Guidance and counseling have come to play a significant role in the field of education. Guidance in simple terms means to direct or provide assistance to someone in need of help. Counseling refers to professional services provided to an individual who is facing a problem and needs help to overcome the problem. Counseling is considered to be an integral part of guidance.
Guidance and counseling is oriented to helping students understand themselves, become self-sufficient in making realistic and positive selections and grow in human relationship and concerns. Guidance, hence, should prepare students for adult life as well as help them acquire appropriate attitudes and values that facilitate them to become productive and dynamic members of their communities.
Reading comprehension is a critical learning skill for all students as it is “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language. Understanding words’ meaning, analyze the authors points of view and aim for writing and gaining knowledge of new words are all very important reading skills that support reading comprehension. Students need reading comprehension skills to successfully accomplish the educational goals and expectations, which are required in the classroom settings. For example, having the ability to understand textual information play a critical role in helping learners to quickly locate information that is pertinent to the text, exclude information that is irrelevant to the text, and identify the important information to focus on. Academic success also requires students to be able to understand, analyze, and apply information they gathered through their reading. The importance of being able to understand written materials increases significantly in all academic areas as students move from one grade to another.
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Not only is reading comprehension a valuable skill for learning in school, but in order to successfully interact in everyday life, individuals need reading skills to read and understand labels, directions, job application forms, and newspapers. Also, individuals need reading skills in order to be able to have and maintain a job and successfully engage in different daily activities, and live independently. The need for reading comprehension becomes very critical when thinking about the negative consequences of not being able to read in critical situations. Those who do not possess the ability to understand what they are reading are put at a disadvantage in every educational and personal life situation.
GUIDANCE AND COUNSELING
Guidance and counseling as a process of helping an individual become fully aware of his/her self and the ways in which he is responding to the influences of his/her environment. Counseling is more involved emotionally in the affective realm personalized learning that is emotions and feelings, values, attitudes. Counseling is an interaction or relationship between two or few individuals, the client counselor relationship of trust.
Guidance counseling is also the process of helping individuals discover and develop their educational, vocational, and psychological potentialities and thereby to achieve an optimal level of personal happiness and social usefulness.
COUNSELING SERVICES
Counseling is a collaborative process that involves the development of a confidential professional relationship that focuses on personal problems. The objective of counseling is to help you clarify issues, gain insight into your feelings and thoughts and deal effectively with problems.
Counseling service includes the client to understand himself better. Counseling involves something more than a solution to an immediate problem. Counseling itself is supposed to maintain a personal stability interview of repeated challenges and repeated changes. Counseling is at the heart of the world structure called guidance. The counseling includes educational, vocational, personal/social aspects. The students’ problems in these areas can easily be solved if only the individual student can open up, ready to be helped and participate fully in solving the problem at hand.
ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN COUNSELING
Guidance and Counseling is an interactive relationship that takes place between the counselor and that client (in this case between you the counselor and the student). It becomes important that some issues related to codes of conduct in counseling relationships are highlighted here.
The following ethical codes of behavior are necessary for you to know, because they are going to help you to conduct counseling professionally. Adherence to these codes of conduct is of paramount importance and a foundation of successful practice:
Confidentiality: You are mandated to maintain all matters arising during any counseling of a client confidential. All advice given should not in any way be disclosed nor discussed with another person.
Tolerance: It is important that you practice tolerance with your client, and un- necessary duress on the client is totally unacceptable. Request for counseling is voluntary and therefore is improper to force the services on a client.
Objectivity: The need to be objective in a counseling relationship. You need to be impersonal in your dealing with the client, and be objective with your view, offer options that are clear and understood by the client, merits and demerits should be spelt out very clearly, so that the client is very clear of the kinds of decisions he/she is going to make. Counselor’s views should not be imposed on the client.
