BALANCED READING PROGRAM: A SCHOOL’S TURNKEY FOR STUDENTS WITH READING DIFFICULTIES

The author is Teacher School

MANOLITO S. DAVID

If there is one learning activity that most students shun, that is reading. At the root of this avoidance or not wanting to read more might be digital distractions, fear of being embarrassed, lack of reading culture at home, and poor reading strategies for varied text types.

Reading is understood as an important skill. Also a process, reading allows a person to create meaning out of a printed text. If a learner either does not have an interest in it or has not developed this skill, he may miss his chance to get ahead in other learning disciplines.

While language teachers cannot force their students to indulge in reading, they constantly design projects and programs to encourage them to read. At San Carlos San Luis National High School (SCSLNHS), a schoolwide reading program has been designed to knock out those reasons and address students’reading difficulties. Its primary goal is to reduce the number of students under frustration or instructional level and make each of them an independent reader.

The program came about after listening to the “voices” of the learners regarding what they found difficult in reading and how they wished to be helped. Having utilized these responses based on the students’ own experiences in reading, the said undertaking offered strategies resolving issues such as the lack of familiarity of the meanings of some English words and the struggle to read these words with fluency and automaticity.

But what characterizes our own balanced reading program? It consists of different co-curricular activities radiating from the students’ desire to be exposed to reading. To provide students exposure and multiple opportunities to read and learn, the English Department of SCSLNHS implemented the Library Hour, akin to project DEAR or Drop Everything and Read of the Department of Education. In this activity, a class devotes one hour reading a variety of types of texts at the library every month.

Related to project Library Hour is a monthly Literary Quiz Bee which challenges library patrons in different grade levels to answer literal and inferential questions in a quiz bee format.

The program also includes Five Words a Week, an activity which takes on the students to spell and be familiar with troublesome words they come across in their modules. Another one is the Adopt-a-NonReader program in which each language teacher bolsters the remedial reading program by taking one identified non-reader as his/her “adopted” student and helping him improve his reading fluency and comprehension.

Did these activities work? Based on the results of the school-based pre test in reading, 61% of Grades 7 and 8 students have been identified as readers in frustration and instructional levels. This figure became 57% at the end of the first semester and 25 % at the end of the school year, a data based on the School Report Card. It can be concluded that in some way the balanced reading program has done good to the students.

Poor reading skills can debilitate other skills necessary for students’success in school. It can be prickly outside, but if we strip the husk from, it can dilate numerous benefits, thus helping them go through their livings.

To other language educators, let us not stop working tirelessly, devising turn-keys for reading— good programs and interventions— to encourage our learners to read and help them become confident and life-long readers.

— oOo—

III at San Carlos San Luis National High