The Effectiveness of a Suggested Program Based on Prior Knowledge to Develop Eighth Graders' English Reading Comprehension Skills

Abstract

This study investigates the effectiveness of a suggested program based on prior knowledge to develop eighth graders' English reading comprehension skills. The researcher uses four tools, a checklist to determine the suitable reading comprehension skills for the eighth graders, a questionnaire to determine the degree of importance of the reading comprehension skills, an achievement test (Pre& post test) , the suggested program and teacher reflection. The suggested program consists of Teacher's Guide, Student's Book, teaching aids and evaluation tools. They include 12 lessons, activities and techniques to activate prior knowledge before reading comprehension lessons. The checklist and the questionnaire are applied before the pre-test to identify the most important skills which are used in the test. The researcher has benefited from the results of the questionnaire and the test when building the suggested program. The reading comprehension skills are classified under four levels: The literal level, the interpretive level, the critical level and the creative level. The researcher purposively chose Al Aishya Higher Basic School for Girls in Dair Al Balah for the experiment and randomly chose two classes from the eighth grade classes. The sample of the study was 80 female students, (40) students in each one. They equally divided into two groups, experimental and control. Both groups were pre-tested to assure that they both were equivalent. The results were statistically analyzed to be compared with the post-test results. The suggested program was taught to the experimental group while the control one to the traditional method, then, the post-test was applied on both groups. The results were statistically analyzed, using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). The findings revealed that there were significant differences between the mean scores attained by the experimental group and those by the control group in favor of the experimental group. This was due to prior knowledge activation before reading a text. The experiment shows the importance of activating prior knowledge before reading a text. The researcher recommends in light of the above findings that the eighth graders' English Language teachers are urged to activate prior knowledge before taking reading a text in order to develop not only eighth graders' reading comprehension skills and increase their comprehension but also their general achievement in English language .