READING COMPREHENSION
Reading comprehension is the ability to process text, understand its meaning, and to integrate with what the reader already knows. Fundamental skills required in efficient reading comprehension are knowing meaning of words, ability to understand meaning of a word from discourse context, ability to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and references in it, ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents, ability to identify the main thought of a passage, ability to answer questions answered in a passage, ability to recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage and determine its tone, to understand the situational mood.
Reading comprehension is one of the most important components of reading to master. It requires students to move beyond decoding individual vocabulary and statements to constructing a solid understanding of the entire passage. Comprehension is a complex process that requires an active interaction between the students’ background knowledge of the context, the purpose of the reading material, and the level of vocabulary and language used by the authors in order to gain meaning of a text. The process is complex because it requires students to engage in multiple cognitive activities, processes, and skills. These skills involve fluently decoding words, understanding the language syntax, making inferences, using background knowledge, and managing working memory as needed. Even a short passage of material requires the reader to have strategic control of when and how to use each of these skills.
Students need reading comprehension skills in order to be successful in both academic and personal life. In students’ academic lives, reading comprehension is the basis for understanding all the academic content. The importance of reading comprehension increases significantly in all academic subjects as students go ahead through grades. In particular, students need reading comprehension skills to successfully accomplish the educational expectations at school and in the classroom.
Also, being able to understand what they are reading allows students to quickly locate pertinent information, exclude non-relevant information to the present topic, and identify the important information to focus on. Academic success also requires students to be able to understand, analyze, and apply information they gathered through reading. Also, students need reading comprehension skill to be able to understand and perform their academic assignments. However, without having reading comprehension skills, students cannot accomplish all of that work.
Reading comprehension is also an essential skill that individuals need in order to be successful in their personal lives. For instance, to be successful, individuals need to understand the basic text that appears in utility bills, housing contracts, career applications, and newsletters. Also, individuals need reading comprehension skills in order to be able to have and maintain a job and successfully engage in different daily activities. The need for reading comprehension significantly increases when thinking about the negative consequences of not being able to read in critical situations. If not being able to successfully read prevents students from graduating from school, they cannot easily find a job and live independently. Even though they might find a job, the pay rate will be much less when compare to proficient readers.
COUNSELING SERVICES AND READING COMPREHENSION
Guidance and Counseling is defined as a planned and organized work aimed at assisting the trainee to understand himself/herself and his/her abilities and develop his/her potentialities in order to solve problems and achieve psychological, social, educational and professional compatibility, and also to achieve objectives within the framework of teachings.
Counseling on the other hand is the procedural aspect of guidance; it is therefore the interaction that comes as a result of the vocational relationship between a specialized counselor and his/her client where the counselor assists the client to understand himself/herself and his/her abilities and talents to achieve self and environmental compatibility in order to attain the appropriate degree of psychological health in light of the techniques and specialized skills of the guidance process.
One of the learning skills is the reading skill. Reading skills are very important in the success of education, as well as career student in the future. Quality education services would also reflected from Guidance and Counseling quality services anyway, because in the process of counseling students learn about themselves and their environment.
Reading comprehension is a critical learning skill for all students as it is “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language. Understanding words’ meaning, analyze the authors points of view and aim for writing and gaining knowledge of new words are all very important reading skills that support reading comprehension.
More so, Academic success also requires students to be able to understand, analyze, and apply information they gathered through their reading. The importance of being able to understand written materials increases significantly in all academic areas as students move from one grade to another and all of these can be achieved through proper counseling.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, without Guidance and Counseling, the problems associated with reading comprehension and overall learning cannot be easily and understandably alleviated. This millennium is witnessing global rapid educational development with the aid of technology. Counseling has to be taken into serious consideration because its importance cannot be overlooked. Counseling centers should therefore be established in each school from basic to tertiary institutions.
The counselor should be perceived as one of the stakeholders of education that should be given the free hands to help achieve educational goals. He/she is not a magic winder that will change student's behaviour overnight or improve on their reading comprehension. The societal cultural setting should not militate against the services of guidance and counseling rather the two should complement each other. Therefore, more awareness about the counseling functions should be created.