World Education Connect Multidisciplinary e-Publication, Vol. VI, Issue X (October 2026), pp.308-321
Author
Rachelle A. Quiambao
Lyceum-Northwestern University
Institute of Graduate and Professional Studies
Dagupan City
Abstract
This study employed a mixed-methods approach to explore the cognitive models, maladaptive strategies, and affective responses of non-decoding learners when encountering unfamiliar text, highlighting the disparity between effective and struggling reading processes. Qualitatively, non-decoders perceive words as "Visual Blobs", focusing only on superficial visual features while experiencing "Mental Freeze" and Shame in oral reading situations, which consumes all working memory and results in a Loss of Meaning at the sentence level. Their self-reported strategies—such as Contextual Guessing and Visual Feature Matching—were found to be highly ineffective and maladaptive, reinforcing the failure to establish phonological decoding. Critically, their underlying mental model is a Memory Game, believing reading is the memorization of thousands of unique symbols rather than the application of the alphabetic principle. These findings confirm that reading difficulty is not merely a skill deficit but a syndrome of erroneous assumptions and emotional avoidance, necessitating explicit instruction to correct their fundamental cognitive models alongside systematic phonics training
Keywords : Reading Decoding, Phonological Awareness, Memory Game Model, Affective Response
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