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CHAPTER 1

THE PROBLEM AND ITS SETTING

Background of the study

Reading is essential to success. The ability to read is highly valued

and important for social and economic advancement. However, reading

has been a pressing problem in the whole world. Many students don't

know how to read and cannot understand simple words. Some students

can read but cannot understand what they are reading.

In American school, an increasing proportion of children, particularly

in certain school systems where learning is disabled have the most

children identified as students who have difficulties in learning to read. In

United Kingdom, too many children leave primary schools still struggling in

reading and writing. They also lacked word-by-word and predict based

upon grapho- phonic cues. It is also indicated that students did not know

the difference between words and letters and had almost no sound/letter

correspondence for encoding (Scordias, 2016).

In the Philippines according to the programme for International

Student Assessment (PISA), 80% of The Filipino Students did not reach

the minimum level of proficiency in reading. Their poor scores in English,

Mathematics, and Science are attributed to the students lack of ability in

basic reading and comprehension. The Filipino students who scored

poorly in reading comprehension mostly come from low-income

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backgrounds where family and schools environment do not motivate

growth learning. Parents cannot afford to send their children in school or

hire a tutor to teach their kids, and that’s why they grow up still struggling

to read, (Nicosia, 2021).

Struggling readers tend to be notably unmotivated. They are

especially likely to have low confidence in their reading which is termed

Self efficacy in the research literature. These students are likely to lack

confidence in their ability to read or even to improve their reading skill. In

addition to a lack of belief in their reading capability, struggling readers are

most likely to be extrinsically motivated than intrinsically motivated. These

students report that their, incentive for reading consists of grades and

meeting teacher's requirements. They are unlikely to read for their own

enjoyment, seek see satisfaction of their curiously through books, or enjoy

the challenge of a complex plot or intricate knowledge in books, (Wiggfield,

Eccles and Rodriguez, 1998) as cited by (J.T Guthrie and M.H Davis,

2019).

Struggling middle School students are also likely to demonstrate

self-handicapping strategies. These struggling students often procrastinate

and deliberately avoid putting forth effort by not studying. By avoiding

academic tasks, They can protect their self-image, if they achieve poorly,

They can attributed their low grades to a lack of effort or time spent with

their friends outside of school rather than their lack of intelligence,

intellectual ability, or worth as individuals (Medley and Urdan,2020).

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While in Pantuyan National High School, The reading coordinator,

Mrs. Julie Pearl P. Sumalinab stated that many students from grades 7-10

cannot understand simple words. They can hardly pronounce words and

they also got low scores in some test because of difficulty in reading and

writing. There are also Senior High School students who got very low

scores in many reading assessment and tests. They also struggle to

create sentence. She also cited that some can create sentence, but it's

below their level.

To bridge the gap, in response to the struggling readers, The

Department of Education (DepEd) in the Philippines established and

developed programs to encourage reading and to promote the

development of reading skills among Filipino young learners. One of these

programs is the Philippine Informal Reading Program (Phil-IRI) with

DepEd mandate for implementation in all public schools of the country bro

addresses the issues concerning literacy improvement. The program

consists of graded passages to identify the performance of learners in

silent reading, oral reading, and reading comprehension. These reading

assessment or the conduct of reading inventory programs are used to

determine the reading proficiency of learners in school which will then

serve as basis for conducting enrichment reading programs.

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Purpose of the study

The intent of this study is to find out why some students are

struggling to read. Researchers could extend help to those students who

are struggling to read, through citing some solutions that can guide and

help them to grow and to be a better reader for their future.

Research Questions:

1. What are the experiences of the Students who are struggling to read?

2. What is the coping mechanism of students?

3. What are their learning based on their situations?

Review of Related Literature

Reading has different definition based on different people. According

to Sutari (2018), "Reading is a process of getting the meaning of

something written of printed by interpreting its characters or symbols.

Reading is a second language that defined as process of grasping full

linguistics meaning in the new language through the symbol used to

represent it".

