Reading Inventory and some observations of the obvious

Photo not mine.

This is the third day of the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (PIRI) posttest that we have been conducting in the school. I am assigned to administer the test to the last section of grade five; the last section contains the not-so-bright and the specially-difficult pupils. This is the idea behind class sectioning, homogeneity: the brightest and the neatest pupils go to the first section while the dirtiest and the not-so-smart pupils go to the last section. There's this systematic gradation (or de-gradation) of the pupils...Well, anyway, nothing I can do about this scheme of things. 

While administering the test, I made some mental notes, sort of an unofficial  observation of the obvious, and here are some of them.  This is the English Reading Test.

Pupils who read very fast have poor comprehension.

They want to impress the examiner by putting their feet on the pedal and reading very fast. There are times that I have to stop and remind them that the test is not a speed reading test and that this is a comprehension test.  

One of the reasons why this is so is because parents (even teachers) put emphasis on reading fast, or fast reading. I have seen parents brag about how fast their child read, and some even go to the extent of making their child read aloud in front of uncles, aunties, cousins, neighbors and even strangers. 

I think almost everyone went through this  hmmmm...quite embarrassing moment in their lives. Whenever parents get together, it is inevitable that they brag about how well their child do in school. Even I passed though this ordeal when I was in Grade 1.  

Many parents (and maybe even some teachers) think that fluency in reading is proportional or directly related to how fast a child read. That is, the faster the child read, the more fluent he/she becomes in reading. There maybe some truth into it, but not entirely because there are children who read slow yet have better comprehension and there are  children who read fast but have poor comprehension; come to think of it, children that read fast have poor comprehension. 

Well, anyway, what I think is better for parents and even teachers especially from the pre-school and primary level children are to focus on reading comprehension. Of course this is laborious because this means more interaction, throwing questions and having more discussions and more effort on the part of the parents and the teacher.  

Maybe this is why many children and even adults think  that reading is nothing more than a public performance or a necessity rather than it could a personal pursuit.

Some pupils read very slow but have very good comprehension.

This surprised me because I have always though that slow readers have poor comprehension. Of course, I am not saying this as a general rule, but there are enough exemptions to make me re-think my assumptions about slow readers. 

Generally speaking, most non-readers are over aged pupils.

This is obvious because most of them stopped schooling for sometime because they were embarrassed by their reading problem.