Teachers’ Reading Comprehension Strategies, Approaches and Challenges

This study determined the reading comprehension strategies, approaches and challenges faced by teachers in the Schools Division of Iloilo, Philippines for School Year 2023-2024. The respondents were the 287 randomly selected through fishbowl technique public junior high school English teachers in the Schools Division of Iloilo. The dependent variables were the teachers’ reading comprehension strategies, approaches and challenges while the independent variables were position, educational attainment, congressional district, years of service and number of trainings attended. The data were gathered using questionnaire on reading comprehension strategies, approaches and challenges devised by the researcher duly validated and reliability tested. The descriptive research design was employed in this study and the statistical tools used were frequency, percentage, rank, chi-square and Phi-Cramer’s V. Findings revealed that in reading comprehension, the teachers mostly employed strategies like: making sense of a text by relating to the learners’ past experience, focusing learners’ attention to what they were reading to fully engage them in the material, and setting the purpose of reading to provide focus for the learners; providing feedback during reading that targets text comprehension, involving learners in real-life situations and encouraging learners to focus on learning to interpret specific words as their mostly used approaches; and mostly challenged by: insufficient foundation in the lower grades on comprehension instruction, inadequate supply of teaching supplementary materials, and focusing on low-achieving learners rather than the high achieving ones; there were no significant differences in the teachers’ reading comprehension strategies, approaches and challenges encountered when they were classified according to position, educational attainment, congressional district, years of service and number of trainings attended; there were significant relationships among strategies and approaches, strategies and challenges but not between challenges and approaches.