers to recognise the words while the top-down model aids in relating with the prior knowledge to approve the assumption of meaning.
In terms of reading comprehension strategies, Oxford and Crookall have defined the mentioned strategies as various techniques which make the language learning more effective and efficient. They are also known as recognising words, using world knowledge, reading for meaning, guessing about the meaning, monitoring comprehension, identifying or inferring main ideas, distinguishing main ideas and paraphrasing. These strategies make the learning better and improve the comprehension as well as overcome the comprehension failures Singhal, According to Nuttall , he has classified the strategies into skimming, scanning, extensive reading and intensive reading.
The primary identified issue in reading skill is reading comprehension problem. There has been a list of difficulties that students face in ESL reading comprehension.
According to a research conducted by Davoudi and Yousefi , they had emphasised that the causes of reading comprehension difficulties for many learners include environmental, instructional, and biological sources.
To keep it comprehensible, according to Gunning , a prominent scholar has identified and categorised these problems as lack of reading process which means the students do not know the processes that they go through during reading and tackling reading comprehension, lack of vocabulary which implies that the students are not equipped with the needed list of vocabulary, lack of background knowledge as the students are not exposed to various life-related topics and do not have prior information about the topic, lack of reading purpose as they do not know the real reason of reading and lack of reading strategies as the students are not aware of the strategies related to reading skills.
There have been a few researches that had been conducted on this issue for years. One in the year and the other one is in the year of by which the number of pages read by the Malaysians in the former year was only two while in the latter year, it progressed to two books.
Next, the statistics from the National Statistics Department shows that Malaysians prefer pastimes such as watching videos and television as reading is not in their list of preference. Daily Express in has reported that even though many Malaysians have possessed literacy skills, but the habit of reading is still below the satisfactory level.
This leads to a situation that the students are labelled as struggling readers which shows and proves that they have low confidence level in reading skill and do not regard themselves as avid readers even for examination purposes. This scenario does not only occur among the school students but also among the tertiary level students.
This is proven by Nezami who had said that the main issue faced by teachers among the tertiary level students is insufficiency in reading comprehension which affects their academic performance. Therefore, this implies that most students in Malaysia are able to read but they do not utilise it for the sake of their self-development. They often relate reading as restricted for their studies only and not for any other purposes. Thus, to put it in a nutshell, it has been obvious that the main difficulty in regards to ESL reading comprehension needs to be identified in order to solve the issue from engulfing the students.
This research was a quantitative research which enabled the researcher to quantify the obtained data and generalise results from the samples chosen for this research. This research was conducted using the survey method which allowed the researcher to derive the needed data in a specified period of time. The questionnaire was set in monolingual which is in the English language.
Each item was accompanied by 5 point Likert Scale between a range of 5 to 1. The score of 5 represented strongly agree. The score of 4 meant agree. The score of 3 indicated that the respondent was unable to decide whether he or she agreed or disagreed with the item. The score of 2 meant disagree and the score of 1 represented strongly disagree with the item. This survey was conducted in one of the 43 secondary schools in Johor. This study primarily focused on upper secondary school students.
The chosen population with people was aged between 16 to 17 years old who are in Form 4 and Form 5. The population was chosen based on their availability on the day of conducting the survey. Since population consisted too many individuals, there was a need to draw specified number of samples for this using a sampling technique. Since a fair mixture of upper secondary school students from various classes was required, simple random sampling technique was used to draw 80 samples as respondents for this study.
The survey was conducted in a supervised setting by which the researcher distributed the questionnaires to all respondents, explained on what was expected from them in the study, guided them throughout the session to ensure that the respondents answered all items in the questionnaires and complete them at ease.
All items in the questionnaire reflect the difficulties faced by the secondary school students in ESL reading comprehension. The main goal in this research was to answer the research question by using descriptive statistics which involved the calculation on frequency of scores, percentages and mean was the medium to analyse the data obtained from the questionnaires. These statistics were chosen to observe the characteristics of the samples based on the items in the questionnaire that was used as the instrument of this research.
The data obtained from the items answered by the respondents was analysed using the SPSS which stands for Statistical Package for Social Sciences version In this study, there were 57 males and 23 females who had participated as respondents.
They were among 16 and 17 years old, studying in Form 4 and Form 5. Furthermore, the respondents were also chosen from all races to avoid racial bias. This was to reduce the limitation of the study conducted. The first part of the questionnaire is Demographic Information. There are five items which are gender, age, year, race and reading hours. Based on Table 1 below, the missing value is obtained as 0 which reflects that no respondent has missed any of the items in Part 1. In other words, it concludes that all respondents have answered all items in Part 1 of the questionnaire without fail.
The second part of the questionnaire consists of 5 categories with 20 items which aims to find out about ESL reading comprehension difficulties among the respondents in this research.
