Beyond Comprehension: Leveraging Adler’s Levels to Strengthen Competency, Competitiveness, and Authority in English Language Pedagogy

Reading pedagogy in English Language Teaching has often been confined to comprehension drills that reduce reading to a mechanical skill, but this study reconceptualized it as a developmental ladder that advances learners from decoding toward authority. Anchored in Adler’s four levels of reading and extended through the DIKW and Bookclub frameworks, the research explored how graduating students in AB-Philosophy, AB-English Language, and BS-Psychology at St. Michael’s College of Iligan, Inc. demonstrated progression from elementary decoding to syntopical synthesis, culminating in ownership of voice. Using a qualitative interpretive design, rooted in hermeneutic inquiry and critical pedagogy, data were gathered through classroom observations, learner artifacts, reflective narratives, and teacher journals, and thematic analysis revealed ten developmental themes: confidence in decoding, strategic reading awareness, critical engagement, collaborative learning, synthesis across sources, ownership of voice, technology enhanced agency, resilience in struggle, identity formation through reading, and alignment with institutional and global goals. These findings confirmed that reading is not a flat skill but a trajectory requiring intentional scaffolding, critical pedagogy, and purposeful integration of technology as an essential support. The study addressed key gaps in ELT by reframing reading as a developmental process, bridging classical theory with modern frameworks, explicitly including competency and competitiveness as outcomes, and positioning technology as structural rather than peripheral. It concludes that ELT must move beyond teaching students to decode texts and instead empower them to become authoritative voices in academic and civic discourse, calling on curriculum designers and teachers to embed this ladder into lesson planning, assessment, and digital pedagogy so learners are guided deliberately from comprehension to authority and prepared to contribute meaningfully to institutional, national, and global conversations.