commit to user 22
listening and responding the stories, to handle book and examine pictures and to see reasons for reading in their daily activity.
d. Social and Emotional Development Individual and group communication and participation are important
factors in social and emotional development. Communication experience should be structured so that young learners feel adequate
and secure and can develop desirable attitude toward themselves and others.
e. Physical Development Good health, good vision and good hearing are most essential for
learning to read. The young learners need to make fine visual discrimination to see likeness and differences is obvious and suggest
the usefulness of early activities involve form and shapes such as picture puzzle and later activities that involve letter recognition
words beginning and ending alike and so on. f. Cognitive Development
Young learners’ intelligent is vital in learning to read. Theory of cognitive development asserted that thought comes before language
and that language is a way of representing thought. It can be concluded that a teacher should provide a task which can be
understood by learners. Giving them social interaction with their peers to facilitate cognitive, social, emotional, and moral development is needed to
make the learners comprehend with what has been read.
4. Problems in Reading Comprehension
Comprehending written material is difficult unless ones realizes that every sentence has meaning, understand the structural pattern of sentences and
recognize the use of punctuation in establishing thought. DeBoer and Dallman 1964: 132 say that the teacher must understand the causes of difficulties in
comprehension if she wants to help individuals comprehend what they read. Moreover, knowledge of the causes may help the teacher to prevent the
commit to user 23
occurrence of serious deficiencies. The problems that cause difficulties in comprehension are as follows.
a. Limited intelligence There is a substantial correlation between intelligence and reading
ability. Ability to comprehend in reading is limited by the conceptual load that his mental ability enables him to carry.
b. Undesirable physical factors Surroundings, lighting, temperatures, and uncomfortable chairs may
interfere with comprehension. c. Word recognition
Methods of teaching that concentrate on the recognition of individual words to the exclusion of meanings derived from connected discourse
may cause for deficiencies in comprehension. d. Overemphasis in oral reading
Oral reading can have either a desirable or detrimental effect of comprehension. Oral reading which is not done well can have
undesirable effect on comprehension. Overemphasis in reading also makes young learners so self-conscious while reading to others
because their concentration may be on how rather than on what they read.
e. Insufficient background for reading a selection Lack of an experience background is essential to the understanding of
the concepts involved in reading material and of the words used in an additional limitation to comprehend.
f. Failure to adjust reading techniques to reading purpose and type of reading material
Good reading comprehension requires a flexible approach to the printed page. The need is for veracity in adapting the reading method
to the reading purpose and to the nature of the material read.
commit to user 24
g. Lack of appropriate Teacher Guidance Difficulties in reading comprehension may frequently be solved with
the aid of teacher who has skill in observing causes of the difficulties. Based on the problems above, a teacher must understand and help the
students to solve the causes of students’ difficulties in comprehending the text. Moreover, knowledge of the causes may help the teacher to prevent the
occurrence of serious deficiencies.
5. Skills of Reading Comprehension
