Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Reading Comprehension, the “Fourth-Grade Slump,” and Expository Text

  Explanation:
            Our graphic organizer is called ‘Back to Basics’ taken from the ‘Back to School’ sign in a certain bookstore supplies. As you can see, we have schools supplies representing the ideas in the text. The book contains the stages undergone by a reader whenever he/she reads a text resulting to comprehension. The apple represents the strategies that will help the reader to understand what he/she is reading and that will aid the teacher in assisting the learner during reading activity. The scissors facing the notebook signifies the problems encountered in comprehending written texts. It is facing the notebook because it presents why Fourth-Grade learners experience problems in comprehension especially in expository text. The book states ‘good readers use reading comprehension strategies’ when they read either narrative or expository text. Back to Basics is looking back as early as in the Fourth-Grade why learners in the higher academic level still suffer difficulty in comprehending expository text, wherein they are exposed too much to those kinds. Moreover, we are looking for possible solution on how to lessen those problems by suggesting strategies in reading.

           
 Reflection as Students:

It is true that reading stories are a lot easier than reading the written text. We enjoy because most of the time we can relate our life with the stories. We find the content areas in  reading quite challenging, especially in math and science because of the many new terminologies that we encounter while reading. Moreover, we cannot relate much because we don’t see or use them often in our life. Furthermore, because of our lack interest in reading written text, we don’t give much time to read or if we read, we just force ourselves to do so to meet with the academic requirements. Hence, we don’t enjoy reading and find it meaningful in life. We think that motivation to read is very important and we should vary our reading to different reading content areas and not just reading stories so we can develop widely our knowledge in all if not in most of the reading content areas. We agree that the more we read, the more we learn and the more knowledge we have the more we find our learning easier. “The rich get richer” holds true to readers who have acquired a good background of reading knowledge and continue to develop their reading skills.
           
Reflection as Teachers:

 As teachers, we value the importance of reading not only in our field of teaching but also in the other content areas so that we can be more resourceful and flexible in our teaching. We should be aware of the changes in the academic areas, especially in education, society and
political as well as economic fields. We should update ourselves with the current issues in society.

 We should equip ourselves with different reading comprehension strategies so as to help our students, especially the grade 4 learners and above to make sense of reading expository text which is so different from stories or narrative texts.  We should be role models first to our students, help them to be aware of the different text structures, motivate them to learn new vocabularies so as to have good vocabulary knowledge and to use question to connect to prior knowledge, organize the text structure as well as to review and extend the text.

As teachers, we feel happy when our students show understanding in learning new lessons, in reading text with ease and in participating in the learning process actively. We want in as much as we can to help our students improve their comprehension skills especially those who are still struggling with expository text. We are convinced that to become good and knowledgeable readers, we keep on reading and exposing ourselves to different kinds of reading materials applying comprehension strategies to aid and develop our reading comprehension skills.


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