Items 1 - 6 are categorised as language knowledge, items 7 - 10 are about the lack of reading strategies, items 11 - 14 are problems related to motivation, items 15 - 17 are about background knowledge and items 18 - 20 are related to reading process. The study used a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 5 point strongly agree, 4 point agree, 3 point undecided, 2 point disagree and 1 point strongly disagree.
The responses obtained from all the items were analysed quantitatively using descriptive statistics to determine the frequency, percentage and mean. The findings were simplified in table form with the mean and standard deviation values. Table 2 is the individual analysis of all 20 items with their respective values of mean and standard deviation. The values of mean help the researcher to determine the most faced difficulty in the reading comprehension by the ESL learners. Table 3 is the categorical analysis which shows the average mean values for the five categories of ESL reading comprehension difficulties faced by the respondents according to the designated items for the classified categories of ESL reading comprehension difficulties.
Therefore, Table 3 above has shown a clearer picture about the reading comprehension difficulties faced by the respondents. Based on Table 3 , the mean value for each category of reading comprehension difficulties was obtained and the category with the highest mean value deduced that the upper secondary school students have the most problems related to reading process compared to the other categories.
This was followed by problems related to the lack of reading strategies, their background knowledge, language knowledge and finally, the least mean value was obtained by problems related to motivation which implies that the respondent does not perceive reading motivation as the most problematic factor in reading comprehension.
On the other hand, the category with the highest mean value has three items items 18 - Each item has been represented by a table and a pie chart below for a better data representation of the respondents. These items have shown that. Table 1. Overall statistics for Section A. Table 2. Individual analysis of items. Table 3. Categorical analysis of items. Thus, this has given a clear view to the researcher in answering the research question.
The percentiles have been represented by Figure 1 in the form of pie chart. Unlike other programs we had tried, this program called Fast ForWord targeted core areas of weakness, starting in the brain. It helped students work on the building blocks of reading while simultaneously exercising their working memory, attention, grammar, vocabulary, and listening skills. When we got our state test scores back, we saw that if students finished Reading Level 3 of the program, their passing rate improved.
The key, we realized, was to start early. So, instead of targeting the program to grades 3—5, we shifted our focus to kindergarten through grade 3.
Since then, student performance has steadily improved. Research shows that at birth a child has the potential to learn any language. By six months, children begin to recognize the speech sounds or phonemes specific to their native language, based on experience. As a result, perceiving and sounding out English words becomes easier and more automatic. These exercises can also correct imprecise speech sounds in the brains of struggling readers.
Another way to help ELLs and struggling readers is to have them practice reading aloud, however, it can be difficult to provide each student with a supportive listener every day or even a few times a week. To overcome this challenge, our district began using a program called Reading Assistant, which uses speech recognition technology to correct and support students as they read aloud. Despite this research, I have discovered the following trends through my teaching experience over the years: ESL teachers have a cursory understanding and even less training of teaching reading as a skill on any grade or age level.
Elementary teachers are more equipped to teach reading with reading instruction being part of their undergraduate curriculum. Secondary teachers are less likely to have such literacy training, but the ESL certifications and endorsements throughout the country serve kindergarten through grade 12 students as well as adults.
Due to this training gap, ESL teachers rely on reading specialists to fill in what they do not know or do not know well. Reading specialists come from the perspective of teaching children whose native language is English. ESL teachers then develop programs, instructional goals, and materials based on the native English speaker models.
I was drawn to their presentation because it included the aspect I believe is most lacking from ESL reading instruction: phonological awareness including word segmentation. It is through the mastery of these skill sets that successful reading happens. I will not expand on each aspect, but allow me to focus on the aspect I just pointed out as being what I believe to be most lacking from ESL reading instruction: phonological and phonemic awareness.
The distinction between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness remains undefined for many ESL teachers. A huge reason why the distinction is not clear to many teachers is that one is a part of the other. Phonemic awareness is part of phonological awareness. The part of phonological awareness addressing only the ability to recognize individual sounds in a word. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, Phonemic awareness involves segmenting words into phoneme or individual sounds, not units or sounds.
Walsh When I teach secondary or adult ELLs, students who have not learned the syllable rules the phonological aspect of reading truly struggle. Without an understanding of syllable rules, students must resort to memorizing words which, in turn, slows them down. Reading becomes tiresome and they shut down. For many years I did not know how to teach reading properly.
I was excited to find Reading Horizons phonics program because I believe it can help fill in this gap that I have seen for years—teachers not understanding how to teach reading to ELL's. By following the program, teachers become better reading teachers as their ELL's become better readers. With phonological awareness linked to all the other essential skills of reading, ELL's can learn to master reading. While teaching 9th grade ESL reading instruction, one of my students read aloud from our text about Lewis and Clark.
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