Reading is an important means of introducing the child to the surrounding world. Through reading the child can view wide horizons and explore new areas in the world of things, people and events. Reading as a school exercise has almost always been thought of as reading aloud, in spite of the obvious fact that in actual life it is to be mainly silent reading. The consequent attention to reading as an exercise in speaking has been heavily at the expense of reading as the act of thought getting. Reading is learned by stages. Success in learning to read is attained when difficulties inherent in everyone of these stages are overcome. So called reading failure is often a result. of an accumulation of difficulties which were not dealt with at the proper time. Children differ when they come into the world. Individual differences among them provide the greatest challenge to the teacher of reading.. Although all teachers know there are differences among their pupils many are not fully aware of the vast range of those differences. No system of instruction could possibly do full justice to all these differences in all their aspects. What they need to learn is the fact that these differences are normal, that they exist at birth and increase as the children grow older.

Teaching and learning the skills of reading are essentially the same all over the world regardless of the language used. Thinking skills in reading affects the entire personality. The teacher bears a great responsibility for the judicious selection of reading matter to which the learner is exposed and for providing expert guidance in the interpretation of what is read. Instruction in reading help the child to interpret the printed page effectively to others, therefore a child must have abundant opportunity to read aloud meaningful materials in such a way that meaning is truly communicated to the listener.

The success in reading is essential to success in school. Teaching and re-teaching the reading skills among the poor and slow readers can never be over umphasized. The use of good illustration in reading materials for the cited readers illuminates the meaning of the words on the page which enables them to proceed faster in the learning process.

It is further believed that a picture speaks thousand words, hence illustration can enhance the verbal description by giving a concrete shape to it. Thus, good illustration always creates a rich experience in the pupils' mind. The need of developing illustrated reading materials is an imperative technique if success in the acquisition of reading skills for slow readers is to be achieved. This study is descriptive experimental and normative in nature. It used 15 school administrators, 70 Master teachers/English coordinators, and 120 grade I: teachers in the 17 elementary schools, selected at random sampling composing the 7 districts of the Division of City Schools. Caloocan, o a total of 205 or 100 percent retrieved and participation.

Seta of validated instruments and historical data of the division schools were used to answer the specific questions raised in the study which included:

1. On the profile of user group, the following revealed that on; 1.1 Reading readiners, the level of recognition

of more than the majority of the 50 pupils mostly encountered difficulties in repetition (2 or 4 percent); mispronunciation 10 or 20 percent; and substitution (5 or 10 percent); the greater number of them were in instructional level (23 or 46 percent) and quite a number of them under the frustration level (2 or 4 percent). There were zero (0) readers.

1.2 Reading levels as based on informal reading inventory test, the average of them with 37 or 74 percent were on the average capacity level while the slow 5 or 10 percent. There were zero (0) percent non- readers.

1.3. Reading difficulties, based on the mid-

year achievement test result in English for the school year 2003-2004, the grade II pupils performed below par in the test as they only obtained average rating of 54.36. It can be inferred from the findings that the users

encounter reading difficulties.

2. From the results of the analysis of historical data the researcher proposed a set of reading materials were BEC based and also designed and developed based on the reading needs of the pupils as shown in the data.

The proposed illustrated reading materials have 40 lessons and aim to enhance the pupils oral and silent reading skills, enhance vocabulary, and identify sounds through listening and know familiar words as well as their reading readiness. The concepts, reading methodologies and exercises included are meant to make the pupils acquire and further enhance their reading skills and overcome their reading difficulties.

3. The proposed illustrated reading materials, designed and developed for the use of the teachers and the experimental group at Kaunlaran Elementary School, 4. No significant difference exists among the perceived assessments on the acceptability of the proposed illustrated reading materials of the 3 groups of respondents which showed strong and shared agreement for the need of this proposed illustrated tool for the use of both teachers and pupils of the school under study.

The computed P-value of 2.85 which is less than the tabular at .C5 and .01 level of confidence showed that there was no significant differences among the responses if the respondents which was 4.26 and 8.02 respectively.

5. After almost three (3) months used of the proposed reading materials which were administered to the experimental group of Kaunlaran Elementary School, the result of the reading performance based on the informal inventory test revealed that the difference on the performance on reading level of the subjects had an increased of 12 in the independent and 8 in the instructional level, and a decreased of 20 in frustration level, and their capacity level as also registered gains from difference of 5 among the fast readers to 18 among average readers. From the total of 28 slow readers and non-readers, the number of sloe readers decreased dramatically to 5 and 0 non-readers.