Teaching and Learning Reading

CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW

A. Teaching and Learning

In Oxford learning pocket dictionary, teaching is a process of giving instruction to somebody. According to Kimble Garmezy in Brown, teaching is showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, giving instruction, guiding in the study of something, providing with knowledge, causing to know or understand. Meanwhile, Brown 2000:7 defines that teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, setting the condition for learning. Based on the definitions above, it can be concluded that teaching activity can not be defined apart from learning, because teaching activity can not be done without the existence of learning activity. Thus, Kimble Garmezy in Brown 2000:133 defines learning is relatively permanent change in a behavioral tendency and is the result of reinforced practice. Further definition is stated by Brown: learning as acquiring or getting knowledge of a subject or a skill by studying experience or instruction. In learning activity, students are active because they should work hard and do many efforts to acquire or to get knowledge of a subject. While in teaching process the teacher is active in giving the lesson materials, responsible in planning, directing student’s activities and deciding what activities should be done, how it should be done and who should do it. Jeremy Harmer 2001:6 describes the characteristics of good teacher as follows: · Having ability to give interesting classes. · Using the full range or their personality. · Having desire to entertain students in a positive sense not a negative sense. · Treating the students all equally. · Knowing all students’ names.

B. Reading

There are many definitions of reading stated by linguists. Heilman states that reading is a process of getting meaning from printed word symbols 1961:8. While Grellet 1998:7 proposes that reading is a constant process of guessing, and what one brings to the text is often more important than what one finds in it. This is why from the very beginning, the students should be taught how to use what they know in order to understand the unknown vocabularies or sentences. Moreover Dawson 1960:2-3 gives description of reading as follows: a Reading is a process It means that learning to read demands the mastery of specific skills, such as moving eyes from side to side following lines of print, hearing and seeing the differences in word that resemble one another in sound and appearance, selecting main points and the major supporting details, etc. b Reading is thinking It means that reading requires the reader to follow the line of though which the author has expressed. Some stages that must be studied by the reader are: · Recall pertinent previous experiences and already learned facts that will help him understand the printed materials. · Follow the writer’s development and organization ideas. · Evaluate the accuracy and appropriateness of information and conclusion. · See how the printed data can be applied to a problem that the reader may be trying to solve. · Select the facts that are important to his purposes. c Reading becomes vicarious experience. It means that a person enjoys literature and books dealing with biography and travel, he is indulging in vicarious experiences. d Reading is a form of communication. It means that a writer put his ideas in to writings or printing in order that the reader may read what he has to say. Here, he may wish to define a problem, prove a point, share newly acquired information and entertain the reader. In conclusion, reading is a complex process. It is an act of communication between author reader in a written form and to get line of thought which the author has expressed, to follow the writer’s organization idea and to see how the printed data can be applied to a problem that the reader tries to solve. B.1. Type of Reading materials When people read, they read for a purpose. They may read the instructions on a jar of instant coffee because they need to know how much coffee to put in the cup of hot water. They may glance at the newspaper headlines to see if there are any major news items that they should know. They may notice a sign announcing a new store; they may read it because they want to find out what it sells. In addition, in the school curriculum there are also many kinds of reading materials in order to familiarize students with the text that is often found in daily life. Jeremy Harmer 1991:190 states that there are many types of reading materials based on the purpose of reading such as: a Reading to confirm expectations In this type of reading material the students are involved in reading in order to confirm their expectations about the information they think the text will contain. This type places great emphasis where the students are encouraged to become interested of a subject in the text, encourages students to predict the content of the text, and gives them an interesting and motivating purpose for reading. b Reading to extract specific information. In this type the students are asked to read a text to extract specific information. The students should see the questions or tasks that they are going to answer or perform before reading the text. They should scan the text only to extract the information which the questions demand. c Reading for communicative tasks. The reading here is purposeful and communicative. Those who read the text know that they will have to answer real questions in order to communicate. d Reading for general understanding. Reading for general understanding is a skill that looks for only the main points of the text. The reader is not looking for specific points, but rather for whatever is necessary to get an overall understanding of the text. e Reading for detailed comprehension This type of reading material gives detailed comprehension. It can give students a valuable opportunity to study written English in detailed and to learn more about the topic and about how language is used. It makes the students understand the way in which texts are structured and to recognize the functions that are being performed. B.2. The ways of Reading. Based on the description above there are many different purposes of reading. Therefore, it needs different ways to read. For example; reading advertisement is different from reading science book. Grellet 1998:4 proposes that there are many ways of reading: 1 Skimming. Skimming consists of quickly running eyes across a whole text an essay, article, a chapter of book, etc to get the gist. Skimming gives the reader advantages of being able to predict the purpose of the passage, main topic, message and possibly some of the supporting ideas. 2 Scanning. Scanning is quickly going through a text to find a particular piece of information. Scanning exercise may ask students to look for names of dates, to find a definition of a key concept, or to list a number of supporting details. The purpose of scanning is to find certain specific information without reading through the whole text. 3 Extensive Reading. Extensive reading is reading a longer text, usually for ones own pleasure. This is fluency activity, mainly involving global understands. 4 Intensive Reading. Intensive reading means reading a shorter text, to find some specific information. This is an accuracy activity involving reading for details. These different ways are sometimes used together. For example someone skims the whole passage to see what it is about before deciding to scan for a particular paragraph to get the information that is looked for. B.3. Reading Comprehension. Reading is not successful without comprehending. In order to get the writer’s idea or message, readers should understand the content of the reading passage. The reading exercise for students is usually followed questions. The students read the passage and then answer the questions. There is a short time about a minute or two minutes before the students answer the questions. During this time, usually the students try to remember and comprehend the content of the passage. The term comprehension based on Howel 1993:182 is the act of combining information in passages with prior knowledge in order to construct meaning. Dawson and Bamman 1963:220 states comprehension as follow: It is a complex thing, including all that the child learns about words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs; differing from day to day in terms of the quantity to be learned, the quality of what is learned, and the purpose for learning; developing gradually just as other reading skills are developed in the maturing child. It is complex because it includes all that we know of vocabulary skill, of the accuracy of recognition. From the definition above it is clearly known that comprehension is an important skill in the reading process. To get meaning from the text, the reader should use context analysis, prior knowledge and the vocabulary that has been learned before. To comprehend the text, the reader needs a strategy. Moore 1999:388 states that the strategy of reading comprehension such follows: a Before reading activities. In this stage, the reader should become aware of what he or she had been known about the subject before beginning to read. In the reading class, the teacher can activate and access their prior knowledge by calling attention through brainstorming and discussion. b During reading activities. During reading activities, the teacher helps the students to understand the text. This stage is started by recognizing the purpose of reading. The students should be led to confirm or redefine predictions, clarify ideas and construct meaning for each segment of information. These strategies can help students to assimilate new ideas, maintain interest and judgment of the text during their reading activity. Thus, students can become alert to the key vocabulary in the text; they can generate new questions, and also can evaluate the ideas presented by the author. Attention to during reading strategies can help students to select important ideas, connect existing ideas to new ones, and organize those ideas. c After reading activities. What the teacher does with students after reading is as important as what the teacher does both before and during reading. The activities that are used most frequently after reading, is an independent student activity or a group review. The independent activity typically consists of answering selected questions at the end of reading and the reviews are often strictly teacher centered, which tends to engender responses from students that are less than enthusiastic. The end of reading, the student should able to summarize the idea and confirm predictions, identify the gaps in learning, generate new questions and extend their learning beyond the information presented in the text.

C. Method in Teaching English Reading