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In an elaboration below, there are three levels of comprehension are identified and only those abilities at the core of understanding and reacting to
information at different levels of thinking are presented: a.
Literal Comprehension Literal comprehension refers to understanding ideas and information
explicitly stated in the passage. The literal level of comprehension is fundamental to all reading skills at any level because a reader must first
understand what the author said before he can draw an inference or make evaluation. In literal comprehension, it is hope the students can recognize the
details such as fact and main idea. b.
Inferential Comprehension Inferential comprehension refers to understanding of ideas and
information not explicitly stated in the passage. To get inferences or implied meanings from the reading material he read between the lines. Inferences are
some ideas that a reader receives when he goes beneath the surface to sense relationship, put facts and ideas together to draw conclusion and make
generalization. In this level, the students can infer supporting details, main idea which is not explicitly stated, and relationship of cause and effect.
c. Critical comprehension
Critical comprehension refers to analyzing, evaluating, and personally reacting to information presented in the passage. Critical reading
requires a higher degree of skill development and perception, because it involves evaluation, making of a personal judgment on the accuracy, value of
what is being read. It means questioning, comparing and evaluating.
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3. Problems in Reading Skill
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Arthur W. Heilman, Principles and…, p. 246
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There are five problems are identified from the student’s reading: a.
Word attack Some of the students had obvious word-attack problems; either the
examiner had to supply words or the children mispronounced words or sometimes they sounded them out. The wrong kind of phonics instruction
may be characterized as follows: 1
It is too abstract, requiring sophisticated prerequisite abilities. 2
It spends time on tasks that do not contribute to reading. 3
It omits components needed for successful decoding. b.
Fluency Most of children read haltingly, in a monotone, and with many
hesitations. The comprehension of students is weak when texts are read too slowly. Some researchers indicate that slow word recognition is related to
poor sentence processing and that fast word recognition is correlated with better comprehension.
c. Syntactic structure
The third reading problem that the children have is syntactic structure. The problems with syntactic structures can arise in two ways. First,
children’s ability to understand syntactic structures when they are spoken does not guarantee that these same structures will be understood when they
are read. Second, some syntactic structures are more frequent in speech than in print and are unfamiliar when encountered in print.
d. Word meanings
Many children had difficulty with the meaning of some words. Here, the number and difficulty of words are increase. The vocabulary becomes
more sophisticated, and word meaning becomes more of a problem.
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Some problems in teaching and learning reading skill that are faced by the teachers are language, topic and genre, comprehension tasks, and negative
expectations.
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a. Language
In the case of written text some researchers look at word and sentence length Wallace 1992:77, on the premise that texts with longer
words will be more difficult to understand than those with shorter ones. It means that if students faced the situation, they will get difficult in absorbing
what the meaning of the text is b.
Topic and Genre The teaching of receptive skill sometimes will not go as we want it to
be because of the inappropriate topic or unfamiliar genre they are dealing with and will not interest to learn.
c. Comprehension Task
When the teacher wants to give the task and choose the comprehension tasks to do it, sometimes that the kind of tasks are not helping
the students to more understand the skill. It is more likely to be testing them. By testing they will not be appropriate way of accomplishing the student’s
improvement in this skill. d.
Negative Expectations Before the students were starting to learn the skill, they already have
negative expectations. They have feeling that they are not going to understand the passage because it is bound to be too difficult and they will be
frustrating and de-motivating.
4. Factors which Influence Reading Comprehension
