Structured Reading Programme: Boosting Students Success in Reading Competency

Reading is a worldwide phenomenon that has the capacity to promote the development as well as instill discipline in an individual. For one to play a significant role in the contemporary society, the ability to read and write is imperative. Reading is a basic life skill and learners are positioned as active agents in relation to texts in school and throughout life. Reading therefore is an act that plays an important role in creating independent learners. One of the biggest concerns among educators today is to create a nation of good readers especially in non-native English speaking country where English is taught as a subject. Thus Reading is indispensable in sustaining the development of any society. Reading is a complex cognitive process. There are five attributes to the process of reading: Phonemic awareness, Alphabetic Awareness, Decoding or Word Study Skills for Word and Phrase Recognition, Reading comprehension and Fluency. These five features work together to form the reading skill. This book Structured Reading Programme (SRP) includes modules on Phonemic Awareness and Word Study skills. The primary aim of the Structured Reading Programme is to improve Phonemic awareness skills and Word study skills thereby to enabling Word Recognition ability which is one of the Reading Competency. In this book, the modules are arranged in an orderly and sequential fashion that can become a part of everyday curriculum or happiness curriculum in Kindergarten, standard 1 through standard 3. The benefits will be seen in Word Recognition, Fluency and Comprehension which are indicators of Reading Competency. Strategies are deliberate, conscious, effortful actions that successful readers implement to repair breaks in comprehension and to move understanding from a shallow level to a deeper level. The modules in this Structured Reading Programme provide strategies for teachers to help them learn Word Recognition. Spending half hour daily to emphasize the sounds of language will help the students as they move into higher grades where word recognition becomes more subject oriented. Once the teachers are proficient teaching with such strategies, they can motivate the students in acquiring a reading habit that would complement the existing curriculum to widen their horizon in their ability to think and learn constructively.