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complex process that involves many interactions between readers and what they bring to the text previous knowledge, strategy use as well as variables related to
the text itself interest in text, understanding of text types, and so on. The theories above imply that reading comprehension is not a single matter. It
is affected by some factors such as the reader’s intelligence and background knowledge, the technique and strategy used and the features of texts. All of those
factors relate each other in influencing the readers’ reading comprehension ability. In reference to the explanation above, it is important for English teachers to
design effective and interactive reading activities. However, the teachers must understand the principles of effective teaching reading in order to guide them in
choosing the best reading strategies which are appropriate for students’ need and characteristics in their reading class.
d. Techniques in Teaching Reading Comprehension
In term of the techniques, many experts have different ideas. Brown 2001:299 proposes three techniques in teaching reading comprehension, namely
top-down processing, bottom-up processing, and interactive processing. 1
Top-down processing Top-down processing requires the reader to interpret the text by moving from
the highest to the lowest unit analysis. The reader makes use of his exciting knowledge to predict the meanings Goodman in Alderson, 2000:17.
In this process, readers bring a great deal of knowledge, expectations, assumptions and questions to the text and give a basic understanding of
vocabularies, they continue to read as long as the text strengths their expectation.
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The readers consider the text as a whole, and relate it to their own knowledge and experience. It brings them to predict the writer’s purpose or argument and
then uses this prediction to interpret the difficult parts of the text. Then, the readers use general knowledge of the world or of particular text components to
make an intelligent guess. This approach makes the readers activate their prior knowledge, common
sense, etc in order to comprehend the text. 2
Bottom-up processing In bottom-up processing, the readers firstly identifies the multiplicity of
linguistics signals letters, morphemes, syllables, words, phrases, grammatical cues and discourse markers and uses the linguistic data processing mechanism.
The reader selects the signals that form a unit and interprets the meaning. The final step in the process is arriving at the meaning of the text.
In other words, bottom-up processing is defined as the process when the readers construct meaning in a linier fashion or form smallest unit that is from
letters, words, phrases, and sentences. It considers that in this process the readers build up a meaning from the written words on the page. The readers recognize
letters, words, and working cut sentence structure. 3
Interactive processing Interactive processing is the combination of top-down processing and bottom-
up. This process brings the readers to use bottom-up and top-down processing. The reader continuously shifts from one focus to another, now adopting a top-
down processing to activate students’ background knowledge, then moving to the
