Education is the key factor that contributes to success in any type of field or sector regardless of social or financial position of an individual.
A well-read person is always celebrated and looked upon regardless if he or she is a person who holds a regular job or if he or she is a person who governs an entire country. Education is as the root to a tree. Despite being cut down multiple times, the tree keeps growing as long as the root is clinging onto it ever alive. Similar to any individual who keeps striving unconcerned about failures faced because they are well educated. In order to be educated one must possess the skill to read and the ability to comprehend what is read. It is not easy to obtain exceptional reading skills and comprehension ability by just reading through some books.
As the old saying goes, “Practice makes perfect” is very true when it comes to reading and text comprehension. It has to begin from as early as primary level of education and forth as reading is a lifelong process. In fact, polishing reading and comprehension skills can begin at any stage or level as long as it is done consistently and properly. Reading is an important element in education when it comes to teaching and learning.
Various methods and approaches has been implemented and practiced to improve reading skill and comprehension. Many programs has even been carried out to improve and encourage reading and comprehension among students. In the methods, programs and approaches carried out, teaching aids have been incorporated for better results. The most well-known teaching aid is related to sight, that is Visual aids.
Anything that is related to the sense of sight, which includes blackboard drawings, charts, photographs, gestures, facial expressions, relia, videos or even flashcards fall into the category of Visual. According to Lottie Baker (2015), the power of an image allows us to grasp the message within nanoseconds. This research paper will focus on the importance of reading, reading comprehension, strategies used in reading classroom and the crucial roles of visual aid in reading comprehension. The main focus is to investigate the usefulness of visual aids when it comes to reading.
In this research, visual aids is simply being added into reading to enhance the readers’ comprehension towards a given text. This study is expected to be helpful in assisting ESL students to become better in understanding a text given and comprehending the vocabulary and content in the text correctly. By having a good comprehension of the text, students would be able to think critically and answer opinion based questions as well. Through the integration of visual aid in a reading classroom, students will be able to read a specific text by relating it t their prior knowledge and by remembering the order of information presented in the text.
By having a clear idea of the text content, students will be able to think critically and answer higher order questions as well. The aim of this research is to study the effectiveness of integrating visual aids to improve reading comprehension of ESL students in Malaysian classroom.
