Reading in english and filipino: A study of self-reported strategy use and reading performance

• Main Author: Sadorra, Ma Luisa C.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2000
• Subjects: Reading > Ability testing; Language and languages > Study and teaching; Performance; Brief test of literacy; Reading and Language
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/880
• Institution: De La Salle University

The new foci on reading comprising meaning-making, reading strategy use, and schema building and activation have led to a more defined concept of reading that describes the reader as an active participant in the reading process. This view is contrary to the conventional reading concept that assigns the reader a passive role and assumes the existence of a meaning in the text which the reader is expected to extract with the use of hierarchically-ordered skills.The present study which follows the interactive view of reading investigated the meaning-making processes of 29 first year, bilingual university students of low proficiency level. It explored how these students read equally difficult academic texts in English and Filipino and how their strategy use affected their reading performance. Self-reported strategy use in English and Filipino was collected using a modified Barnett questionnaire (1988) and retrospective verbal reports. Reading performance was assessed in terms of the amount and quality of the students' written recall protocols. The Kruskal-Wallis test was performed to determine whether and which strategies obtained from the self-reported strategy questionnaire and verbal reports contributed to reading performance. The results indicated that the reading performance for the English and Filipino texts was on the detail level alone, that is, the students were not as successful in interpreting the whole text to get the main idea as they were in getting the details. The strategies which positively affected reading performance were the text-level strategies of hypothesizing or guessing the main idea by inspecting the title and using prior knowledge or schema and the word-level strategy of figuring out what an unfamiliar word might mean (English and Filipino texts). The retrospective verbal reports revealed that using intertextual content schema and identifying key information facilitated reading in English by contrast, no strategy was reported to have any positive effect on reading performance in Filipino. In addition, a typology of strategies comprising strategies used by high proficient readers such as coherence detecting and monitoring moves and elaborations are generated from the analysis of the retrospective verbal reports.Thus, the strategy use of the students in the study evidently showed that low proficient readers processed texts using a reading repertoire of effective readers but were unsuccessful in getting past the detail level, that is, they used the strategies only until the detail level and merely attempted to (re)create meaning of the texts. Unsuccessful reading suggests the over reliance on the use of certain strategies and the failure to orchestrate the appropriate strategies which the text and reading situation require.