E. Kinds of Reading Skills
The teaching of reading in the language classroom is aimed to develop students’ reading skills. Mikulecky 1990: 25 defines reading skills as the
thinking processes which the reader needs to develop further in order to read a standard language effectively. This definition is quite clear to explain what is
meant by reading skills that many teachers try to develop in their reading classes. Generally, the aim of teaching reading is to provide strategies for the
learners in order to help them comprehend the text well. This can be seen from Brown’s statement on reading comprehension skills Brown, 2001: 306. He states
that for most second language learners who are already literate in their mother tongue, reading comprehension is primarily a matter of developing appropriate
and efficient comprehension skills. The skills that are suggested by Brown cover 1 identifying the purpose in reading, 2 using graphemic rules and pattern to and
in bottom-up decoding, 3 using efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension, 4 skimming the text for main ideas, 5 scanning the text for
specific information, 6 using semantic mapping or clustering, 7 guessing what you aren’t certain, 8 analyzing vocabulary, 9 distinguishing between literal and
implied meanings, and 10 capitalizing on discourse markers to process relationships.
The aforementioned reading skills are commonly trained by many language teachers to develop students’ reading skill in the classroom. Actually,
many experts propose different kinds of reading skills, and the amount of them will not be exhaustive and uncountable since every expert has different way in
determining reading skills. Some of them distinguish between macro skills and micro skills. They also distinguish between strategies and skills, and so on.
However, such classification on reading skills overlaps with each other and they are not necessary in this research. Thus, it is sufficient enough to limit a number
of reading skills by proposing the reading skills proposed by Brown in order to avoid the overlap.
F. Material Development
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