Chapter I
THE PROBLEM AND ITS BACKGROUND
Introduction
Sentences cannot be form without using the phrases, and you cannot see phrases without involving different vocabulary word and for you to know older students must be skilled at reading to learn; but it is also true that they never finished learning to read. Do students really understand what they are reading? Do they retain the words in the given reading material?
Learning and discovering come up with reading and understanding, and understanding goes with identifying and familiarizing the meaning of each word in a produced sensible context.
Based on the statistics, the literacy rate in the Philippines as of 2005 has risen from 72% to 90% in the last 30 years. The 2005 Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO) resulted 48.4 million or 84% of the estimated 57.6 million Filipinos who are 10 to 64 years old are said to be "functionally" literate (TODAY newspaper, 2005). It was defined by the NSO that functionally literate means a high level of literacy which includes reading, writing, numerical and comprehension skills. While on the other hand, the 2009 National Achievement Tests (NAT) results revealed a rise in Mean Percentage Score (MPS) of only 66.33% from 54.66% in 2006, which equates to an improvement of 11.67% (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2010). In addition to that, the Department of Education reported that almost two-thirds of the country’s high schools fared poorly in the NAT last school year 2011 with the schools getting a below average NAT scores at the percentage of 67.10 which denotes that there must be a problem within the learning system of the schools (Inquirer, 2011). These articles were showed to analyze the declination of literacy rate in our country as of the year 2011. The prospect reason for this is the study and reading habits of the students.
The essential tools for the students to cope up with the difficulty of the different subjects and to develop critical thinking skills are reading comprehension skills and good vocabulary knowledge. It has been said that it is through reading that a reader gives way to expand his knowledge, meaning it is a two-way process in which the acquisition of knowledge comes with understanding the context vice-versa. The habit of knowing things through reading is vital not only for the students and professionals but also to all the human being in able to be informed of what is happening around and in our surroundings.

Background of the Study
This study focuses on the role of semantic network strategy towards the reading comprehension and vocabulary enhancement of the selected college students. Semantic network is a graphic notation for representing knowledge through the use of arcs and nodes to interconnect the words and thoughts from the context (Sowa, 1992,www.jfsowa.com/pubs/semnet.htm). It was originally developed for artificial intelligence and for computers as an Interlingua for machine translation of natural languages. Later, other field of study adapted the strategy and refers to it as Abstract semantic graph, conceptual graph, knowledge representation, mind map, network diagram, semantic lexicon and semantic web.
There were several kinds of the semantic network but only six of it is common, and these are the Definitional, Assertional, Implicational, Executable, Learning and Hybrid networks. The Implication networks use implication as the primary relation, where it might be depends on the belief, causality or inferences. Executable networks include mechanism which can perform inferences, pass messages, or search for patterns and associations. Learning networks extend new acquired knowledge through making a representation out of the given examples such as the passages and sentences. Hybrid networks, as its name implied, it pertains to the combination of two or more semantic networks. Assertional networks are more of logical assertions, while the Definitional networks are used to define concepts and its relationship to one another.
As for this study, the researchers only used the definitional networks and learning networks because they can be very useful to the study as to compare with the others.
Reading comprehension is effective reading skill of a reader to acquire knowledgeable information by means of understanding the written passage of text. An effective reading could be described as grounded in strong cognitive skills such as attention, memory, vocabulary knowledge, visualization, and the ability to understand a written material, which would serve as the basic foundation of learning and knowledge.
While on the other hand, the vocabulary pertains to the definitions or meaning of the words. The size of vocabulary knowledge can be developed through the exposure to the meaning and usage of the word and through reading with understanding.
The researchers conducted this study to find out whether the utilization of semantic network strategy could help the students, particularly the college students, with their vocabulary and reading comprehension competencies. College students were the chosen respondents of the study because in education setting, the heart of learning and vital fundamentals of complex knowledge should start to develop at this stage where reading comprehension and vocabulary size have a significant role.

Theoretical Framework This study, which used the semantic network strategy as a means to enhance the vocabulary and reading comprehension skills, was anchored by the Constructivism and Discovery learning theory of Bruner, J.(Bruner, 1960, www.lifecircles-inc.com/learningtheories/constructivism/bruner.html). The main theme of this theory is that learning is an active process, in which learners constructs new ideas and concepts based upon the existing knowledge on the certain information. Also, it gave emphasis on the roles of the categorization and structure in learning new information, wherein the categorization serves as a key concept and structure refers to as a techniques or strategies in acquiring and understanding the concept.
In relation to the present study, categorization is used in enhancing reading comprehension and vocabulary by means of the structure which is the semantic network strategy. The strategy was to help the students to interpret the certain information by similarities and differences through classifying according its class with the help of the given context, where their prior knowledge plays a significant role.
In addition, Bruner postulated three stages of intellectual development which are the enactive, iconic and symbolic. Enactive is the term used for the first stage where the person started to learn about the world and its matter through actions on physical objects and things. Iconic is the second stage where learning can be obtained through the use of models and pictures. And lastly, the symbolic stage where the person started to think abstractly and critically about the certain matter. As for the present study, these three stageswill be obviously done and accomplished in enhancing the language comprehension of the students with the used of the strategy. Enactive, iconic and symbolic will be used in interpreting the information since prior knowledge, critical thinking and visual representations of knowledge with the used of the arcs, arrows, boxes and labels are all present in the test instruments of the study.