Principles for Teaching Reading

20 can be used to measure the students’ progress in their reading class. The assessment can be both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative assessment includes information from reading comprehension test and reading rate data. Quantitative assessment includes information from reading journal responses, reading interest surveys, and responses to reading strategies checklist. The last principle is to strive for continuous improvement as a reading teacher. Reading teacher should view themselves as facilitators and help the readers to find what works best. The teacher needs to understand the nature of reading process so that they can help the readers to understand the text. 2 Farrell’s Principles for Teaching Reading Farrell 2009 also proposes that there are eight principles for teaching reading. The first principle is to reflect on reading. The main point of this principle is to invite teachers to reflect on their reading process first. They are expected to reflect in the reading behavior and reading process they experience when they read something. Then it would be followed by reflecting on how they teach reading to their students through the help of fellow teachers to observe how they teach reading in the class. The essence of this principle is to encourage teacher to place themselves as readers first and notice on how they understand before they decide what kind of reading class they will bring their students into. The second principle is to teach fluency and comprehension. There are two commonly purpose of reading, those are reading for pleasure and reading for general comprehension. General reading comprehension requires readers to be 21 able to gain information from the text being read in which they have to master the ability of understanding text and interpret it. As stated by Farrell 2009, reading fluency is actually closely related to comprehension. As a result, the demand for the teacher is not only to focus on the instruction to increase students’ reading strategies, but also to make use of the ability to recognize text structure to build both reading fluency and comprehension. The third principle is to teach reading strategies. Reading strategies refer to how the readers make sense of what they read and what they don’t understand from the te xt Farrell, 2009. It is the teachers’ responsibility to introduce students to understand and use reading strategies that would be beneficial for them in the process of understanding the text without removing the possibility of having discussing and practice of reading strategies during the reading activity. In addition, teacher is greatly hoped to develop strategic readers rather than to only teach individual reading strategies. The fourth principle is to teach text structures. In this principle, the big challenge for the teachers is to teach their students on how to understand text organization since based on research on first language, that readers who are able to recognize text structure found it easier to recall the information back. From the research, it could be concluded that having the ability to understand text structure would be so beneficial for the readers in their effort of understanding the text. In short, it would be effective and beneficial if teachers also teach their students how different texts are organized and structured or how paragraphs are organized. The fifth principle is to teach vocabulary building. To be able to understand a text, readers need to know vocabularies as much as possible. Yet, when they 22 read new text, they know new vocabularies but it would not be beneficial if readers do not know what to do with that. It is the teachers’ responsibility to teach students to understand unfamiliar vocabulary so that finally it can improve their reading understanding. By giving guessing meaning exercise or rapid word- recognition exercise, teachers have taught their students to learn vocabulary. The sixth principle is to promote extensive reading. The main point of this principle is to promote alternative reading text for the students in which they are interested in. This will be a good solution as an anticipation attempt of boredom that might be experience by the students when they read text book. The next principle is to plan effective reading classes. Planning an effective reading class would be the best step that teachers could take. It is hoped that the students are no longer learning to read but they hit the level of reading to learn. To do so, teachers need to carefully plan the class involving all needed aspects to help students improving their reading skill. The last principle is to use authentic reading assessment. According to Farrell 2009, assessment here refers to both traditional, quantitative, paper-and-pencil test which is combined with qualitative assessment like what we could find in portfolio assessment, peer assessment, self report and others.

b. Reading Comprehension Strategies

In order to support students to be strategic readers, it is important for teachers to teach reading strategies to the students. The reading strategies are sometimes linked to bottom-up or top-down activity in which will be beneficial 23 for both teachers and students to reach the goal of creating strategic readers in the reading class. Brown 2001 suggests ten strategies for reading comprehension that could be applied in the teaching learning process. The first strategy is to identify the purpose of reading. The aim of identifying reading purpose is to simplify the reading activity into an efficient process. By doing so, students will be able to know what they are looking for and what attempts that can be done to the potential distraction information. The second strategy is to use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding. This strategy will really help students, especially the beginner in understanding text from the very low level, words. By providing aids, it would be easier for the students to understand deeply and could build meaning from the words they learn. The third strategy is to use efficient silent reading techniques. To help students in maximizing the use of their silent reading technique, it would be better for them to teach using some silent reading rules. Those are, 1 reducing the habit to pronounce each word, 2 try to virtually recognize more than one word at a time, 3 skip anything which is not related to global understanding and try to get the meaning from the context. The next strategy is to skim the text for the main ideas. Skimming the whole text will give students opportunity to predict the purpose of the text, the main topic, or probably the developing or supporting ideas. The fifth strategy is to scan text for specific information. Scanning is the activity of looking for certain information in the text. It is the reflection of the aim of scanning itself that is to extract specific information without reading the whole text. 24 The sixth strategy is to use semantic mapping or clustering. It helps students to manage ideas into meaningful clusters. By doing so, they would easily grasp the message that is conveyed in the text. The next strategy is to guess when uncertainty comes. There are some aims of guessing in which it could be used to guess the meaning of a word, guess a grammatical relationship, guess a discourse relationship, infer implied meaning, guess on a cultural reference, and guess content messages. The eighth strategy is to analyze vocabulary. There are several techniques that could be used on analyzing vocabulary. It is important to look for prefixes, suffixes, roots that are familiar, grammatical contexts which potentially give information, and semantic context for clues. The next strategy is to be able to distinguish between literal and implied meaning. To be able to implement the strategy, students need to master advance top-down processing skills. Not all language could be interpreted exactly but implied meaning usually derives from the pragmatic information process. The last strategy is to capitalize on discourse markers to process relationship. Discourse markers which signal relationship among ideas are expressed through phrases, clauses, and sentences. By providing clear comprehension on the discourse markers, it is hoped that it could help students understanding the text being read.

c. Curriculum 2006 in Teaching Learning Process

Curriculum 2013 is the recent curriculum used in Indonesia. A pro-contra thought from the Minister of Education which resulted to the statement to stop the implementation of the curriculum, gives impact to the teaching learning process.