By ISABELITA N. DAROYA
Dagupan City

PUPILS’ poor comprehension is one of the causes of pupils’ poor performance. Many pupils achieve accuracy recognition and pronunciation, but few succeed in comprehension. To comprehend means to understand the meanings not only of single words and sentences but also in the interrelationship among sentences in a discourse. It implies the ability to summarize, outline, and organize concepts. It also involves a full grasp of the author’s style and purpose and features of the local setting against which a story unfolds.

A very appropriate test of comprehension is the pupils’ ability to recognize and integrate concepts through the use of semantic webbing.

According to Feedman and Reynolds (1980), semantic webbing is a process of Organizing and integrating information that underlies many theories of conceptual thinking. It elicits from the pupils’ concepts of meaning which they themselves organize and integrate with the teacher’s help.

As a technique, it is an effective way for teachers to organize and integrate materials and concepts for teaching by the construction of visual displays of categories and their relationships.

There are four components of semantic webbing: the core question, the web strands, the strand supports, and the stand ties. The core question is the focus of the web and the purpose of inquiry. Web strands are the answers to which students give to the core question. Strand supports and facts, inferences and generalizations that students take from the story to give clarity and validity to the strands and differentiate one from another. Strand ties are the relationships that strands have for each other. It is also means of characterization.

Semantic Webbing visually illustrates categories and relationships generated from a core question. Through this technique, both teachers and students expand their roles in the lesson by extending and elaborating their own meaning and it helps develop and improve pupils’ comprehension.