Teaching reading during the pandemic

Point of View

At the onset of the COVID pandemic in the Philippines, educational institutions were directed to cease in-person classes to help stop the spread of the virus. As of this writing, basic education schools are still closed for face-to-face classes. If this persists, we will have two consecutive school years of distance and blended learning.

With these school closures, learners are experiencing what UNICEF terms “learning loss.” Personally, the blended learning that the Department of Education is adapting does not suffice in augmenting the learning needs of our students. Learning motivation is consistently deteriorating; skills development has been superficially delivered and, most unfortunate, reading abilities of our learners are at risk of continuous decline.

As per Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), school activities hampered by COVID-19 have resulted in 30 percent decrease in the oral reading fluency of learners. This also implies that low performing schools are falling even farther behind. I presume this research result from PACE is applicable, too, in the Philippines.

I remember one of our Literacy professors in UP saying that there are reading skills which are difficult to teach through the modular approach. One of those skills is decoding or the ability to apply the letter-sound relationships to translate print into speech. If learners, especially in Kindergarten, are not extensively taught phonics, which is the initial stage of teaching decoding, it would be hard for them to learn decoding later, hence detrimentally affecting their comprehension skills.

Modules do not teach sounds; someone who is capable of teaching phonics should sound it out to a child. In teaching beginning reading the modular way, we still need someone who is live, someone who will carefully plan and prepare reading activities. We need someone who is at least a reader. In short, modules alone will not help the child learn how to read.

Another thing that exacerbates the decreasing reading abilities of our learners this time of the pandemic is ironically their learning facilitators. Why? Undoubtedly, there are parents who solely rely on online videos or online learning applications in teaching reading, not even scrutinizing if the sounds or the words taught are accurately sounded and presented. This might be because they don’t have time or they do not know how to teach reading at all.

If you wish to teach reading to a child, bear in mind that it strongly needs live human intervention. It needs you!

With the luxury of time the pandemic has offered them, most of our children are immersed in video games or watching television instead of using a lot of their time reading or studying. Probably this is because children find themselves less pressured or, worse, they do not consider their parents as authorities in the academic aspect of their lives.

Last thing and I guess the most major contributing factor to the minimal effectiveness of modules to teach reading is that our learning facilitators and parents did not receive any seminars or trainings to capacitate them to teach reading to their children. That’s what we lack the most. We forget the teaching readiness of our parents. We have a handful of trainings for our teachers, but none for our learning facilitators.

Teaching reading is a laborious and a back-breaking task. Reading is not a single topic. Reading is composed of five big components, namely: phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Thus, it is only through introducing these components to our learning facilitators that they get to familiarize and somehow acquire background knowledge in teaching reading.

Beyond everything, I want to underscore that every good pedagogy is backed by a positive personality. This means no matter how trained you are in teaching or how competent you are as a learning facilitator, if you are not patient and understanding with your child, your teaching-learning activity with him/her will not be fruitful in the end.

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The author is a former Reading faculty at La Salle Greenhills and currently a Language and Literacy graduate student at the University of the Philippines.