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long texts and emphasizes that it should normally be at the level of the students’ reading or below it.
3 Comprehension reading
Comprehensive reading refers to the kind of activity, which involves the students’ previous background knowledge and put it together with the new
passage or the new information. Barnitz 1985, p. 14 argues that a major factor in reading comprehension is the background knowledge or schemata of the reader.
Background knowledge can influence the interpretation of the text by providing an overall context for the information being encoded, comprehended, and recalled.
Smith 1975 in Content Area Reading states that the only effective and meaningful way in which anyone can learn is by attempting to relate new
experiences to what he knows or believes already. In comprehensive reading, the readers are expected to comprehend the content of the passages or texts they read
by connecting the background knowledge presumed by the author.
c. Reading skills
Conscious development of reading skills is important because we are trying to equip students for the future Nuttall, 2000. It is impossible to familiarize
them [students] with every text they will ever want to read; but what we can do is give them techniques for approaching texts of various kinds, to be used for
various purposes, that is the essence of teaching reading Nuttall, 2000, p. 38. Mikulecky 1990 listed the reading skills that students need to develop in order to
read standard English effectively pp.25-26. Moreover, Byrne in Modules for the professional preparation of teaching assistants in foreign languages 1998 stated
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that strategies that can help students read more quickly and effectively include previewing, predicting, skimming, scanning, paraphrasing, and guessing from
context. The reading skills or strategies are as follows.
1 Previewing and predicting
Giving the text a quick once over to be able to guess what is to come. Previewing is a high-speed reading skill. By previewing, the reader gains enough
information from the text to begin hypothesizing about it and to begin the cognitive process of matching new information with what is already known. It is
for example, reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions to get a sense of the structure and content of a reading selection, Whereas predicting is using
knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension; using knowledge of the text type and purpose to make
predictions about discourse structure; using knowledge about the author to make predictions about writing style, vocabulary, and content Byrne, 1998.
2 Scanning
Scanning is looking through a text very rapidly for specific information. Pugh 1978 in Reading in the Second Language describes that scanning as the
finding a match between what is required and what is given in a text, very little information processed for long-term retention or even for immediate
understanding. Cushenbery and Thomas 1985 argue that scanning is much faster than skimming since the reader is probably viewing pages of material in excess of
2,000 words in a minute. The reader’s mind is focused on what is being sought; it does not abstract any information, word, or phrase that does not answer the
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specific question the reader has in mind. Scanning involves looking for particular information, usually facts that one has read recently. This also involves looking
quickly through a text to locate a specific symbol or group of symbol, such as, a particular word, phrase, name, figure, or date. The focus is in local comprehension
and most of the text will be ignored. Scanning is employed to the purpose of looking for specific words or phrases, figures or percentages, dates of particular
events, and specific items in an index Urquhart Weir, 1998.
3 Guessing the meaning of unknown words from the context and finding
Pronouns referent
This skill is using such clues as knowledge of word parts, syntax, and relationship patterns. It, then, is using prior knowledge of the subject and the ideas
in the text as clues to the meanings of unknown words, instead of stopping to look them up Byrne, 1998. Moreover, recognizing and using pronouns, referents, and
other lexical equivalent are used as clues to cohesion Mikulecky, 1990, p. 25.
4 Skimming
Urquhart and Weir 1998 argue that skimming involves processing a text selectively to get the main idea and the discourse topic as the efficiently as
possible, which might involve both expeditious and careful reading and both bottom-up and top-down processing. Cushenbery and Thomas 1985 describe
skimming as a quick type of text that is done to get the general gist of the material. The text is processed quickly to locate important information, which
may be read more carefully. Purposes of using this strategy are to establish the
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general sense of the text, to quickly establish a macro propositional structure as an outline summary, and to decide the relevance of the texts to establish needs.
5 Making inferences
Many inferences are made by readers automatically and out of consciousness. In fact, skilled reading requires such inference making. Yet,
readers’ think-alouds also contain many reports of inference making that involve conscious reflection. These inferences vary in scope, from inferences about word
meanings to overall conclusions Pressley Afflerbach, 1995, p.48.
d. Comprehension in reading
