2.5 Teaching Reading in Senior High School
2.5.1 The Characteristic of Senior High School Students
Senior High School students or teenagers are categorized into adolescents’ learners. The characteristics of adolescents’ learners according to Harmer 2001:
38-39 are: 1 they seem to be less lively and humorous than adults;
2 identity has to be forgetting among classmates and friends; peers approval maybe considerably more important for the student than the attention of the
teacher; 3 they would be much happier if such problem did not exist;
4 they are maybe disruptive in class; and 5 they have great capacity to learn, have a great potential for creativity and a
passionate commitment to things that interest them. Based on the explanation above, the writer assumes that adolescents are
young people who are developing into adult. In this period they need opportunities for self-expression, do what they want to do, loyal in friendship, not
too serious in paying attention to the lesson, and sometimes need the teacher’s attention.
Teachers’ jobs are to motivate and guide the students to develop their potential in learning and also give more attention to the students’ difficulties or
problems in learning.
2.5.2 Teaching Reading
Reading is a crucial skill for students of English as a Foreign Language EFL. There are two main approaches on teaching reading. One is bottom-up
processing. It focuses on developing the basic elements in the text focus on the words and phrases. The other is top-down approach. It focuses on the background
knowledge about the text attend to the overall meaning. Teaching reading is more than just work hard through the textbook.
Teachers need to develop and apply appropriate technique to help the learners in mastering reading comprehension skills.
2.5.3 Goals of Teaching Reading
Martha Rapp Ruddell 2005: 88 states that, the most academic goal of reading is text comprehension—the construction of meaning that is some way
corresponds to the author’s intended meaning. In school, however, reading has three additional goals:
1 Subject Matter Learning. Students read not only to understand text but to extend their knowledge in subject areas as well.
2 Increasing Reading Skill. At each grade level, students are expected to become better readers and to read increasingly difficult text.
3 Knowledge Application. Throughout the middle and secondary grades, students are expected to apply knowledge constructed from their reading of
subject text.
From the argument above, it can be said that the goal of teaching reading is to help the learners to comprehend the reading material that they read so that
they can get knowledge and hopefully they can applied it in their life.
CHAPTER 3 METHOD OF INVESTIGATION
This chapter deals with research method that discusses experimental research, research design, subject of the research, instrument for collecting data,
data collecting, data analysis, and method of data analysis.
3.1 Experimental Research
In this research the writer uses quantitative approach. A quantitative approach is a numerical method of describing observations of material or
characteristics Best, 1981: 154. One of quantitative approach is experimental research.
Arikunto 2003: 272 states that experimental research is a research which has a purpose to investigate whether there is an effect of “something” that is
treated to the subject of research. In this research, the researcher tries to arouse a condition or situation and then tries to find out the effect. In other words, an
experiment is conducted in order to know the effect of the treatment.
3.2 Research Design
Research design refers to the outline, plan, or strategy specifying the procedure to be used in seeking an answer to the research question Christensen,
2001:233. 22
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