A STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN READING COMPREHENSION AND STUDENTS' ATTITUDE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

1. The Study: This study examined the relationships between five variables: • attitude to teachers • attitude to learning • attitude lo language • attitude to Mathematics and the level of reading and comprehension in English. The relationships an; examined for the 3 main ethnic groupings i.e. Chinese, Malay, Indian for each of the 2 different ability streams i.e. Normal and Express of Singaporean students in Secondary 3 classes. The study aims to :- • work out the correlations between the five variables for the 3 ethnic groupings for each stream: Normal and Express • see if there are significant differences between the scores for the same variable across ethnic groupings in each stream. • make paired comparisons between the Normal and the Express streams. for each ethnic group to see if there are differences between them. • compare the findings of this study conducted on secondary school samples with a similar study which was conducted with a Primary 6 sample. This study is a replication of an earlier study ( A Study of Four Attitudes and Reading Comprehension of Primary Six Students in Singapore by Mohsen Ghadessy, National University of Singapore: RELC Journal Vol 19 No. 2 Dec. 1988) that used the Arlin Hills Attitude Surveys for Elementary Schools (1976).For this study, the Arlin-Hills Attitude Surveys for High School test battery was used. Two samples, one comprising Secondary 3 Normal and the other comprising Secondary 3 Express pupils were selected from a random sample of schools to provide for each sample, a minimum number of 120 pupils ' from each of the 3 ethnic groupings: Chinese, Malay and Indian. A study of the means for the 4 attitudes for the Normal Course pupils, show regardless of the ethnic group, the majority of the pupils do not have a particular positive or negative attitude towards the tested topics. Pearson intercorrelations between the five variables were computed for the 3 racial groupings for comparison. The correlations are rather low. These correlations are slightly lower and are more negative than those recorded in the Ghadessy study on Primacy 6 pupils. The SPSS for Windows ANOV A was applied to compute the data on each attitude of one ethnic group with the same attitude of another ethnic group. None of the differences is significant. This means that there are no differences between the ethnic groups in regard to their attitudes to teachers, learning, language and Mathematics and their respective reading comprehension levels. The Express pupils demonstrate higher means than the Normal pupils but the differences are not significant.