On the other hand, Harris (2019) said that "Reading is the

meaningful interpretation of printed of written verbal symbols which also

involves sensing, perceiving, achieving, meaning, learning reacting in

variety of ways". From these definitions, it can be said that reading is an

effort from the students to get or transfer the meaning and information

from the text by understanding, grasping, translating, and giving meaning

to the written form. Therefore, it can be concluded that reading is not only
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looking at word in the form of graphic symbols but also getting meaning

from word to word to understand the context of a text and to get

information from the text.

Reading skill becomes very important in the world of education. By

reading, students may get beneficial information that is not given by

teachers in the classroom. According to Harner, (2019) that almost 50

percent of the National Final Examination items consist of reading skill.

Therefore, the students should be trained in order to have good reading

skill. He also states that reading useful for language acquisition, because it

is needed for career, for study purposes, or simply for pleasure. Reading

and understanding are the important things that we need to use in our

daily life. Hudson (2016) explains that, "Only by reading the people can

acquire the speed and skill he will need for practical purpose when he

leaves the school. In our literate society, it is hard to imagine any skilled

work that does not require the ability to read.

In other words, reading skill is very crucial to be mastered by

language learners, especially for the junior high school students because it

will be useful for them when they decide to continue their study.

Oberholzer (2017) stated that "Understanding the reading text is far

more important than knowing the mechanical skill of reading. Without

comprehension, reading would serve no purpose". It means that

understanding the text is very important to be achieved by the students

because reading is not simply about mechanical skill. It helps the readers
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to understand the world, learn about the past and plan for the future.

In order to understand the text, Westwood (2018) argues that

readers must use information they already possess to filter, interpret,

organize, and reflect upon the incoming information they get from the text.

He thinks that efficient interpretation of text involves a combination of word

recognition skills, linking of new information to prior knowledge, and

application of appropriate strategies such as locating the main idea,

making connections, questioning, inferring, and predicting. Therefore,

understanding the text is not an easy thing, so that is why there are many

students find difficulties in understanding a text.

Moreover, Kuswidyastutik (2017) said that "someone's

understanding of a thing can measured by whether or not he was in

answering questions related to it and the difficulty can be seen from the

mistakes he did while working on the questions".

There are also many different factors contribute as the cause of

students' difficulties in understandable text. Some of those factors are

located within the learner's background, some within the teaching

technique, and some within the learner's environment.

The learner's background means something which comes from the

learner's themselves.It was related with the learners attitude towards

reading, such as interest and motivation in reading and the prior

knowledge that the learner have known before.

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Teacher is one of school environment factors who has important role

to increase students learning achievement. Teacher is a subject in

education who has duty to transfer the knowledge to the students. A

teacher is an important person in teaching learning process, especially for

teaching reading, because the teacher also determines whether their

students to be good readers or not. Teacher also will become source of

learning difficulties if he/she cannot choose the right technique to teach the

material. Wang (2017) argued that although teachers are very

knowledgeable about the subject they are teaching, they often rely on one

teaching technique to impart this information. They sometimes do not

realize that the techniques they use are not in accordance with the subject

matter they convey. Therefore, the teacher should be careful in choosing

the technique to teach because it related to the students' understanding of

the material.

The environment factors also can influence the students in mastering

and in learning English. According to Finocchiaro (2019), "Someone who

lives in environmental with the society that has high educational and has

good attitude toward reading will support her ability to master reading that

has been learned at school can be applied functionally outside school".

Therefore, someone who lives in an environment that has reading habits

will be supported by her environmental indirectly. And it happens not only

in learning reading but also in learning English, without practice and

applied it outside school he will not understand English perfectly.

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Despite intensive instruction, many children and adolescents fail to

reach functional levels of reading comprehension. Reading

comprehension is essential for success in life and can be broadly defined

as "understanding, using, reflecting on and engaging with written texts, in

order to achieve one's goals, to develop one's knowledge and potential,

and to participate in society", (OECD, 2019). The importance of reading

comprehension is also reflected in the extensive and impressive

knowledge base that has been established in the fields of psychology,

education, and cognitive sciences, (RAND Reading Study Group, 2017).

