The Objective of the Study The Significance of the Study
oral drill, and writing letters and characters is simply copying or scribbling.
9
The explanation above describes the role of comprehension when reading a text that could express and create many ideas. In other words, it
explains how essential the comprehension to decode the text. Comprehension needs the reader
’s ability to follow the author’s organization of main ideas, details, paragraph structures, and whole
selection.
10
In order the readers can do that, many of them use some strategies to get comprehension of the text they read. They are:
a. Skip words they don’t know
b. Predict meaning
c. Guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from the context
d. Do not constantly translate
e. Look for cognates
f. Ask someone what a word means
g. Have knowledge about the topic
h. Draw inferences from the title
i. Make use of all information in the paragraph to comprehend
unfamiliar words j.
Try to figure out the meaning of a word by the syntax of the sentence k.
Read things of interest l.
Study pictures and illustrations m.
Purposefully reread to check comprehension.
11
In addition, The National Reading Panel concludes the other comprehension strategies for improving students’ understanding of what they
read in the discipline areas: a.
Comprehension monitoring, where readers learn how to be aware of their understanding of the material;
b. Cooperative learning, where students learn reading strategies
together;
9
Scott G. Parris and Ellen E. Hamilton, “The Development of Children’s Reading Comprehension”, in Susan E. Israel and Gerald G. Duffy, Handbook of Research on Reading
Comprehension, New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2009, p. 32
10
Roe, 1978, Op. Cit, p. 147.
11
Jerry G. Gebhart, Teaching English as a Foreign or Second Language, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1996, p.199
c. Use of graphic and semantic organizers including story maps,
where readers make graphic representations of the material to assist comprehension;
d. Question answering, where readers answer questions posed by the
teacher and receive immediate feedback; e.
Question generation, where reader ask themselves questions about various aspects of the story;
f. Story structure, where students are taught to use the structure of the
story as a means of helping them recall story content in order to answer questions about what they have read; and
g. Summarization, where readers are taught to integrate ideas and
generalize from the text information.
12
From those statements above, it can be known that there are many strategies in order to get reading comprehension. And the writer thinks we also
should do those strategies if we want to get a good comprehension in reading. Moreover, Goodman et al states that:
Reading is a problem-solving process. As readers, we try to discover what the author means while at the same time, we build meaning for
ourselves. We use our own language, our own thoughts, and our own view of the world to interpret what the author has written. These interpretations
are limited by what we known.
13
Based on the explanation above, the writer thinks the reader may not get the whole idea of the writer, or may be the readers get some different
understanding of what they read because it depends on the readers’ knowledge. So, it seems important for the readers to have some prior
knowledge in order to get the complete understanding of the author means.
12
Michael L. Kamil, et.al, Successful Reading Instruction, Greenwich: Information Age Publishing, 2002, p. 122
13
Yetta M. Goodman, Carolyn Burke, and Barry Sherman, Reading Strategies Focus on Comprehension, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980, p.3.