Effectiveness of Contextualized Learning Materials in Improving the Reading Skills and Comprehension Level of the Students

The learners are placed in an engaging, significant, and real scenario when reading comprehension teaching is contextualized. Contextualization can be achieved by focusing reading lessons and exercises on the context and area of interest of the learners. The study aimed to find out and evaluate the reading skills and comprehension performance of seventh-grade students and the effectiveness of the contextualized learning materials. In addition, the study used a descriptive-quantitative research method with an emphasis on experimental design. The study utilized a complete enumeration technique in selecting the student respondents, which included 420 seventh-grade students from all sections of the school. The study had been conducted for 1 month and 2 weeks in the first quarter of the academic year 2022–2023. The collected data were interpreted using IBM SPSS; also, frequency and percentage were used to present the data on the reading comprehension performance level of the seventh-grade students categorized as independent, instructional, frustrated, and non-readers. The weighted mean value was used to evaluate the reading comprehension level of the learners, while the paired t-test was used for analysis. The level of significance (α) was set to 0.05 with a high level of confidence. The results revealed that the reading comprehension level of the learners in the pretest is above average (m = 11.75, SD = 4.16), whereas in the posttest, the student’s reading comprehension performance level is "outstanding" (m = 16.48, SD = 4.97). Nonetheless, it has been revealed as well that there are significant differences between the students’ pretest and posttest reading performance levels (t-value = 9.1864; p-value = 0.000). Furthermore, there was a mean score difference of 4.73 in the students' reading comprehension performance from the pretest to the post-test. A study has shown that reading comprehension and skills can be improved through contextualized teaching and learning. Also, it was important to use contextualized learning resources when teaching English to help students score better on reading comprehension tests.