Summarizing Stories Using a SWBST Chart to Improve Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Implementing the habit of reading is an important part of intelectual development and human growth, which is acquired through experience. Learning this skill must be taken as a fundamental part to acquire new knowledge that will eventually broaden creativity (Freire,1983). This is showed in a research study about pleasure reading in young adults from Canada which found improvement in three areas: in the academic, social engagement, and personal development. Pleasure reading is searching information from everyday life to develop maturity, values, and cultural identity (Howard, 2011). The reading comprehension strategies help the readers to build the meaning of the text easily, one of this is the use of semantic mapping or clustering which allows the readers to provide some order to the chaos prior to understand the ideas conveyed in a text (Purwandani, 2015). Using SWBST1 is simple and understandable for most of students. Through this chart they are able to remember the most relevant events of a story, and enables them to write summaries (Hathaway, 2014). Students show understanding of a story or narrative through summarizing, including the main important aspects of it, such as: the characters, the problem, and the setting (Barreiro, 2019). Uzer (2013) obtained in his research that teaching reading comprehension by using summarizing strategy to the eleventh-grade students of the State Senior High School was effective. Sanchez (2021) showed that twelve students with different English levels of proficiency, from elemental until intermediate level got good results in the innovation of summarization as a strategy to enhance reading comprehension of narrative stories. Asnawi (2020) affirmed that teaching reading comprehension using summarizing activity through SWBST can improve this skill, the population was all eight-grade students in Banda who were not able to read. The same problem that is being researched internationally has been detected in this group of local students from this public institution in the city of Guayaquil. Evidence in class shows that their reading skills are poor due to the low rates of comprehension, summarizing, fear to read a text, which lead to the absence of continuous reading. So, the improvement of reading comprehension and student’s performance by using a SWBST chart is the desired goal. Many students from this public school cannot even summarize a story or a narrative even if it is fiction or not fiction. The problem relays in that they find difficulties to identify the main events, for example: The characters, what did the main character want? what happened in the story? How was the conflict solved? Students that study English as a foreign language (EFL) have had issues in the Reading comprehension due to the lack of the next factors: vocabulary, use of grammar and por reading strategies which are very essential to reduce this difficulty (Davudi, 2017). Finally, this problem needs to be addressed in this local context. That is why this study seeks to improve readers’ comprehension through the use of a SWBST chart to summarize stories using some key questions in this group of students in the city of Guayaquil.