Critical Reading Factors Influencing Reading Comprehension

must understand what he reads. It can be said that in reading comprehension, there should be an interaction between the author and the reader. The author expresses his ideas in the form of written language and the reader has to understand the meaning of the text intended by the author. To be able to achieve the purposes of reading comprehension, one should have some basic reading skills as follows; 1 literal skills getting the central thought and the main idea, recalling and recognizing of facts and information, finding answers to specific questions; 2 interpretive skills drawing conclusions, generalizing, deriving meaning from context; 3 critical skill determining the writer’s purpose; and 4 creative skills applying information into daily life. In relation to the study, those skills can be implemented in two levels of understanding as follows: a. Reading the lines Learners are able to understand the literal meaning i.e., responding to the precise meaning of familiar words in their context and inferring the meaning of unfamiliar words from contextual clues and also visualizing the scenes and events the words conjure up. b. Reading between the lines Learners are able to get the writer’s intent and purpose, to interpret clues to character and plot, and to distinguish between fact and fiction. Based on the definition above, teaching reading comprehension is a guidance that is done by the teacher to enable learners to reach comprehension of the text using a certain technique. The teacher can lead the learners to understand a text using some strategies on reading comprehension.

8. Pre-reading Activities

Anderson 1999 emphasizes that there is research conducted by second language reading researchers showing that reading comprehension and skills are enhanced when prior knowledge is activated. Adequate data also suggest that inducing appropriate schemata through suitable pre-reading activities is likely to be beneficial. . Zhang 1993 concludes that comprehension is facilitated by explicitly introducing schemata through pre-reading activities; therefore, the pre-reading stage helps in activating the relevant schema. In fact, pre-reading activities motivate students before the actual reading takes place. Anderson 1999 suggests some classroom activities to facilitate the activation of prior knowledge that can be classified as the following: a. Pre-reading discussion or anticipated guides: The teacher asks questions about the topic intended to challenge students’ knowledge and beliefs about the content of the passage. b. Semantic mapping: It is similar to brainstorming. The readers may be given a key word or concept related to the reading materials. Then the teachers ask them to generate words and concepts associated with the key words. Students can link ideas and concepts they know to the new one that will be learned.