The Department of Education – Region 11 aims to strengthen comprehension-centered teaching to achieve a “zero non-reader” rate for Grades 1 to 3 learners come school year 2025-2026.
Speaking in an inter-agency meeting at the DepEd regional office Tuesday morning, DepEd-11 regional director Allan Farnazo said this will be the region’s response to the “significant struggles of grade school students with basic reading and comprehension skills,” considering that most of the grade school students were affected during Covid-19 pandemic, where classes were being taught online or through paper modules.
“We’re even very aggressive in saying that we will try to achieve zero non-readers in schools,” Farnazo said.
However, Farnazo emphasized that 11.09 percent of Grade 1 to 3 learners were low emerging readers, out of more than 266,155 learners at those levels as of school year 2024-2025.
Low emerging readers are learners in Grades 1 to 3 who might struggle with fundamental reading skills like letter-sound recognition, blending, and decoding words.
“The learning outcomes [of the students] have significantly declined due to Covid-19… This has a significant impact in agencies of government, business, and other social services,” Farnazo said.
The regional director added that 50 percent of these Grades 1 to 3 learners might be at risk of future “disengagement,” or will cancel education “due to controllable or non-controllable factors, such as the school’s capacity to hold classes and lawless elements in some areas, to name a few.”
To measure learners’ improvement, Farnazo said they would make assessments of students in Mathematics and Reading subjects by February or March, through a program called Literacy Remediation Program, a program born from DepEd memorandum No. 34 released on April 12 this year.
The memorandum aims to equip learners with foundational literacy skills necessary to transition to Grade 4, where English will be used as a primary medium of instruction.
Indicators which will be used would be their test scores in measuring students’ capabilities in comprehending text and word problems, such as usage of Comprehensive Rapid Literacy Assessment (CLRA), weekly check-in assessments, specialized learner activity sheets, among others.
CRLA refers to a series of reading diagnostic and formative pen-and-paper tests in mother tongue, Filipino, and English to assess the students’ capacity to comprehend and to do reasoning out of texts.
“Those who were not taught face-to-face in kindergarten [during the Covid-19 pandemic] are now Grade 5, and the accumulation of the learning gaps during the times that they were not taught physically are now mounting,” Farnazo said.
“That’s why we are assuring the public and our stakeholders that we will do our job in enhancing learners’ capabilities for their future,” he added.
Meanwhile, DepEd-11 earlier said they are expecting 1.45 million enrollees for SY 2025-2026, with 739,755 students to be enrolled in the elementary, while 399,769 will be in junior high school. (Ian Carl Espinosa/MindaNews)
