sentences of the text using their brain into a meaningful whole.
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It means that comprehending a text needs active readers to analyze and process words and
sentences to construct an appropriate meaning by connecting to their background knowledge, personal experience and vocabulary mastery to get a meaningful
understanding of the text.
5. Strategies for Reading Comprehension
A message of written text can be properly received by the readers with varying degrees of comprehending. Readers who have good skills in
comprehension will easily construct the meaning of the text. However, being good comprehensive readers is not easy because sometimes they face some reading
problems which can disturb their comprehension. There are several essential comprehension strategies for the readers to improve their reading
comprehension.
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a. Using Prior Knowledge In order to comprehend a text, students need to integrate their new information
from the text with their background knowledge related to the text. b. Asking and Answering Questions
When reading, making some questions and reading to answer the questions are reading activities in improving their ability to get significant details from the
text. By asking some questions related to the text, the students will more pay attention to the information to answer the questions.
c. Determining What is Important The purpose of reading is getting information. However, most texts contain so
much information which sometimes make students confuse what information should they get from the text. In this case, students need to deny the
unimportant information and focus on the most significant information from the text based on their purpose of reading.
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Jane Oakhill, et al., Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A Handbook, New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 1.
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Raymond Philippot, and Michael F. Graves, Fostering Comprehension in English Classes, New York: The Guilford Press, 2009, pp. 107—115.
