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In teaching reading, interactive process is trying to cover bottom up and top down process as Brown says 2000:299. The top-down approach is used
to predict probable meaning, then moving to the bottom-up approach to check whether that is really what the writer says.The goal of this approach is to
provide students with strategies that will help them become independent readers, who monitor their own thinking while reading link their prior
knowledge with the text they are reading.
c. Micro-skills and Macro-skills of Reading
Reading is one of the skills in a language teaching. In the reading, the reader has to perform a number of simultaneous tasks such as decoding the
message by recognizing the written sign, interpret the message by assigning meaning of the words and understand what authors’ intention is.
There are two major skills of reading: micro-skills and macro-skills. In micro skills, readers are required to have skills in dealing with graphemes and
orthographic patterns and linguistic signals. Brown 2004:187-188 provides the list of skills of reading comprehension as follows:
1 Discriminate among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns
of English 2
Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory 3
Process writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose 4
Recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance
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5 Recognize grammatical word classes nouns, verbs systems e.g., tense,
agreement, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms 6
Recognize that a particular meaning maybe expressed in different grammatical forms
7 Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signaling
the relationship between and among clauses. In macro-skills, readers need to make use of their discourse knowledge,
communicative functions of written texts, inference skills, scanning and skimming techniques. Brown 2004:187-188 presents the macro-skills of
reading as follows: 1
Recognize the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation
2 Recognize the communicative functions of written texts, according to form
and purpose 3
Infer context that is not explicit by using background knowledge 4
Infer links and connections between events, ideas, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relation as main idea, supporting idea, new
information, given information, generalization and exemplification 5
Distinguish between literal and implied meanings 6
Detect culturally specific references and interpret them in a context of the appropriate cultural schemata
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7 Develop and use a battery of reading strategies such as scanning and
skimming, detecting discourse makers, guessing the meaning of words from context, and activating schemata for the interpretation of text.
Therefore, based on the micro-skills and macro-skills that have been determined, the reading techniques and the reading activities should include
those reading micro-skills and macro-skills as well as employ reading strategies needed by the students. It aims to help students to comprehend the
text effectively and making them easier to deal with various kinds of texts.
3. Theory of Vocabulary a. The Nature of Vocabulary
Vocabulary cannot be separated from language skills because it plays an important role in understanding the language holistically. Hornby 1995, 133
says that vocabulary is a list of words with their meanings. It is the core of language.
According to Hatch and Brown 1995:1, the term vocabulary refers to a list or set of words for a particular language or a list or a set of words that
individual speaker of language might use. Moon in Schmit and McCarthy, 1997:105 argued that traditionally, vocabulary has been seen as individual
words that could be used with a great deal of freedom. It is the key aspect of learning a language.
Thornbury 2002:14 states that vocabulary means a large collection of items. He adds that learning vocabulary is important because it enriches
someone’s knowledge of words. In reference to the reading comprehension, the students should acquire a number of vocabularies to get better
