Teaching Reading in Junior High School

1 Principle 1: Reading is not a passive skill. To be successful in reading, the students need to work actively, like understanding what the words mean, working with the grammar and structure, seeing the pictures if provided, and understanding the arguments. 2 Principle 2: Students need to be engaged with what they are reading. This will give benefits if the students pay a lot of interests on what they are reading. 3 Principle 3: Students should be encouraged to respond to the content of a reading text, not just to a language. The students should be given chances to give comments about the topic. The focus of the reading activity is not only the language, but the content as well. 4 Principle 4: Predicting is a major factor in reading. Hints are needed before the students read. The hints can be from the book covers, the photographs, the headlines or from the teacher. 5 Principle 5: The teacher should match the task to the topic. The teacher should design a challenging and interesting task to the students so that they will not get bored with the activity. 6 Principle 6: Good teachers exploit reading texts to the full. The follow-up to the tasks is a discussion about the text. The discussion can be about the favorite characters in the text or the most interesting things in the text. The principles above should be considered by the teacher when teaching reading to junior high school students. Those principles should be a consideration in designing the materials, media, and activities in the classroom.

c. Characteristics of Junior High School Students

Before teaching the high school students, the teachers need to understand about the characteristics of the students. The eighth grade students of junior high schools are teenagers whose ages are between 13-15 years old. Brown 2001: 92 said that the teens are an age of transition, confusion, self-consciousness, growing, and changing bodies and minds. They are in the position between childhood and adulthood so that the teacher needs to consider this factor when teaching them. According to Harmer 2002: 39, teenagers, if they are engaged, have a great capacity to learn, a great potential for creativity, and a passionate commitment to things which interest them. Adolescents are in the phase when they are still looking for an individual identity, so it is necessary for the teachers to think about their inner potentials, to give them more guidance, and to be motivated in learning process. Some teenage students particularly may be disruptive in the class. This can be caused by the needs of self-esteem and peer approval that may provoke them for being disruptive. Additionally it can also be caused by the boredom affected by many problems outside the class. Nevertheless this is determined by the position of the teachers. The students will be happy if the teachers manage to control them and help them solving their problems with a supportive and constructive ways rather than shouting or scolding them.

d. Teaching Reading to Junior High School Students