Teaching Strategies and the Reading Comprehension Competence of Grade 7 Students

Abstract

Reading comprehension plays a pivotal role in understanding the material at hand. Without this skill, readers would encounter difficulties comprehending what they read, ultimately impeding their academic performance. The study investigated the effectiveness of teaching strategies, including Vocabulary Knowledge, Context Clues, Identifying the Main Idea and Key Details, and Sequencing a Passage into Ordinal Series, to improve the reading comprehension competence of Grade 7 students. The initial scores on the pretest for all measures were relatively low, ranging from 1.98 to 2.66. However, the post test scores showed a significant increase, ranging from 3.47 to 4.58. The t-values for all measures were highly significant (p < .001), indicating that the improvements observed between the pretest and post test scores were not due to chance. The study included a sample size of 64 respondents, with 63 degrees of freedom for each measure. In summary, the results of the study indicated that the implementation of various teaching strategies resulted in significant improvements in all aspects of reading comprehension. The negative t-values demonstrate statistically significant enhancements in scores from the pretest to the post test. Moreover, the p-values (all less than .001) indicate that these improvements were highly unlikely to have occurred by chance alone. Therefore, it can be concluded that strategies such as reading aloud in the classroom, using the QAR strategy (Question-Answer Relationship), and incorporating contextual clues were effective in enhancing the students' reading comprehension competence.