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exercise, students were asked to find some words that they considered as the difficult ones. Through the words they found, they had to find the synonym and
made new sentences of each word. Carrel 1988, p.242 as cited in de Debat, n.d mentioned several techniques of introducing new vocabulary, for instance as
synonyms and antonyms; as collocations and idioms; and through rules of word formation as in reader’s log.
2. Reader characteristics
According to Pressley and Afflerbach, difficulties can be due to lack of background for text topic or insufficient lexical knowledge on the reader side
1995, p. 66. Thus, background knowledge of students was important in reading. Since students of Basic Reading I came from different areas of Indonesia,
background knowledge was also different one another. If the texts to be read had a cultural context that was different to the students, the issues of formal and content
schemata became even more important. Respondent 1 mentioned her difficulty in reading. She said that “kadang-kadang saya sulit memahami bacaan karena dapat
teks yang baru, maksudnya saya baru mendengar atau membaca topic bacaan atau isinya dari kelas ini tapi ini jadi pengalaman baru”
Sometimes I was difficult to understand the new text, I mean I have just heard or read the topic or
the content from this class, however, it is kind of a new experience for me. Bransford 1994 as cited in de Debat, n.d mentioned that difficulties in
comprehension may be attributed to the lack of background knowledge presumed by the text. Furthermore, he saw the responsibility of instructors as being twofold;
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they were to activate preexisting schemata and to help students to integrate isolated pockets of knowledge into a schema or to build a new one.
McDonough 1995 as cited in de Debat, n.d explained that English for Second Language ESL and English for Foreign Language EFL students were
faced the difficulty of learning to read in a second language with texts that contained cultural assumptions of the target culture. Therefore, the learner might
lack the culture-specific background knowledge necessary to process the text in a top-down manner.
However, readers especially EFL readers like students of Basic Reading I, who encounter such difficulties could try to understand the text by using a slow
mechanical translation process; alternatively, they could make an effort to form a situation model from past experiences and try to force the text to fit preconceived
notions Grabe Stoller, 2002, p.30.
3. Interaction between text and reader
