Pre-Reading Activities and Reading Comprehension in an English as a Second Language Classroom

Abstract

Reading comprehension is the skill of understanding and interpret the meaning of a text. Engaging and exposing students to more reading related activities with interaction and critical thinking would be of great help to enhance the comprehension skills of the students. The purpose of this study is to find out the effectiveness of pre-reading activities such as KWL strategy, graphics information, WH-Questions and vocabulary in improving the learners’ reading comprehension skill. The respondents were the limited sixty (60) grade 9 students of Sta Catalina National High School for the school year 2022-2023. Two groups of respondents comprised thirty (30) students who undergone the treatment and served as the first experimental group while the other thirty (30) students served as the second experimental group who used two different pre-reading activities. The first experimental group undergone the pre-reading activities, KWL strategy and Graphics Information while the other one undergone WH-Questions and Vocabulary. Based on the results of the experiment, there is no significant difference in the mean pretest and posttest of the experimental group 1 using the KWL and graphics information pre-reading activities. However, there is significant difference in the direct recalling questions reading competence. In terms of mean pretest and posttest of the experimental group 2 using WH-questions and vocabulary, there is also no significant difference. Same with experimental group 1, only in direct recalling questions found significant. It is also found out that there is no significant difference between the pretest scores of the two experimental groups of respondents before using the pre-reading activities. In terms of posttest of the two experimental groups, all the four variables have no significant difference although some improvement in the posttest scores is evident, only direct recalling questions were found to have significant difference in the mean posttest scores. The result of the scores of the experimental group 1 is higher than that of experimental group 2.