The majority of Malaysian students still struggle to acquire reading abilities despite the fact that English has been a required subject since Preschool. The Malaysian Ministry of Education has launched a few reading initiatives, including the NILAM Reading Programme.
The teacher needs to find a way to make the class more interesting so that students are given the opportunities to sharpen their ability in reading English. Furthermore, the teacher could also choose a suitable technique for the students to support the teaching-learning process to get a better result, while media is one of the components in teaching-learning that can help the teacher to deliver material more easily since good media brings a positive impact in the learning process in the class.
Teaching using visual media like educational brochures aims at the teaching-learning environment determined as specific learning about verbal symbols and visuals. It means that students can keep note of the teaching instruction and explanation with visual media. Therefore, teaching-learning should be effective and efficient to understand what the teacher explained. However, teachers often ignore media, although it has many advantages in teaching the learning process. The reasons are that teachers have no time to prepare instructional media, difficulty finding the appropriate media, lack of funding, and using media was troublesome.
Visual media is all kinds of mediums that can be enjoyed by the sense of sight and, at the same time, can stimulate students in learning, such as pictures, painting, photo slides, posters, comics, brochures, pamphlets, and leaflets (Kelly, 2002). The educational brochure could be an alternative solution to developing reading habits. A brochure is a pamphlet or booklet containing summarised or introductory information or advertisements. A brochure is a type of media that can be easily obtained in the market, even in the trees along the road, on the walls, and in many instances, which is familiar to public relations and advertising or promotion centres.
There are two types of brochures based on the function, i.e., informative and advertisement brochures. An informative brochure is commonly used to tell the customer about a company, products or services offered by the company. In contrast, an advertisement brochure is a brochure that advertises one or some of the products sold or the services provided by a company or company instance to the consumer.
Based on the explanation above, using media, especially visual media like educational brochures, could increase reading performance in the NILAM Reading Programme.
About the Author:
DR P KANGATHEVI PONNUDORAI
Senior Lecturer (Languages), Faculty of Education, Languages, Psychology & Music, SEGi University
Dr P Kangathevi boasts a remarkable career in the realm of English Language education spanning a remarkable seventeen years in tertiary education. Dr Kangathevi’s academic journey commenced with the acquisition of her Translation & Interpretation degree from the University of Science Malaysia in 2006. Subsequently, she pursued and successfully obtained her master’s degree in English as a Second Language from Universiti Malaya in 2015. In the year 2023, she completed her doctoral studies, earning a PhD in English Language Studies from the International Islamic University Malaysia. Her research interests encompass Reading Programme Evaluation, English Language Reading, Computer Assisted Language Learning, language-related issues, and Malaysian language policies.