Micro – and Macro – skills of Reading

1 Use any visuals for vocabulary brainstorming The teacher may show some pictures related to the text and make some questions about them orally. Those questions provide the vocabulary which are useful for the students to get an “image” about what the text is about. 2 Use any headlines or sub-headings The teacher writes the headlines or subheadings on the board before giving the whole text to the students. Then, the teacher asks the students to guess what the article or the text is about. 3 Use key words The teacher takes five or six key words from the text and writes them on the board before the students read. These words will be used as prompts and the students can try to make sentences using those words. 4 Use questionnaires The teacher gives a mini-questionnaire to the students related to the topic of the text before they read it. 5 Use prediction exercises The teacher makes prediction exercises to anticipate the vocabulary or content of the text, for example in form of true or false statements. The techniques above aim to make the text as comprehensible as possible for the students to understand. By applying those techniques, the students are expected to be ready and prepared for the most likely information in the text. According to Davies and Pearse 2002: 92-93, the reading comprehension practice can be divided into three stages. Those stages are: 1 Pre-reading This stage aims to prepare the students for what they are going to read. The activities can be in the form of guessing the topic from the titleheading and illustrations, brainstorming about the topic word, predicting, or questioning. 2 While-reading At this stage, the activities aim to help the students to understand the text. They can do some activities like scanning for specific information, skimming for the general idea, answering questions, completing sentences, a table, a map, or pictures, and asking questions to each other. 3 Post-reading This stage aims to help the students to link between the information from the text and their own ideas or experiences. The activities can be in the form of discussing the text, debating some controversial aspects of the text, doing tasks, and summarizing the text. In addition, Grabe and Stoller 2002 in Hedgcock and Ferris 2009 propose some reading strategies such as specifying the purpose of reading, planning a reading process, previewing the text, predicting text content, verifying predictions, generating questions about the text, locating answers to the questions, comparing to the existing schemata, summarizing, making inferences, noticing and analyzing text structure, re-reading, using discourse markers to understand textual relationship, checking comprehension accuracy, tracking reading difficulties, reflecting and discussing what has been learnt. These strategies can be applied according to the reading objectives that will be reached. Brown 2001: 306-310 proposes ten reading strategies that can be applied in classroom learning. Those strategies are presented below. 1 Identify the purpose of reading. 2 Use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding especially for beginning level learners.