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Silent reading is divided into intensive and extensive reading. Intensive reading, analogues, to intensive listening, is usually a classroom-oriented activity
in which students focus on linguistics or semantic details of a passage. Beside, intensive reading requires students’ attention to grammatical forms, discourse
markers, and other surface structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning implications, rhetorical relationship, and the like.
On the other hand, one of the definitions of extensive reading is proposed by Day and Bramford in Harmer 2001:204. They note that extensive reading
improves the students’ comprehension skills and develop automatic recognition of words since the more language they acquire the better understanding they will get.
Thus, extensive silent reading is the best way to improve the students’ reading
ability. In reference to the above discussion, they are two types of classroom reading
performances, namely silent and oral reading. They should be combined to help the students have better skill in reading.
c. Genre of reading
Brown 2004:186 defines reading into three genres. They are academic reading, job-related reading and personal reading. Each of them is discussed as
follows. 1
Academic Reading Academic reading is a reading activity in which the text is related to the
academic world. Some written works that can be used for academic reading are general interest article in magazines, newspapers, etc, technical reports e.g. lab
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reports, professional journal articles, reference materials dictionaries, et cetera, textbooks, thesis, essays, papers, test directions, editorials and opinion writing.
2 Job – related reading
Job – related reading is a reading activity which involves texts related to any
activities in a job. Some written works that can be used for job
– related reading are message e.g. phone messages, letter or emails, memos e.g. inter office, reports e.g. job
evaluations, project reports, schedules, labels, signs, announcement, forms, applications, questionnaires, financial documents bills, invoice, etc, directories
telephone, office, etc, manuals and directions. 3
Personal Reading Personal reading is a reading that is closely related to reading for personal
interest. Some written works that can be used for personal reading are newspapers, magazines, letters, emails, greeting cards, invitations, messages,
notes, lists, schedules train, bus, plane, etc, recipes, menus, maps, calendars, advertisements commercials, want ads, novels, short stories, jokes, drama,
poetry, financial document e.g. checks, tax forms, loan applications, forms, questionnaires medical reports, immigration documents, comic strips and
cartoons. With regard to the explanation above, there are three genres in reading. They
are academic reading, job- related reading and personal reading. They enable readers to apply a certain strategy that assist them in constructing appropriate
meanings.
