TW30003 DEVELOPING READING AND WRITING SKILLS FOR PRIMARY SCHOOLS Assignment 1: Case Based Method CONTEXT For

the past 9 years, I have been teaching in this small rural area school, which consists of 6 classes, one class for each primary. Unlike other schools, there are no specific names for these classes, and we, the teachers address each class by their primary, for instance Year 4. The pupils are of KadazanDusun race and ninety percent of them are Christians. We only have 7 Muslim pupils, and they are all of KadazanDusun natives. In this case based assignment, I will be discussing about the dilemma in teaching reading skill to the Level Two (2) pupils of ages between 10 and 11 years old. There are 60 pupils altogether for both classes. DILEMMA PROBLEM : Able to read but do not understand what they are reading. After years of teaching English Language, i have clearly detected that the main problem that pupils are facing in reading is, they do not understand what they are reading about. They seem to be able to read clearly with good pronunciation. They can also identify words easily. Unfortunately they could not get the meaning out of the texts, passages nor stories they read. This has somehow depressed some children as they could not see a vivid image of what is happening in the story. They love reading, but they could not enjoy the story at all due to this problem itself. As a teacher, I am quite worried over this problem that we are facing here because if they could not grasp the meaning of what they have read, reading would be useless. What good would it bring them when they could not even see what is happening in the story? Stories read can increase a child's imagination and eventually help them in writing skills. With the ability to have a good image of the situation or events of the stories, passage or text, they would have more ideas to write eventually. Looking at this problem, it seems that children's interest to read was killed as well due to the disability to understand the fun out of the story or whatever texts they read. This has also affected their ability to generate good ideas in writing compositions

especially for the Year 4 pupils whom are required to write sentences and 2 short compositions in their Paper 2 examination paper. Due to this problem, pupils' examination marks are affected and this may leave negative impression on the language or subject teachers. Other than that, pupils, parents, teachers and the community will always consider them weak pupils based on the grades they obtain during the examination. I personally think that the ability to read does not determine the quality of a child. They must be able to read and understand what they read at the same time to develop well in English Language. SOLUTION In order to reduce the number of pupils who could read but could not understand what they are reading about, I have tried several methods and practiced some in my classroom. One of them, which i have been using a lot lately is reading aloud with guidance then discuss story read. Though we believe that children at age10 and above should be reading independently, in my case it's a whole lot of a different issue. I would dedicate every Monday as reading day. No other skills focused on Mondays besides reading skills. Pupils will be provided with a storybook of the same title. For example, for year 4 pupils, i give them a storybook entitled The humble Prince, whereas the year 5, they are in their second storybook entitled The Walking Box and Other Stories. These books have pictures of events happening after every page and it helps a lot in giving a vivid image to these children of what the story or event they have read is all about. Repetition, repeated oral reading with guidance and drillings of words were taught as well in order to help pupils to exercise the rolling of their tongues to achieve good pronunciation. After reading practice, i would usually discuss with pupils on meanings of certain words or the events that they found from the pages we have read. If they could not answer, i will ask questions to help them to figure things out themselves. I cannot say that this has been a success but i have seen some changes especially pupils' ability to read loud and clear with confidence as a bonus. Out of 22 pupils in year 4, 15 of them are now able to read and share ideas or understanding of what they have read, while 24 out of 38 pupils in year 5 are now able to confidently share ideas of what they understood from their reading with partial guidance from teacher.