How do we understand what we read? Reading comprehension

depends on the execution and integration of many cognitive processes. To

understand a sentence, one must visually process the individual words,

identify and access their phonological, orthographic, and semantic

representations, and connect these representations to form an

understanding of the underlying meaning of the sentence. Similarly, to

comprehend a text as a whole, the reader needs to process and connect

individual idea units, resulting (if all goes well) in the construction of a

coherent mental representation of the text. For these processes to be

successful, many factors play a role, including reader characteristics, text

properties, and the demands of the reading task, (Lorch and Van den

Brock, 2017).

When a child is repeatedly unsuccessful in comprehending texts that

he/she has read, this suggests reading difficulties at the processing level.
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These difficulties can manifest themselves in various ways: failure to recall

the main points of a story, failure to answer literal and/or inferential

questions, failure to complete the actual reading of the text, and so on.

These failures may be due to the deficits in lower level processes that

involve translating the written code into meaningful language units

(phonological processes, decoding processes, etc.), to higher level

processes that involve combining these units into a meaningful and

coherent mental representation (inferential processes, executive function

processes, attention-allocation abilities), or both. Approaching the issue

big reading difficulties at the level of specific processing difficulties offers

an important advantage. It can inform the design or selection of

appropriate instructional materials and interventions to remediate the

source of the difficulty (McMaster et al., 2012, as cited by Rapp et al.,

2017). Indeed, remedial plans are likely to be most effective if they are

based on a solid understanding of the possible sources of failure.

On the one hand, comprehension by readers with difficulties

predominantly in lower level processes suffers because these processes

exhaust attention and working memory resources and because the

meaningful message is inadequate and presents inaccurate or incomplete

input to the higher level processes. On the other hand, readers with

weaknesses predominantly in higher level processes such as inference

making, executive function skills, and attention-allocation abilities have

difficulty identifying semantic connections between text units, identifying

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connections between the text and their prior knowledge, identifying the

important or main ideas in a text, and monitoring their comprehension,

(Helder, Van Leijenhorst, Beker, and Van den Broek, 2016). For these

readers, comprehension is compromised at the level of combining

language units into a meaningful and coherent mental representation;

even if the construction of a mental representation of the text is possible, it

is likely that the quality of the representation suffers significantly.

One source of reading comprehension problems concerns the ability

to generate inferences. Inferences allow the reader to construct

meaningful connections between the text elements and relevant

background knowledge and therefore are crucial to comprehension,

(Oakhill, Cain, and Bryant, 2017). The development of inference making

skills begin at a young age, well before formal reading education starts. As

children become older, the inferences they generate changes in both their

quantity and quality. For example, with development children increasingly

generate inferences that connect larger text units such as paragraphs,

event episodes, and sections, rather than just inferences that connect

individual events and facts within an episode or section. Also, they

increasingly infer abstract connections. As a result, with age and

experience, children identify a greater number and wider variety of

semantic connections during reading, (Van den Broek, 2017).

Readers who are weak in making inferences almost inevitably fail to

comprehend all but the simplest texts, because they are unable to identify
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important connections that lend coherence to their text representations.

Such weakness may result in difficulty recognizing the proper referential

connections that indicate that an object or person referred to in one

sentence is identical to that in another sentence. Inference difficulties also

manifest themselves in problems making inferences that fill conceptual

gaps between the clauses, sentences, and paragraphs in a text, Magliano

and Wiemer-Hastings, 2016). Even when a reader is capable of making

such inferences, weakness may result if the reader adopts standards of

coherence that do not fit the goal of reading the text and, hence, makes

insufficient or inadequate inference, (Kendeu, Carlson, and White, 2018).

Finally, weakness in inferential ability may result when the reader lacks the

background knowledge necessary for important inferences. This

background knowledge includes both content knowledge and knowledge

about text structures. Readers who experience difficulty in inferring

important connections, in applying the proper standards of coherence, or

who lack background knowledge are likely to construct impoverished

representations of the texts they read and, as a result, fail to grasp their

meaning.

