students’ characteristics, ages, needs, and interests. It is also significant for the teacher to create engaging condition and fun class atmosphere that can raise
stu dents’ motivation to read.
b. Principles of Teaching Reading
To conduct reading activities, teachers should attend some principles of teaching reading. Harmer 1998: 70 mentions six principles of teaching reading.
1 Reading is not a passive skill. Reading is an incredibly active occupation so the students have to understand
what the words mean, see the pictures the words are painting, understand the arguments, and work out if we agree with them.
2 Students need to be engaged with what they are reading. Students who are not engaged in the reading activities are less likely to benefit
from it. When they are really fired up by the topic or the task, they get much more from what is in front of them.
3 Students should be encouraged to respond to the content of a reading text, not just to the language.
The teachers have to give students a chance to respond to the message of the text by asking their feeling about the topic.
4 Prediction is a major factor in reading. There are some hints that the readers can find in the books from the covers,
photographs, and headlines. The moment when they get this hint, their brain starts predicting what they are going to read. Expectations are set up and the
active process of reading is ready to begin. Therefore, teachers should give students ‘hints’ so that they can predict what’s coming too. It will make them
better and be more engaged readers. 5 Teachers should match the task to the topic.
Once the teachers have taken a decision about what reading text the students are going to read, they need to choose good reading tasks. The most interesting
text can be undermined by asking boring and inappropriate questions; the most commonplace passage can be made really exciting with imaginative and
challenging tasks. 6 Good teachers exploit the text to the full.
Any reading text is full of sentences, words, ideas, descriptions, etc. It does not make sense just to get students to read it and the drop it to move on to
something else. Good teachers integrate the reading text into interesting class sequences and use the topic for discussion and further tasks.
c. Teaching Reading at Junior High Schools
Indonesia is an EFL country. It means that, in Indonesia, English is not a dominant language. In other words, English is not used for real life
communication, but only learned as a subject in schools. The environment lacks English input or exposure. Moreover, in general, the students are not highly
motivated to learn it, though some may have integrative or instrumental motivation. In Indonesia, English is one of the compulsory subjects in the junior
and senior high school.
In teaching English at junior high school, the teacher should consider the characteristics, ages, needs, and interests of the students. Junior high school
students, considering their ages, belong to teenager. Penny Ur in Harmer 2001: 38 suggests that teenage students are in fact overall the best language learners.
Added to this, Harmer 1998: 2 says: “They may push teachers to the limit, but they are much happier if
that challenge is met, if the teacher actually manages to control them, and if this is done in a supportive and constructive way so
that he or
she ‘helps rather than shouts’.” He also states that teenagers, if they are engaged, have a great capacity to learn, a
great potential for creativity and a passionate commitment to things which interest them.
Herbert Puchta and Michael Scratz in Harmer 2001: 39 see the problems with teenager as resulting in part,
from ‘. . .the teacher’s failure to build bridges between what they want and have to teach and their students’ worlds of
thought and experience’. Students must be encouraged to respond to texts and situations with their own thought and experience, rather than just by answering
questions and doing abstract learning activities. Teachers must give them tasks which they are able to do rather than risk humiliating them. According to the
theories above, it can be concluded that teenager learners can be very potential if the teachers know how to deal with the
m. Therefore, the teachers’ duty is provoking students’ engagement with materials which are relevant and involving.
To guide the teachers in creating and developing materials for teaching and learning activities, the government, the Ministry of Education, has arranged
the curriculum. According to Laws of National Education System No. 20 of 2003,
