from the text to confirm or reject these expectations. To accomplish this sampling efficiently, the reader directs the eyes to the most likely
places in the text to find useful information.
17
4. The Kind of Reading
Reading can be divided into two kinds which are intensive and extensive reading. Here are the explanations:
a. Intensive Reading Intensive reading, according to Harmer, refers to the detailed focus on the
construction of reading texts that usually takes place in classroom and accompanied by study activities where the teachers encourage the students to
reflect on different reading skills and may ask them to work out what kind of text they are reading, look at particular uses of grammar and vocabulary,
tease out detail of meaning, and then use the information in the text to move on to other learning activities.
18
b. Extensive Reading Extensive reading refers to reading which students usually do outside the
classroom, for example reading novels, web pages, newspapers, magazines, etc which involve reading for pleasure or joyful reading.
19
The goal of extensive reading is to improve reading skills by processing a quantity of
materials that can be comprehended and pleasurable where the teacher’s job is to guide the reader to comprehensible materials and to let the students
make their own choices of what they want to read.
20
17
Grabe and Stoller, op. cit., pp. 25 —26.
18
Jeremy Harmer, How to Teach English, Malaysia: Pearson, 2007, pp. 99 —100.
19
Ibid., p. 99.
20
Jerry Greer Gebhard, Teaching English as a Foreign or Second Language —a Self
Development and Methodology Guide, US: University of Michigan Press, 1996, p. 208.
5. The Principle of Teaching Reading
Teaching reading is not as simple as the theory. To be successful in teaching reading, a teacher should know the basic rule of it. There are eight
principles of teaching reading which will be explained as follow:
21
a. Exploit the reader’s background knowledge
Background knowledge is information that the readers get by experience or study which is started from the first day of their life. It can be built from the
readers’ personality, surroundings, people they meet, or even from the television shows that they watch. As Carell said on his journal, interpretation
of the text is influenced by schemata or reader’s background knowledge.
22
Every readers have different schema which affect them in interpreting the text that they read. So, a story may be understood differently from one reader to
another. The teacher can help the students activating their background knowledge by setting goals, asking questions, making predictions, teaching
text structures, and starting reading process by building up the students’
background knowledge if they are reading on an unfamiliar topic.
23
b. Build a strong vocabulary base Vocabulary teaching is really important as
Nation stated that vocabulary teaching has positive effects for students as it can be really helpful when
learners, especially non-native speakers feel it is most needed.
24
The students will have to spend too much time figuring out the unknown words and will
not be able to understand the passage as a whole if there are too many words that a reader does not know.
25
In other words, the teacher should help the students to strengthen their vocabulary base as it will bring some advantages
21
David Nunan ed, Practical English Language Teaching, New York: McGraw Hill, 2003, pp. 74
—78.
22
Patricia L. Carell, Some Issues in Studying the Role of Schemata, or Background Knowledge, in Second Language Comprehension, Toronto: TESOL Convention, 1983, pp. 82
— 83.
23
Nunan, loc. cit., p. 74.
24
Paul Nation, Teaching Vocabulary, in P. Robertson, P. Dash, and J. Jung eds, The Asian EFL Journal Quarterly, British Virgin Islands: The Asian EFL Journal Press, 2005, p. 48.
25
Laura S. Pardo, What Every Teacher Needs to Know about Comprehension, International Reading Association, 2004, p. 274.
for the students like improving their reading comprehension and making reading time more efficient. So, basic vocabulary should be taught clearly and
the students should be taught to use context to guess the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary effectively.
26
c. Teach for comprehension Teachers should focus on teaching the students how to comprehend the text
instead of focus on testing reading comprehension by verifying that the predictions made by the students are correct and make sure that the students
get familiar to the reading material when they don’t get the meaning.
27
By teaching the students how to comprehend the text, the students
comprehension will increase as they predict the meaning of the text correctly during reading activity.
d. Work on increasing reading rate Teachers should understand that the focus of reading class is not to develop
speed readers, but fluent readers.
28
Teachers can help students become more fluent by engaging them in repeated readings for real purposes and modeling
fluent reading by reading aloud to students daily so that the students realize what fluent reading sounds like.
29
Teachers also have to find out the way to balance both assisting students to improve their reading rate and developing
their reading comprehension skills by reducing students’ dependence on a dictionary, telling the students to not focus on move through the passage one
word at a time but spend more time analyzing and synthesizing the content of reading.
30
26
Nunan, op. cit.
27
Ibid., p. 75.
28
Ibid., p. 76.
29
Pardo, op. cit., p. 273.
30
Nunan, loc. cit., p. 76.
