Evaluation of Teaching Reading Strategies Used by Early Grade Teachers

Abstract

The importance of reading ability is admissible especially for youngers. There is interdependency between students’ learning and teaching reading strategies used by English language teachers. Research claims that different teaching strategies used by teachers help in development of students’ reading ability. The purpose of current study is to explore and evaluate teaching reading strategies used by early grade teachers. The objectives of the study were to evaluate the teaching reading strategies which are used by early grade teachers for developing students’ word recognition, reading fluency and text comprehension. Self-developed tool i.e. structured observation schedule was used for data collection. For this purpose, quantitative research method cross- sectional survey design was applied to collect data from sampled primary English teachers (n = 10). Three consecutive observations were conducted for each subject of the study. Descriptive statistics frequencies, percentage and mean were used to analyze the collected data. The results of the study show that most of teachers mainly focus on oral expression and meanings of difficult words. While majority of teachers do not use teaching reading strategies for developing students phonemic awareness, pronunciation, repeated reading practices and text comprehension skills. It can be evaluated on the basis of results discussion that teachers least use the research based teaching reading strategies for developing students’ English reading in early grades. To sum up this study highlighted that there is a scarcity of using relevant teaching reading strategies to accomplish the standards, benchmarks and SLOs on NCEL (2006). It is strongly recommended that focused training programs with proper pursue should be planned for changing the beliefs and enhancing teachers’ professional proficiency for developing reading skill of the students. Key Terms: Reading, strategies, early graders, phonemic-awareness, word recognition, Pronunciation, fluency and text comprehension