Reading Attitudes, Interests, Habits, and Material Preferences of Junior High School Learners towards the Development of Strategic Intervention Materials

Focusing on reading attitude, motivation, and preference helps develop higher levels of focus and concentration of student readers. It also forces the readers to organize their thoughts, including issues they may not be familiar with. Reading also plays a significant role in improving student academic performance. However, in 2018 the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reported that the Philippines ranked last among 79 participating countries in reading. To address this issue, the Department of Education (DepEd) encourages teachers to create more contextualized and engaging supplementary reading materials for students. Thus, the researcher in this mixed-method study aimed to determine the reading attitudes, interests, habits, and material preferences of Junior High School (JHS) learners in a secondary school. Through random sampling, 344 JHS students of Solano High School as respondents participated in this study, and 12 informants were purposively selected for the in-depth interviews following the lens of a narrative inquiry approach. The respondents’ reading interests and habits were determined using frequency count, percentage, distribution, and rank, while their reading attitude was described using the mean. The qualitative data were explored using two analyses: deductive content analysis and thematic analysis. Results revealed that Grades 7, 8, and 9 respondents used digital/online media in their reading literary selection tasks, whereas Grade 10 preferred print media. When the respondents are in school, books were their primary source of reading, while internet websites were used for reading outside of school. Qualitative data revealed that they used digital media such as audio-video and ebook formats when reading a literary piece assigned to them. Four themes emerged from the interview data: accessibility of the reading selection, easy-to-use reading materials, interactive features of the reading materials, and shareability of the reading materials. Findings may have pedagogical implications for all concerned members of the discourse community and stakeholders, such as establishing a state-of-the-art electronic library, developing educational programs to strengthen the library’s roles and functions and revisiting existing policies on school libraries and reading corners, implementing reading awareness campaigns, and designing supplemental reading materials.