Investigating the Trends of Teaching Reading Comprehension Skills at Primary Schools

This study explored lived academic experiences of primary school teachers in teaching reading. It attempted to find out whether primary school English teachers were aware of different thinking and comprehension strategies like cognitive, metacognitive and comprehension strategies: predicting, visualizing, making connections and summarizing. Purposive sampling technique was employed to specify the participants. To collect the required data, focus group discussion and classroom observation were used. Seven experienced primary school English teachers were involved in the study: two of the teachers participated in the classroom observations, whereas the five teachers participated in the Focus Group Discussion. The data collected through FGD were audio-recorded and later transcribed for analysis. The data were analyzed based on grounded theory using open, selective and substantiate coding. The results of the analysis indicated teachers gave little attention to thinking or thought-based teaching of reading comprehension. The teaching focused on textual comprehension instead of research-proved thinking strategies.