DIFFICULTIES OF READING AND COMPREHENSION OF BASIC

EDUCATION IN FULLBRIGHT COLLEGE

An Undergraduate Thesis Presented

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

As a child grows, different areas of development like physical, social, emotional, and mental
help them understand the world around them. Students that are proficient in reading skills are
crucial to success. Effective reading and reading comprehension is strongly recommended for
students at all levels from the primary to the tertiary and for the rest of one’s life (Partin, 2002)
Students with reading difficulties have the potential to be unsuccessful. There are many people
doesn’t know how to read from child to adulthood and they tend to be embarrassed about it.
Reading is part of our lives, it’s like our portal to understand how the world really works. For
reading, which is define as the process of making sense from the text and symbols, to be
effective, it must be handled as a fluent , sense-making , strategic, motivation- based, and
lifelong process. The skills involve the process constitute five basic principles reading according
to ( Akyol,2015.)
Reading enhances our way of understanding and communication. To be able to understand the
changing structure of society, the child must improve her/his skills towards reading with
comprehension. During our observation at Fullbright College, Basic Education specifical we
observed that the main problem raised by the teachers is the reading difficulties of the students.

Some students still struggle with reading due to gaps in their early learning. Now that face-to-
face classes have fully returned, researchers noticed that many learners are having a hard time
reading, which affects their performance in school. To help address this, schools provide
materials like storybooks and printed reading texts to support their reading development.
Learners are encouraged to engage with these materials actively so they can better understand
what they read and find important information through active reading.

Today's important purpose of reading is to understand what you've read.Reading would enhance
the communication, interaction and participation of the students during classes. Students acquire
new words and gain knowledge through reading. Reading is part of our daily life since we are
required to read such as street signs, prescriptions, chats, and books.
 II. Literature review

The researchers find related topic information to this study that deals with difficulties in reading
and the different suggested solutions to the problem.

According to, Torppa et al. (2020) studied how problems with understanding what you read are
connected to reading speed and students’ feelings about school. They found that struggling to
understand a text is different from reading slowly—some students can read quickly but still not
grasp the meaning. The study also showed that students who have trouble with comprehension
often feel less motivated and enjoy school less. This can make them frustrated, lose interest in
learning, and develop a negative attitude toward school. Based on McArthur et al. (2022)
Highlight the importance of cognitive and language skills in reading comprehension. These skills
include memory, attention, and the ability to organize thoughts, all of which help a person
understand and remember what they read.

Studies on young children show that problems with memory and attention make reading harder.
When children struggle to process and remember information for a short time, they often have
difficulty understanding what they read. This means that strong memory and focus are important
for good reading skills. According to García and Cain (2020), decoding, or the skill of
sounding out words, is very important for understanding what we read. This study found that
students who are not good at decoding often have a hard time understanding texts. Because of
this, they may lose confidence and feel less satisfied with reading activities. Based on their
findings, having strong basic reading skills is needed before students can understand more
advanced reading materials.

According to a study by Nguyen (2020), students who are learning English as a second language
face problems in reading. These include having a small vocabulary, weak grammar, and not
enough background knowledge. These difficulties make reading hard and lead to lower interest
and satisfaction in school reading tasks. This study shows that language skills are very important
in helping students enjoy and understand what they read.

Based on the book by Oakhill, Cain, and Elbro (2020), many reading problems come from weak
language processing and poor memory. According to the authors, teachers can use simple
strategies to help students improve their reading. This can also help students feel more satisfied
and more engaged in reading lessons.

According to Ariyanti (2020), many students do not enjoy reading because they are not
motivated, do not read often, and have poor reading habits. This study found that these problems
can affect how students feel about reading, often making them dislike it or feel unhappy while
doing it.

Reading aloud allows the children to develop comprehension and vocabulary, gain ideas about
sentence stracture and ultimately professionalize in reading (Dic kinson and Smith, 2022). To
become a skilled reader, children need a rich language and conceptual knowledge base, a
broad and deep vocabulary, and virbal reasoning abilities to understand messages that are
conveyed through print. Children also must develop coderelated skills, and understanding that
spoken words are composed of smaller elements of speech (phonological awareness), the idea
that letters represent these sounds (the alphabetic principle), the many systematic correspondeces
between sounds and spellings, and repertoire of highly familiar words that can be easily and
automatically recognized (McCardle and Chhabra, 2020) and McCardle, Scarborough, and Catts,
2001). Students with reading difficulties also experience acceptance and avoidance in the face of
failure and create a fear of reading aloud. The most important help to be given to the
student’s interms of success in reading is to make him/her read aloud (Anderson et al., 2020).

Jesson and Limbrick (2022) found that students who receive Reading Recovery intervention
continue to be at risk and require monitoring by teachers to ensure that their skills continue to be
at par with their peers. As well, a school focus on literacy, home-school connections and
communication, high levels of literacy expectations for all students, and a collective
responsibility by all staff are all necessary for Reading Recovery students to sustain their reading
skills post-intervention. There are many possible reasons why a student can’t read. It indicates
lack of focus, no interest, no involvement of parents, lack of learning materials and motivation.
The potential solution to solve this problem are: involvement of parents, teaching skills, utilizing
reading materials, reading sessions, and allowing learners to interact/participate during oral
reading activities. It is an effective solution for students to recognize and understand the words
they
encounter frequently. In this way, reading started with texts that are suitable for the level of the
learner’s reading capability and it continue until the students improve their reading skills.

III. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Research Paradigm