ABSTRACT
This study aimed at determining the views, learning activities, challenges, and coping strategies used by English teachers during the Catch-Up Fridays as bases for a sustainable remediation and enhancement program. The following were the teachers’ views of Catch-Up Fridays: a program to help struggling learners cope with the lessons, a reading enhancement program, and a program to lessen cases of absenteeism. The learning activities included: reading comprehension worksheets, topic-related movies, short clips and videos, and activity sheets. The challenges encountered by the teachers were: limited time, lack of teacher-made additional learning materials, lack of attention and interest, and decrease in number of attendance due to skipping of classes. The following were the coping strategies: planning of engaging and fun activities, effective communication, and incentives and reinforcements for learners and teachers.
Keywords: Learning Activities, Catch-Up Fridays, Challenges, Coping Strategies, Sustainable Enrichment Program, Remediation
INTRODUCTION
Reading proficiency stands as one of the major challenges for many individuals although it serves as the gateway to knowledge, offering learners unlimited opportunities to touch diverse perspectives, suit in various points of view, expand their comprehension, and engage with the present world around them on a deeper level. However, despite its undeniable importance, reading remains to receive the least focus due to the fact that the curriculum is loaded with too many subjects in learning areas for the children to learn, thereby neglecting the teaching of literacy especially reading which is the key to understanding the other areas in the curriculum.
As the education system in the Philippines adjusts its grip on the teachers and curriculum developers, they gradually learn to adapt more than expected to different types of reading activities to supply good quality of learning to the learners.
The Department of Education has come up with numerous attempts to develop and implement an educational program that could further align the reading mishaps within the educational system in the Philippines. The most recent one that has been implemented is the Catch-Up Fridays that seeks to provide the learners with a wider selection of reading materials for they want to inculcate the culture of reading in the schools.
In order to carry out the program by all means, teachers in the Junior High School have intuitively crafted a profusion of learning activities and reading materials to hook the attention of the learners during Catch-Up Fridays. One innovative approach involves creating educational materials by compiling information from books, the internet, and other learning resources, tailored to match the students' comprehension levels. Lindsay (2011) believed that the results of research on multiple channels, namely the delivery of information through various types of media or ways indicate that when a channel is complementary to existing information, learning activities will increase and when information provided through different channels is inconsistent with previously available information, learning activities will actually decrease.
As an English teacher in Junior High School who also embedded teacher-made “Catch-Up Fridays” activities, the researcher has observed that many students who are considered as slow readers or struggling readers pay more attention to details and lay out of the activity sheets and uses it to fish-out information and clues in writing their answers. These students are considered non-literates. They evidently experience challenges in one or more areas of literacy development. Moreover, these students display boredom and lack of interest especially when the reading materials are purely in text (Baladhay, 2023).
In relation to this, the researcher conducted this study to discover the learning activities used by English teachers during Catch-Up Fridays as bases for sustainable remediation and enrichment program.
see PDF attachment for more information