Teaching Reading with a Heart
BY JILLAN RAE C. SIMOGAN
Teacher I
Azpetia National High School
Azpetia, Prosperidad, Agusan del Sur
For years, teaching reading in our school was superficial. That is, until all teachers of other learning areas instigated and supported the reading interventions initiated by the reading coordinators that would completely reshape the lives of the students.
One fine warm afternoon, I heard my colleague laughing as she was describing how one of the Grade 7 students read. I was a Grade 10 English teacher that time.
“At young agi galyo liki”
This statement puts the squeeze on me to do something. This statement that should be read as “At young age, Galileo likes” was the go signal for me to advocate teaching reading.
But how? Where am I going to start? Who am I going to ask for assistance? These were the questions that made me hesitant to do it. After all, I was not the Grade 7 English teacher. I am not liable of the reading ability of the students.
It was then I was assigned as the English 7 teacher and I have no choice but to push through what were my desires before to improve the reading skills of our Grade 7 students. Good thing that the Phil-IRI manual was released during that time. It was a great tool for me to easily identify the reading proficiency of my students.
In my first months as the reading teacher, I have noticed that some of my students forgot the correct sounds of the letters and worst, few of them couldn’t recognize the letters. As a sort of review, I introduced them to the sounds of the alphabet letters and even had a game in identifying the sounds of them. Singing the sounds of the alphabet was also the best part of that year. They enjoyed them. I can still remember how my co-teachers teased me before for teaching them like kindergarten.
“Lage. Murag mga kinder. Sige ra importante nalingaw sila while nakakat-on”, my reply to them.
Interventions in the following months were giving them word for the day and using the word for the day in a sentence before our class starts to develop their vocabulary in reading. Aside from that, reading of sight words before going home and activities during reading month celebration like peer tutoring, inviting parents to read a story and other activities helped a lot in the increase of the rate under instructional and independent level of readers on that year as a Grade 7 English teacher.Still, I am not convinced that I have given my best as a reading teacher. So, I tried another intervention. This time is focusing more on struggling readers. Twelve of the struggling readers were slow in reading while three of them were non-readers.
My heart was crushed like an ice when their classmates told me that these 3 nonreaders were bullied in their classes. It was unbearable to learn that the reason why they skip English and Filipino classes is that they don’t want to read because they don’t know how to read.
Is it teacher factor? Are the materials being used uninteresting? Or they just don’t want to learn how to read? Am I not enough?
Here we go again. Always questioning.
How am I going to help these students?
So I shared my burden to my co-teachers and ask them suggestions to solve the problem. And they told me “English teacher or Filipino teacher pa lang mi matabangan gyud kanamo”. And voila! I have now the answer for the problem.
I told them that teaching reading was not only the responsibility of the language teachers. Every teacher is a reading teacher! Teaching reading is an obligation of every teacher regardless of the subject they are teaching.
So, I ask them if they are committed to help me and spend an extra time and effort for these struggling readers. They all agreed! Each teacher was assigned to a struggling reader.
I also called for a meeting to the parents and the struggling readers especially the three nonreaders if they are willing to be helped by the teachers. And they too agreed!
Teachers prepared their reading charts, reading cards, videos and other reading materials for the struggling readers.One of the nonreaders who kept on skipping language classes before loved to stay in their reading area of his reading tutor. He was so early and excited to go to school. He was so fascinated and amused when he could blend three letter words.
Many months passed, the mother of this student went to the school and looked for the reading tutor of his child. The mother thanked me but I called the Science teacher of her child and introduced her as the reading tutor of that student who once was a nonreader but now can be called as a reader.
That scene was so precious and unforgettable. It was fulfilling that we helped one soul who gave up before the chance to learn how to read.
It was satisfying to see how your students improve their reading proficiency.
The feeling that they will not be bullied anymore because they have now the guts to keep up with those students who can already read is priceless!
More than that is their interest in going to school because they now know how to read.
Indeed, teaching reading is not for language teachers only but definitely to those teachers who teach reading with a heart. ###