A second source of reading comprehension problems concerns

reader’s executive functions. Executive functions refer to cognitive

processes that regulate and control our behavior while performing a

particular task, (Diamond, 2016). Two important executive functions are

working memory and inhibition. Working memory enables the reader to

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maintain information while processing incoming information, making it

possible for the reader to integrate the two pieces of information,

(Baddeley, 2003, as cited by Daneman and Carpenter, 2018). Inhibition

enables suppression of irrelevant information, and thus determines which

information to maintain in active memory.

Individual differences in working memory result in differences in

reading comprehension in adults and predict reading comprehension as in

children over and above lower level skills, (Cain et al., 2018). Working

memory capacity increases during the elementary school years into

adolescence and adulthood, (Luna et al., 2019). Reader with low working

memory capacity experience numerous constraints on how much

information they can keep active as they read, resulting in lower

comprehension and recall performance, (Just and Carpenter, 2017).

The ability to keep information active is essential to inference

generation and to a reader’s ability to reflect on his or her understanding.

Therefore, weakness in working memory results in inadequate inference

making and comprehension monitoring. Likewise, weaknesses in other

executive functions have been found to contribute to reading

comprehension problems. For example, readers with deficits in executive

function skills demonstrate difficulties in planning and organizing,

(Locascio, 2020), which, in turn, impede reading comprehension,

particularly when the text at hand is complex and long. These readers are

less efficient in applying reading strategies when those are needed for
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comprehension.

Individual differences in inhibition also result in differences in reading

comprehension. Indeed, good inhibition skills relate to good

comprehension and vice versa, (Gernsbacher and Faust, 2019). For

example, to successfully create a coherent representation of a text, a

reader must maintain in active memory the most important information

while being able to inhibit less important information. Children with poor

reading comprehensions skills show difficulty eliminating information that

is no longer relevant in both short term memory tasks and working

memory tasks, (Cain, A. ,2016). Specifically, when children are instructed

to ignore certain words during reading, children with poor inhibition skills

fail to do so, and are more likely to remember the to-be-ignored words

than the children with good inhibition skills.

In summary, weaknesses in executive functions such as working

memory and inhibition may seriously hamper the reader's ability to perform

the cognitive processes necessary for for adequate comprehension.

A third source of reading comprehension problems concerns

attention-allocation ability, the ability to adapt attentional and processing

resources to the demands of the task at hand, (Liu, 2016). As children

develop and become more proficient at reading, their ability to focus on

structurally central aspects of the text becomes more selective and more

effecient, (Van den Broek, 2017). This developing sensitivity to structural

centrality is reflected in better allocation of attention to structurally central

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information during the processing of the text and in a more prominent

position of this information in the mental representation of a text, (Helder

and Van Leijenhorst, 2017).

Children with attention-allocation deficits may experience reading

comprehension difficulties. Attention deficits may impede readers'

comprehension monitoring, the ability to evaluate one's level of

comprehension of a text, (McInnes, Humphries, Hogg-Johnson and

Tammock, 2018). As a result, readers with attention deficits aren more

susceptible to being distracted by detail, especially when reading longer

texts, and fail to focus on main ideas, (Loong and Seely, 2017). These

readers have relative difficulty to detect coherence breaks in texts, which

ultimately may result in less coherent mental representation of tests, (Cain

and Oakhill, 2017).

In summary, inferential ability and its components, executive

functions such as working memory and inhibition, and attention-allocation

are essential aspects of successful comprehension. Weakness in each

creates a source for comprehension difficulties. Although these are main

sources of difficulty, they are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive.

Importantly, this means that struggling readers do not fit a single, specific

profile but rather exhibit diverse patterns of weaknesses that influence

each reader's reading development and performance in different ways.

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Theoretical Framework

This study was anchored on Dual Rute's Theory (1986) as cited by

(Gough, 2019) states that reading is a complex process that enables us to

translate symbols on a page into words, sentences, and paragraphs

without meaning. This is not a natural process that occurs in human

development such as speech, but a skill that needs to be taught. While

about 40% of children may figure out how to read with partial or no reading

instruction, 60% are risk of failing to become fluent readers if reading

instruction is not systematic and explicit. Is it estimated that if systematic

phonics instruction was implemented in all classrooms, the percentage of

struggling readers would drop to 5%.

