Strategy of Reading The Nature of Reading

41

d. Strategy of Reading

Reading strategies can be defined as “plans for solving problems encountered in constructing meaning Richards, 2002: 287. Further, he states that they range from bottom-up vocabulary strategies, such as looking up an unknown word in the dictionary, to more comprehensive actions, such as connecting what is being read to the reader’s background knowledge 2002: 289. Richards states the aim of reading strategies as follow: 1. Strategies help to improve reading comprehension as well as efficiency in reading 2. By using strategies, students will be reading in the way that expert readers do 3. Strategies help readers to process the text actively, to monitor their comprehension, and to connect what they are reading to their own knowledge and to other parts of the text. In other word, it can be concluded that strategies of reading help students to improve their performance on test of comprehension and recall. Comprehension is the purpose of reading. Variations in comprehension are likely to come from different background knowledge brought to the text Urguhart, 1998: 87. In the classroom where teacher and students share the same culture, such variations may not be very large on the contrary in the classroom where teacher and students may come from a wide range of background knowledge and culture, the comprehension may become the major problem. Further he states that there is the difference between comprehension and interpretation. He states that comprehension refers to differences brought about the readers setting themselves different level of 42 acceptable while interpretation refers to differences resulting either from different readers bringing different information to a text or the same reader at a different times, bringing a different mind-set 1998: 87. Brown 1998: 292-296 states that reading comprehension is primarily a matter of developing appropriate, efficient comprehension strategies, those are: 1. Identifying the purpose in reading Efficient reading consists of clearly identifying the purpose in reading something. By so doing, the reader knows what he is looking for and can weed out potential distracting information.. 2. Use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding for beginning level learner At the beginning level of learning English, one of the difficulties students encounter in learning to read is making the correspondences between spoken and written English. Learners may need to be given hints and explanations about certain assumption that one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondence will be acquired with ease, other relationship might prove difficult. 3. Use efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension for intermediate to advance levels a. To increase efficiency of reading by a few silent reading rules: b. You don’t need to “pronounce” each word to yourself c. Try to visually perceive more than one word at a time, preferably phrases d. Unless a word is absolutely crucial to global understanding, skip over it and try to infer its meaning through its context. 43 4. Skimming Skimming consists of quickly running one’s eyes across a whole text to get the gist. Skimming gives reader the advantage of being able to predict the purpose of the passage, the main topic or message, and some of developing supporting ideas. 5. Scanning Scanning is searching quickly for some particular piece of information in a text. Scanning exercise may ask learners to look for names or dates, to find a definition of a key concept, or to list a certain number of supporting details. The purpose of scanning is to extract certain specific information without reading through the whole text. 6. Semantic mapping or clustering The strategy of semantic mapping, or grouping ideas into meaningful clusters, helps the reader to provide some order to the chaos. Making such semantic maps can be done individually, but they make for a productive group work. 7. Guessing Learners can use guessing to their advantage to: a. guess the meaning of a word b. guess a grammatical relationship c. guess a discourse relationship d. infer implied meaning e. guess about cultural reference f. guess content message 44 8. Vocabulary analysis Several techniques are useful here: 1 look for prefixes, 2 look for suffixes, 3 look for roots that are familiar, 4 look for grammatical contexts, and 5 look at the semantic context topic for clues. 9. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings This requires the application of sophisticated top-down processing skills. The fact that not all language can be interpreted appropriately by attending to its literal, syntactic surface structure makes special demands on readers. 10. Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationships There are many discourse markers in English that signal relationships among ideas as expressed through phrases, clauses, and sentences. A clear comprehension of such markers can greatly enhance learners’ reading efficiency.

4. Language and Text