6.
Reading Skills
In reading certain text, a number of things should be able to be done by the students by using reading skills: Scanning, Skimming, and Reading For Detailed
Comprehension. a.
Scanning
This skill requires students to be able to scan the text for particular information or details they are searching for. It means that they do not need to read the entire
paragraph especially in every word and line. This skill is applied, for example, when they are looking for certain advertisement on the newspaper o
r someone‟s name on the attendance list.
b. Skimming
This skill is used to get the general understanding of what the text is about. Skimming is done by running our eyes rapidly over a text. For example, when
the students read a newspaper, they only cast their eyes over it to find the general idea of what has been happening, or weekly popular magazine that what we
would find about the information we need in a half time it takes us to read it now.
c. Reading for detailed comprehension
To get the detail comprehension of the text, students have to use the skill which is different from the skills explained before. Reading for detailed comprehension
is actually more complex than commonly assumed. It requires very rapid and automatic processing of words, strong skills in forming a detailed meaning
representation of main ideas, and efficient coordinating of many processes under very limited time constraints.
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Jeremy Harmer, How to Teach English: An Introduction to the Practice of English Language Teaching, Harlow: Longman, 1998, p. 60.
7. Principles of Teaching Reading
There are six basic principles in teaching reading elaborated by Harmer, as Follows.
a. Reading is not passive skills
Actually reading is an active skill. To do this successfully, the readers have to understand the meaning of the text, see the picture what the text about,
understand the argument of the text, and we develop the text if we understand it well.
b. Students need to be engaged with what they are reading
A lot of efforts have to be done by the teacher in order to make sure that every student in the class is engaged with the topic of reading text. The students who
are not engaged with the text, mostly they do not interested with the text especially with the teaching learning activity, because they get bored with the
lesson in the beginning of the lesson. The impact of this the students have less benefit of it.
c. Students should be encouraged to respond to the content of a reading text,
not just to the language.
It can be said that the meaning of the text is just as important as the structural of the text to be comprehended such as how the text use the language, the number
of the paragraphs included in, and how many time the clauses are use in it. In this case, the teacher has to give a chance to the students to respond that message in
some way.
d. Prediction is a major factor in a reading
Before the readers actually start reading, there are some hints printed on the book that give them the clause of what the book is about. By glancing at those hints,
