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Johnson, 2001. Murtagh in Anderson 2003 stresses that the best readers can “efficiently integrate” both processes.
d. Micro- and Macroskills in Reading Comprehension
Brown 2004: 187-188 states a number of micro- and macroskills implied in reading comprehension. The microskills focus on the smaller bits and chunks of
language those of which are used in the bottom-up processing. These include the abilities to discriminate and recognize various syntactic aspects such as
orthography, word order pattern, grammatical word classes such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc., systems tenses, agreement, pluralization, grammatical rules, and
cohesive devices. Meanwhile, the macroskills of reading comprehension focus on the pragmatic aspects of language those of which are used in the top-down
processing. These include the abilities to recognize the rhetorical forms and the communicative functions of written discourse, to infer implicit context, to
recognize relations such as main ideas, supporting ideas, new and given information, generalization, exemplification, and cause and effect, to distinguish
between literal and implied meanings, to detect references based on the context, and to employ various reading comprehension strategies such as skimming,
scanning, detecting discourse markers, guessing meaning from context, and activating schemata. Those micro- and macroskills can be used as the indicators
for reading comprehension assessment.
e. Strategies in Reading Comprehension
As it has been stated that reading comprehension needs the use of various strategies to be equipped consciously by the students, some experts proposed
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reading strategies that can help students comprehend a text. According to Moreillon 2007, reading comprehension strategies are
“tools that proficient readers use to solve the comprehension problems they encounter in texts
”. Meanwhile, Oxford 1990 defines
a strategy as “a plan, step, or conscious action toward achievement of an objective”.
Pressley Woloshyn in Grabe 2009 propose these following reading strategies:
1. Summarizing
2. Forming questions
3. Answering questions and elaborative interrogation
4. Activating prior knowledge
5. Monitoring comprehension
6. Using text-structure awareness
7. Using visual graphics and graphics organizers
8. Inferencing
Almost similar to above strategies, Zimmermann and Hutchins in Moreillon 2007 propose these following strategies:
1. Activating or building background knowledge
2. Using sensory images
3. Questioning
4. Making predictions and inferences
5. Determining main ideas
6. Using fix-up options
7. Synthesizing
Brown 2001 also provides 10 strategies that can be used to help reading comprehension. The strategies are:
1. Identify the purpose in reading
2. Use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding
especially for beginning level learners 3.
Use efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension for intermediate to advanced levels
4. Skim the text for main ideas
5. Scan the text for specific information
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6. Use semantic mapping or clustering
7. Guess when you aren‟t certain
8. Analyze vocabulary
9. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings
10. Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationships for example
enumerative, additive, logical sequence, explicative, illustrative and contrastive.
Nuttall 1996 argues that it is important to know the students problems in reading to decide what strategy to use. The students need to know how the
strategies work through modeling and they need to practice them a lot Lems et al., 2010.
f. Teaching Reading Comprehension
