The Effects of Missing Letters to the Reading Comprehension free essay sample

She has two siblings, Glen Mark and Gladys Suansing. She graduated her elementary at Tagaytay Elementary School. She was a consistent character awardee. She finished her secondary education at Tagaytay City Science National High School. She is currently studying at Cavite State University taking up Bachelor of Science in Psychology. After graduating college she is planning to pursue Industrial Pschology. She wants to become a Human Resource Practitioner.This experimental research will not be complete without encouragement,assistance,support and inspiration proved by several people. The authors wish to express their sincerest appreciation and gratitude to the following persons who helped in the realization of this piece of work; To Ms. Alodia Mercado, our adviser for her sound academic guidance and moral support which enabled her to pursue this study; To Ms. Alma Fatima Reyes, for her useful comments and suggestions that improved the study; To Ms. Ivy Valerie Garcia for letting the researchers use her laptop; To To the family of the researchers,for their love and support they gave me throughout the study; My greatest praise and honor to our Lord Almighty who guided me through my most difficult moments and problems. The Effects of Missing Letter to the Reading Comprehension of 2nd year IT Students of Cavite State University. † Experimental Research. Bachelor of Science in Psychology. Cavite State University. March 2012, under the supervision of Ms. Alma Fatima Reyes. As reading plays an important role in our lives, reading comprehension is important for human progress. This experimental research proposes to investigate the effects of missing letters to the reading comprehension of students. The research is conducted at Cavite State University, Indang, Cavite. Fifteen respondents were needed for the Pre-test and the Post-test. Same person will be taking the Pre-test and Post-test. All fifteen respondents are 2nd year BS IT students of Cavite State University. The general objective of the study was to determine the Reading Comprehension of Students with missing letters. Specifically, the study aimed to determine if there was a difference between the scores obtained in the Pre-test and the scores obtained in the Post- Test. Data and information were gathered through the help of the respondents by answering the questionnaires regarding to their Reading Comprehension Skills provided by the researchers. It is a means of communicating and sharing of information. We do it automatically. It requires development, practice and understanding. When we read, we use our eyes to receive written symbols such as letters and we use our brain to convert them into words, sentences and paragraphs that communicate something to us. Many people read books, newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc. It is considered as a daily routine of other people who loved to read. Readers integrate the words they have read into their existing framework of knowledge or schema. Reading helps a lot in our vocabulary. It widens our knowledge about words. Sometimes when we encountered unfamiliar words we can’t understand it, but when we encountered the same word we already knew what its meaning because we’ve read it already read it in the past. Reading also helps us in communicating in many way for example say, your job or any job for that matter, and you need to read a contract for business purposes or even if you work at a supermarket, don’t you need to know how to read in order to send the food that a person get to the right address. This study will benefit the following beneficiaries: Respondents This study will help the respondents to be familiarized in this type of reading. The respondents will also enhance their vocabulary. Community This study will be a great help for the community in order for the people to be aware in this style of reading. School This study will benefit the school by teaching this style of reading not only for students but also for the teachers. Future Researchers This study will be a guide for the future researchers in order for them to have a background regarding to this study. This will also serve as their related literature. Scope and Limitation This study is about on how the students read and understand the meaning of a word if there is a missing letter on the word. This study will also test the vocabulary of the students. This study only involves 2nd year IT students of Cavite State University. It is composed of 15 respondents from IT students. The study also limits the short period time given to conduct this research. Definition of Terms These are some terms used in the study: Cognitive Psychology – it is the study of internal and external processes of the brain Word Superiority Effect – refers to the increase in efficiency of letter identification within words Reading Comprehension – level of understanding when reading Pattern Recognition – organization of stimuli Pre-Test – test given before the Post-test Post-Test – test given after the Pre- test Schema – past experiences Treatment levels of the independent variable Theoretical Framework This study justified the Parallel Letter Recognition. It is the model that most psychologists currently accept as most accurate is the parallel letter recognition model. This model says that the letters within a word are recognized simultaneously, and the letter information is used to recognize the words. This is a very active area of research and there are many specific models that fit into this general category. The figure below is one popular formulation of this model. [pic] Figure 1: Parallel Letter Recognition Figure 1 shows a generic activation based parallel letter recognition model. In this example, the reader is seeing the word  work. Each of the stimulus letters are processed simultaneously. The first step of processing is recognizing the features of the individual letters, such as horizontal lines, diagonal lines, and curves. The details of this level are not critical for our purposes. These features are then sent to the letter detector level, where each of the letters in the stimulus word are recognized simultaneously. The letter level then sends activation to the word detector level. The  W  in the first letter detector position sends activation to all the words that have a  W  in the first position (WORD  and  WORK). The  O  in the second letter detector position sends activation to all the words that have an  O  in the second position (FORK,  WORD, and  WORK). While  FORK  and  WORD  have activation from three of the four letters,  WORK  has the most activation because it has all four letters activated, and is thus the recognized word. Conceptual Framework Fig. 2 This study aimed to know the difference between the Pre-test and Post-test scores of the students in their reading comprehension. