Reading Subskills The Nature of Reading Comprehension

f. Reading Subskills

Reading is not one single skill. It consists of several subskills. To master reading therefore means mastering these reading subskills. The terms reading macroskills and microskills are often used interchangeably with reading subskills, whereby the first involves understanding the ideas in the text and the latter requires recognizing and interpreting linguistic features of the text. Brown 2004 and Spratt, Pulverness and Williams 2005 propose several reading subskills. According to Brown 2004: 187-188, the reading skill is divided into a number of reading macroskills and microskills. They are mentioned as follows. Microskills 1. Discriminate among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns of English. 2. Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory. 3. Process writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose. 4. Recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance. 5. Recognize grammatical word classes nouns, verb, etc., system e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms. 6. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms. 7. Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signaling the relationship between and among clauses. Macroskills 8. Recognize the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation. 9. Recognize the communicative functions of written text, according to form and purpose. 10. Infer context that is not explicit by using background knowledge. 11. From described events, ideas, etc., infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization and exemplification. 12. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings. 13. Detect culturally specific references and interpret them in a context of the appropriate cultural schemata. 14. Develop and using reading strategies such as scanning and skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning of words from context and activating schemata for the interpretation of texts. In addition, Spratt, Pulverness and Williams 2005 states that when readers read, they do not necessarily read every single word in the text. It depends on their reason or reading purpose which eventually influences the way they read. Consequently, it determines which reading subskills they should use. According to Spratt, Pulverness and Williams 2005, reading subskills involves reading for specific information scanning, reading for gist skimming and reading for details. It can be assumed that these reading subskills are reading strategies which the use need to suit readers’ reading purpose. In relation to teaching-learning activities, teachers should consider these reading subskills in order to specify reading objectives. Given the research focus, this study only focused on improving several reading subskills that help students comprehend a text better. Those subskills were the ones related to the students ’ abilities to access information from the text such as the main idea and supporting details of a text as well as knowledge related to generic structures and linguistic features of the text.

g. Strategies for Reading Comprehension