THE SIGNIFICANCE OF READING WITH COMPREHENSION

MELANIE D. HERNANDEZ

Reading with comprehension is a pivotal skill that must be harnessed to every learner. It is the ability to understand, interpret, evaluate, and decide on the meaning of the text. It is only through reading with comprehension that a student is able to triumph in all his or her academic pursuit.

It is with this vignette that varied Interventions and enrichment programs have been conducted in the academe to address the issue on poor reading comprehension but to no avail.

The report on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022 reveals that the Philippines lags behind among countries in reading comprehension. With this result, Filipino educators are now facing a very crucial challenge that they must address as front liners of the academe.

One of the initiatives that has been made just to enhance the reading proficiency levels of the learners is the Catch-up-Fridays, which is stipulated in the DepEd Memorandum 001 s. 2024. One of the highlights postulated in the memorandum is to use all Fridays of January of this year for the “Drop Everything and Read” (DEAR).

The question is, will this really address the poor comprehension skill of the students? Are the teachers solely responsible for educating the young minds? What happens outside the classroom is sometimes beyond the teacher’s control. Thus, parents also play a vital role in intensifying whatever lesson their child has learned in the classroom, may it be reading or arithmetic. For all we know, parents are the kid’s first teacher.

The cure to eradicating illiteracy and ignorance is to improve students’ reading comprehension skill, an advocacy that should be supported both by the internal and external stakeholders.

-oOoThe author is SST II at Arayat National High School