Developing Filipino ESL Learners’ Reading Performance through Effort Praise: A Growth Mindset Reading Intervention

The present study attempted to investigate whether praising the reading effort of Filipino struggling readers would lead to increased reading performance. A total of 60 seventh-grade students, initially categorized under the frustration-reading level from a public junior high school in Cotabato City, were invited to participate in this experimental research. The students completed the effort-ability and mindset surveys to group them based on their belief in the effort-ability relationship and their mindset on reading abilities. Next, they answered three reading comprehension tests with varying levels of difficulty. After getting a passing score on the first reading test, the students in both groups (inverse rule group with fixed mindset = 27, positive rule group with growth mindset = 19) were praised for their effort by their teacher. The analysis from the independent samples t-test revealed that struggling readers with a growth mindset in the positive rule group significantly performed better in the reading tests than those with a fixed mindset in the inverse rule group after receiving effort praise from their teacher. In addition, results from the Pearson product-moment correlation showed a significant positive relationship between the mindset and the reading performance of the ESL struggling readers. It implies that when students have a growth mindset, they will most likely have an increased reading performance. Conversely, students with a fixed mindset will most likely have an impaired reading performance.