REPORTS

In recent years, there have been major strategic and significant initiatives to promote and
support approaches to raising standards in reading and writing. Yet weaknesses remain in
teaching children to read and write, with the result that the standards achieved by many children
at the end of the primary years fall stubbornly short of what are desirable and, the evidence
suggests, achievable. The foundations for competent reading and writing are laid down from the
age of three to seven. We know the importance of children developing their vocabulary, listening
both to what others say and mean, and to the sounds of words. We know how to teach the
recognition of letters and the association of sounds with letters and combinations of letters to
decode and spell words. We know how to develop, encourage and improve reading and writing
and how to overcome the challenges that some children experience, but the evidence suggests
that we have not succeeded in doing these things consistently and persistently across all
schools in the country.
The goals of reading instruction are many, but certainly include that children will read with
confidence, that they will understand what they read, and that they will find reading a source of
knowledge and pleasure. Therefore, to improve the students ability and change their perception
in English, the English Language Society club has come out with an activity called Basic
Introduction of Phonics with Parents to help students achieve atleast the minimum goals
required in reading and writing skills.
The basic introduction of phonic with parents program for Level 1 Linus pupil is the first ever
program launch in SK Bandar Tawau. This program is organize by the head department of
English with hopes of teaching the basic of reading to both parents and level one Linus pupil.
This is also to help pupils master reading skills with the help of parents. This program can also
benefit the teacher in lots of ways. Our target audiences are parents of level 1 Linus pupil and
students from class 5C, 5D and 5E. Our main objectives for this program are to help parents
equip themselves the basic of phonic in order to monitor pupils progress at home, to inculcate
love towards learning English language, help pupils master all the basic of the language
English, to ensure that teaching and learning as well academic programs are executed
effectively and to produce proficient language user. The program starts from 1.30 p.m. and
finish at 4.30 p.m. The committees members involve in this program are eleven English
teachers from the school.

STRENGHTS
One of the strengths of our program is we really make the parents understand their role
at home. We explain to them the important of their role in monitoring the students progress and
how to help the students at home. Instruction in phonics involves helping beginning readers
learn how sounds are linked to letters and letter combinations in the written language. It teaches
that there is a predictable pattern to much of our language. Once phonics skills are mastered,
students will be able to decipher words encountered in reading and spell the various words they
wish to write. When students are focusing less on decoding, they can spend more attention on
making meaning from the print they are reading. This is the main point that we want to convey
to the parents.
Secondly, the best thing of our program is, we incorporate games in our program. They
can learn through play. This is proven when they involved and cooperate throughout the games
that we have provided. This way, the programs become less boring and a fun environment that
we want during the program has been accomplished. The parents also did enjoy themselves
watching their children taking part in the activity and learn something meaningful from there.
This way, a good teacher-parent relationship has been built during the program. According to
Kydd (2013), a good teacher-parents relationship can benefit the parents by becoming more
confident about the value of their school involvement. Parents develop a greater appreciation for
the important role they play in their children's education while for the teacher, teachers can learn
more about students' needs and home environment, which is information they can apply toward
better meeting those needs. Parents who are involved tend to have a more positive view of
teachers, which results in improved teacher morale.
Last but not least, the strength of our program is we received a lot of positive feedback
from the headmaster and the parents regarding our program. They praised our program and
asking us to do more program like this in the school. The students also asking us to create more
program like this and cannot wait to participate in the next program. They really enjoyed the
program and hopefully from this program they can learn something valuable in their life and also
change their perception about English. Learning English is not hard and stressful, it is fun and
enjoyable.

WEAKNESSES
The weakness of our programs is, we do not have enough committee members to runs
this program more smoothly. There are only11 English teachers involved in this program and to
solve this problem, each of us needs to take two or three jobs at the same time. For example,
we had to be the secretary, the cameraman and the technical committee. We had to work hard
to make sure our programs run smoothly without any trouble. To make thing worse, because we
are lacking in committee member, we have problems in controlling the students involved in the
programs. We need to make sure the students concentrate and behave themselves throughout
this program. Just imagine, four teachers are required to be the guest receptionist welcoming
the parents, two teachers will give their presentation in front and the other five teachers need to
control about 100 students involved in this program. We overcome this difficult situation by seek
aid from the discipline teacher, Mr. Yuzaidin, to help us controlling the students behavior during
the program.
The second weakness that we faced throughout this program is time constraint. The
program only last in 3 hours, therefore we need to compact our activity during that time.
Actually, there are other interesting activities which the parents and students are involve, but
because of time constraint we cut down the activity and only deliver the most important
knowledge for the students to learn during the program. This problem occurs because the
parents along with their children came late to school and fail to register on time. Supposedly, we
have to start the program at 1.30 p.m. until 4.30 p.m., but because the parents come late, we
had to extend the registration period until 2.00 p.m. and this cause some problem in our time
table. Therefore, to comply with the time that we had scheduled before, we had to cut down
some activity in the program.
IMPROVEMENTS
The suggested improvement that can be taken based on implied meaning is increase
the amount of teacher or staff. By assigning more teacher into the program, more burden can be
laid off by the main committee member. this will allow more quality time used by the teacher to
teach the phonic more effectively. We would suggest teacher from other option to join this
program, mainly doing simple not burdening task like food distribution during snack time. Adding
more teacher would also help the teacher control the pupils, doing so would ensure matter like
discipline. We would suggested that the disciplinary teacher would join this program to ensure

that matter overall, the addition of staff and teacher would be the solution and improvement if
we ever did decide to make this program again.
The second suggested improvement would be expanding the time duration of this
program. We would like to expand the time of this program due to the fact that it is not sufficient
enough for pupils and parents to absorb the phonic element. If possible we would like to extend
more time to sufficiently teach them phonic and more time to teach pupils who are still weak in
terms of phonic. Again , we would to extend the duration of this program from one day into
maybe two days. This alleviate time constraint towards teacher teaching them.