It is also concluded that reading comprehension is a combination of

two mutually dependent and important processes: being able to decode

words and being able to understand words. A deficit in either process

would implode the development of a good reader (resulting in good

decoding skills and poor comprehension; or a reader with good language

comprehension but poor decoding skills). Both processes need to be

taught explicitly and in tandem.

Meanwhile, it is also stated that as we read, we recognize words that

are already stored in our long-term memory but when we encounter new
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words, we revert to the sounding out (phonological strategy). As children

develop their reading, they access more and more words automatically.

This aligns with the cognitive load theory, which proposes that there is a

limit to how much information the working memory can hold at any one

time. Good readers who have automatic recognition of words stored in

long-term memory can attend to comprehension, whilst poor readers who

struggle with decoding and comprehension might experience cognitive

overload. The process of transferring knowledge from short-term memory

to long-term memory is one of repeated practice and rehearsal.

Definition of terms

The following terms were defined to make the research study more

comprehensible to the prospective learners who is a struggling reader:

Phenomenology- The study of the development of human consciousness

and self-awareness as a preface to or a part of philosophy (Merriam Webster

Dictionary).

Struggling reader- lacks cognitive competencies, which may include

reading comprehension, study skills, word recognition and reading fluency.

Significance of the study

This study is conducted to benefit the following:

DepEd- This study will help Department of Education to formulate more

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effective reading programs to help the students who are struggling to read.

PNHS Teachers- This study will make the teachers easy in teaching

reading and this expect to give useful contribution in teaching reading and

give another way for the teacher develop students' reading.

Students- This study will help the students to know the importance of

reading and what is the negative impact to them if they don't know how to

read. It will give them the realization that reading is the most important part

of their school journey. It will also help them to be motivated and make

enthusiasm in the learning.

Community- The whole community will know the positive and negative

impact of reading to the students. It will help them identify if one of the

student in each family is a struggling reader and in that way, they can help

them to grow and learn.

Delimitation and Limitation of the Study

This study covered those students who are struggling to read. The

researchers gather information about the experiences of the students who

are struggling to read and how it affected them. This study is limited within

the bound of Pantuyan National High School. Ten students are the

participants of this study.

Organization of the study

In presenting the flow of the study, the researchers properly order the

following chapters for the readers to clearly understand the study. Chapter

1 introduced the study which consists of a brief statement of the origin of

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the problem. It is followed by the discussion of the struggling readers and

what are the reasons of their struggle in reading and how it affected their

academic performance. Next, the presentation of the research questions

which utilized for the interview of the respondents. Next is on the literature

and other research studies related to the main problem which specifies

different authors and previous studies. After, the presentation of the

Theoretical Framework is discussed. Followed by the significance of the

study. It is also important to have a clear understanding of the terms, thus,

important words in the study is operationally defined. The last part of this

chapter is the delimitation and limitation of the study which identifies a

reasonable area covered by the study.

Chapter 2 covered the methodology of the study which demonstrated the

importance of research design, role of the researcher, research

participants, research subject, research instrument, data collection, data

analysis, trustworthiness, credibility, and ethical considerations...

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CHAPTER 2

Methodology

This includes the following: Research design which shows what

design does the studybused, role of the researcher that states the capacity

of the researcher and what are the rules that they should follow as a

researcher, followed by the research participants, research instrument,

data collection, data analysis, trustworthiness, credibility, and ethical

considerations that should be done in this chapter.

Research Design

In this study, Phenomenological approach is used. Phenomenology

is a science whose purpose is to describe particular phenomena, or the

appearance of things, as lived experiences (Streubert and Carpenter,

2019). Typically, interviews were conducted with a group of individuals

who have first-hand knowledge of an event, situation or experience. In this

way, researchers can contribute in alleviating their way of life by giving

encouragement for them to improve their life and leave the negative

behavior.

