Assisting Quayson memorial junior high school students, improve upon their reading and comprehension skills using the phonic method

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to improve the reading and comprehension skills of the JHS One (1), students of Quayson Memorial School. The researcher employed purposive sampling technique to select a sample size of twenty-five (25) pupils who had difficulties in reading. Data were collected from pre-test, observation and post-test and analyzed in tables for easy understanding. The pre-test results show that no students scored between 80-100 marks and only one (1) student had a pass mark which falls between 50-70 representing 10%. The post-test results show that four (4) students scored marks between 80-100 representing 40% of the sampled students, the study concluded that teachers do not always consider the appropriate aspects of phonic method like systematic synthetic phonic and phonics instruction for teaching reading and comprehension skills. The findings show that students face various levels of difficulties in learning reading comprehension. These difficulties emanated from their homes, teacher remediation, assessment, sex, teaching and learning resource, lack of adequate infrastructure. First of all, the school environment must be conducive for learning to take place. The teachers who facilitate the students learning must be trained and retrained to be equipped with adequate competences for their jobs, students, try to identify their weaker points in their process; this will help them learn to improve upon their weak sites. Proper assessment should be made before mainstreaming students into one learning environment to enable the teacher to identify their individual differences. University of Education,Winneba http://ir.uew.edu.gh