Oral Communication Skills of Grade VI Learners

Abstract

The study focused on the oral communication skills along with articulation disorders among Grade VI learners of Balong Elementary School. It significantly analyzed the common errors committed by the respondents along articulation disorders. The study used the descriptive-qualitative type of research method. The data were gathered through administering an oral reading assessment with the use of a passage lifted from the Phil-IRI Module entitled “Galileo, The Scientist” consists of 89 words. It was found out in the study that the level of proficiency of most of the learners in oral communication falls under instructional level. The frequency of errors in oral communication disorders along articulation disorder shows that “imperfect production of phonetic elements” has the most committed error with 306 or 56.77%. “Omission of certain speech sound” ranks second with 119 or 22.08% errors. Third is “substitutions” with 98 or 18.18%. Fourth is “distortions” with 10 or 1.86% and the least is the “baby talk” with 6 0r 1.11%. Based on the findings, the following conclusions are drawn: a) Some of the learners are not well-versed enough in reading sight words; b) imperfect production of phonetic elements or mispronunciation as the most common error committed; specifically, on pronouncing words with long /a/, soft /th/, and vowels ‘ou’ with schwa /Ə/ sound; c) the most common factor affecting the oral communication skills of the learners is “lack of reading experience in school and at home”; and d) to minimize or avoid the errors in oral communication, intervening activities may be implemented.