Role of the Researcher

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As a researcher, I have many roles to be achieved and to be

followed for the goodness of our respondents. As I conduct my research, I

use the qualitative research. Qualitative research is a phenomenological

research which is describing a "live experiences of a phenomenon", that's

why the researcher should be careful and conservative in making and

asking questions to the respondents. The researcher should also be

careful in citing the name of the respondents in their research because the

identity of the respondents has to be private in order for the respondents to

have privacy.

Research Participants

As a researcher, I believe that the right participants in this study are the

struggling readers. They lack in cognitive competencies that includes

reading comprehension, study skills, word recognition, and reading

fluency.

Meanwhile the respondents of this study are the 10 struggling readers

in Pantuyan National High School. They are considered as struggling

readers because they cannot read fluently. They also struggle in spelling

and create simple sentences.

The respondents were given guides for confidentiality purposes which

were also made clear to them before the interview started.

Research Instrument

In this study, I will use some questions for the respondents to be

answered. Cellphone as a recorder was then used to easily get the

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information, stories, and experiences shared by the participants. To get all

the needed information in the conduct of my study, the interview guide

questions will be constructed and validated by the expert in research.

Likewise, the validation of the questionnaire is to ensure that the data

gathered is in line with the research objectives of the study. In the field, we

always make sure that our data is always attuned to our research

objectives to avoid biases.

Data collection

As a researcher, I have to underwent different processes in collecting

the data. I will make sure that the steps are followed correctly and the

ethical considerations were properly observed in the conduct of the

research. Researchers will chose to conduct a qualitative research with

the method of interview. We will interview several struggling readers and

asked them what their experiences as struggling readers are and how it

affected their lives. We will also ask them their personal situations and

experiences in life that became one of the reasons why are they struggling

to read. Before the interview of a person, researchers will inform them

about the purpose of this study and their names would remain as

confidential information. Researchers asked them which date and where

we could meet up for the interview, we will ask them whether they will be

okay with us to record them.

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Data Analysis

Data analyzed by a procedure knows as inductive research. In order

to fulfill our research aims, researchers find answer to the research

question from scattered data. It requires us to interpret the underlying

meaning of their narratives. We come up with the idea of investigating their

reading skills. We will find some early research related to our thoughts on

the subject, such as being struggling readers may lead to low academic

performance.

Trustworthiness and Credibility

In order to ensure the trustworthiness of the study, the researcher

should establish credibility. Trustworthiness involves establishing

credibility, dependability, transferability, and confirms ability. As a

researcher, I make sure that the participants of the study were aware of

the questions that will be asked to them. Also, in order to be more reliable,

all of the interview questions were checked by the panelists and teachers

to see if they were applicable. The researchers make sure that the identity

of the participants is private to protect their privacy.

Researchers will ask certain questions at two different points of the

interview (at the beginning and in the end) and to see whether the

participants will change their answers or give a different reply to the

researchers on a similar question during the interview. This method can

help the researchers identify if the participants are telling the truth.
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The participants of the study were able to express their experiences

as a struggling reader. They were able to give solid stories and feelings as

to how being a struggling reader affected their lives. Most of them had

similar answers to the questions given but they just interpreted it

differently.

Ethical and Consideration

Ethical considerations in research are critical. Before the

researchers start the interview, they should be ready. The researchers

inform the participants what is their purpose in conducting the interview

before they start the interview. In addition, before getting the participants'

replies, the researchers ensure that they would be of a confidential nature,

thus use to protect the participants.

Moreover, researchers try to avoid words which are negatively

changed during the interviewd. The researcher makes sure to avoid

making observations that were unrelated to the questions.

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Questionnaire

Questionnaire Sub-question Answer

1. What are the 1.1 How was your daily life

experiences of the students as a student?

who are struggling to read? 1.2 What do you usually do

in your leisure time?

¹.3 How was your situation

as a student who are

struggling to read?

2. What is the coping 2.1 What is your parents

mechanism of students? reaction with your reading?

2.2 What is the advice

given to you by your

teacher?

2.3 Does your classmates

and friends teases you

about it?

3. What are their learning ³.¹ Do you apply the advice

based on their situations? given to you by your

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teacher?

3.2 Do you usually read

books?

3.3 Do you also help

yourself in becoming a

better reader?