LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 21:9 September 2021
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Investigating the Factors Responsible for Poor English Reading Comprehension
at Secondary Level at Select C.B.S.E Schools in Aligarh

Athar Afsar Sulaiman and Sumbul Shahid

Rationale

The study aims to find out the issues responsible for poor English reading comprehension at secondary level at select C.B.S.E secondary schools in Aligarh and proposes to provide solutions and improvement in teaching techniques.

The first revelation from the Holy Quran “IQRA” which means “READ” makes it very clear about the importance of reading. Reading is a guessing game in which the readers reconstruct the message which is encoded by writers (Carrell & Eisterhold, 1983). ‘The reading is thinking’ is a popular notion in the area of literacy instruction (Cunningham & Allington, 2006; Fountas & Pinnell, 2001). Reading being an important skill is very important to master in order to succeed in any walk of life. It is an activity that involves comprehension, word recognition, motivation, and fluency. One of the main purposes of reading is comprehending what you have read. The purpose of reading changes with different types of readings. These different types of readings can be labelled as: scanning, skimming, reading to learn, reading for general idea/understanding, reading for critical evaluation and reading to integrate information (Carrell & Grabe, 2010). Scanning is such a reading process which needs recognition of some visual form such as: number, word, or phrase (Carver, 1992). Reading for understanding, is a reading process that requires visual and semantic process and the mental construction of the text summary (ibid). Reading to learn does not only require summary of a text but also different chunks of information which are elaborated in different sets of information (ibid). Reading comprehension occurs when reader extracts and combines different types of information from the read text and makes a link between the new information and the already known ones (Koda, 2007).

Reading of a text in second language (English language) is more complex than reading in 1st language. There are a lot of variations in L2 reading such as variations in age, training, schooling motivation, socio-economic level, and at individual level (Carrell & Grabe, 2010). The readers, reading in L2, have to acquire a complex cognitive ability which is different from reading in L1 (ibid).

Reading comprehension is complex process, in which many other skills are used (Cain et al, 2004). Many factors are involved which affect this reading comprehension process (Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Samuels, 1983) and these factors are related to the text, context, work and the reader (Snow, 2002). Vocabulary is also one of the main factors which affect reading comprehension (Nagy, 1998 as cited in Bauman, 2009).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Athar Afsar Sulaiman
Research Scholar, Department of English, A.M.U.
atharaas@gmail.com

Sumbul Shahid
Research Scholar, Department of English, A.M.U.
sumbulsathar@gmail.com
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