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE This chapter presents the related topics and studies regarding this study. It also presents the synthesis of all the topics. Pattern Recognition Our ability to recognize familiar types of things is a spectacular human characteristic. This attribute allows us to recognize an old friend in a sea of faces, to identify an entire musical theme from a few notes, to read words, to enjoy the taste of a vintage wine, or to appreciate the smell of a rose. It is a cognitive endowment that we mostly perform seamlessly, rapidly, and without much effort. In our everyday life, we use pattern recognition all the time, yet the cognitive structures which support pattern recognition are only recently understood. Cognitive Psychology, 6th edition, Robert Solso, p. 109) Researchers have discovered that top-down processing can influence our ability to recognize a variety of objects. It also influences our ability to recognize letters during reading. Most of the research on this topic examines how context helps us recognize letters of the alphabet. Psychologists who study reading have realized for decades that a theory of recogn ition would be inadequate if it were based only as the information in the stimulus. (Cognition, 5th edition, Margaret Mathin, p. 42) Immediacy of Interpretation One of the important principles to emerge in studied of language processing is called the principle of immediacy of interpretation. Basically this principle says that people try to extract as much meaning out of each word as it arrives, and they do not wait until the end of sentences or even the ends of phrases to decide or how to interpret a word. For instance, Just and Carpenter (1980) studied the eye movements of subjects as they read a sentence. While reading a sentence, subjects will typically fixate or almost every word. Just and Carpenter find that the time subjects spend fixating or word is basically proportional to the amount of information provided by a word. Thus, if a sentence contain or relatively unfamiliar or a surprising word, they pause in that word. (Cognitive Psychology Its Interpretation,John R. Anderson) Reading Comprehension Reading comprehension is a complex undertaking that involves many levels of processing. One of the most fundamental aspects of comprehensi on is the ability to deal with unfamiliar words encountered in text. Readers who struggle with word-level tasks use up valuable cognitive space that could be allotted to deeper levels of text analysis. It is not enough to rely on context cues to predict the meaning of new words, since this strategy often results in erroneous or superficial understandings of key terms, especially in content-area reading (Paynter, Bodrova, Doty, 2005). Mature readers need to possess a basic knowledge of â€Å"how words work† and a set of strategies for approaching new words encountered throughout the day. (http://www. edu. gov. on. ca/eng/research/mcquirter. pdf) How word knowledge affects reading comprehension Vocabulary knowledge is one of the best predictors of reading achievement (Richek, 2005). Bromley (2004), in a comprehensive review of research on vocabulary development, concludes that vocabulary knowledge promotes reading fluency, boosts reading comprehension, improves academic achievement, and enhances thinking and communication. Spelling is also an important consideration in reading comprehension. The concepts about sound patterns that children learn in the early years through invented spelling and direct spelling instruction help them to decode new words in their reading. As they mature and begin to spell longer and more complex words, children apply the concepts of base words, prefixes, and suffixes to their spelling. This knowledge of morphology, in turn, helps them to deconstruct longer words encountered in their reading. Templeton (2004) argues that spelling knowledge provides the basis for explicit awareness and understanding of morphology, which, in turn, may guide the systematic growth of vocabulary knowledge. Considering the strength of vocabulary knowledge in predicting reading achievement, the complex interrelationships among these areas are significant. (http://www. edu. gov. on. ca/eng/research/mcquirter. pdf) Missing letter effect In cognitive psychology, the missing letter effect refers to the finding that, when people are asked to consciously detect target letters while reading text, they miss more letters in frequent, function words (e. g. the letter t in the) than in less frequent, content words. The missing letter effect has also been referred to as the reverse word superiority effect, since it describes a phenomenon where letters in more frequent words fail to be identified, instead of letter identification benefitting from increased word frequency. The effect is usually measured using a paper-and-pencil procedure, where readers are asked to circle a target letter every time they come across it while reading a short passage. The missing letter effect is more likely to appear when reading words that are part of a normal sequence, than when words are embedded in a mixed-up sequence (e. g. readers asked to read backwards). The missing-letter effect for common function words It has been proposed that function words such as for and on conceal their letters because their higher familiarity allows fast access to their unitized representations. However, this study shows that letter detection in function words varies with their linguistic role in text. When such words were embedded in a phrase where they were forced into a content role by the surrounding context (e. g. , for or against or on switch ), letter detection improved markedly and did not differ from that of matched content words. The result was replicated when the context preceding the function word and the overall sentential meaning were equated for both function and content usages.