Overviews on the Nature of Reading

CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, the writer would like to discuss some theories related to the study. In the theoretical description, the writer presents overviews on the nature of reading, teaching reading, implementing the theories of reading to the developed materials, instructional design models, the competence-based curriculum for Junior High School, and the curriculum in school level KTSP. The second part, theoretical framework, is the guidance for the wr iter in conducting the study.

A. Theoretical Description

There are six points to be discussed in the theoretical description. They are overviews on the nature of reading, teaching reading, implementing the theories of reading to the developed materials, instructional design models, the competence- based curriculum for Junior High School, and the curriculum in school level KTSP.

1. Overviews on the Nature of Reading

Reading is known as one of the four language skills. According to Hafni 1981: 1, language can be viewed from the points of materials, product, and process. From the viewpoint of materials, reading is seen as a material in which the author encodes the information to the reader. As a product, reading affects information getting. Reading is considered a process; that is why, there is a transfer of information in it. In this process the readers employ their experiences, linguistic competence, and conceptual framework in processing the information. 11 Barnitz 1985: 3 states that reading is a complex communication process in which the mind of the readers interacts with the text in a particular setting or context. It means that during the reading process readers construct a meaningful representation of text through an interaction of their conceptual and their linguistic knowledge with cues which are in the text. Furthermore, Mitchell 1982: 1 also states that Reading can be defined closely as the ability to make sense of written of printed symbols. The reader uses the symbols to guide the recovery of information from his or her me mory and subsequently uses their information to construct a plausible interrogation of the writer’s message. Meanwhile, Clark and Silberstein, quoted by Asiyah 2000: 10, describe that reading is an active cognitive process of interacting with print and monitoring comprehension to establish meaning. It means that when the readers interact with the print, their prior knowledge is combined with the written information. Then, it will result in the comprehension about the message of the written information. Reading is viewed as a two-way process in which the author presents his idea through words, while the readers are reading the printed pages that contain certain ideas and experience the background knowledge that the readers process. ”The author’s socio-cultural, value system, and attitude background are needed to help the readers get something out of the reading” Widagdo, 1998 : 10. Therefore, moral lessons presented in the fables are learnt in order to shape the readers’ behavior in their society or community. Readers and text are two necessary elements involved in reading. Readers look at and understand what is written, but it does not mean that readers have to 12 understand everything in the text. Readers are not passive subjects who can only read letters, words, and sentences without unders tanding the content, but they are active subjects who are able to work on the text and able to come to the understanding without looking at every letter and word William, 1986: 2. In other words, readers are active subjects who can select and comprehend the information in the text. If readers, in this case students, are active subjects, teachers should know what reading materials their students want to read and what is suitable for the students’ level. As what is proposed by Davis 1997 about the area of language instruction, teachers of reading should constantly search for new and innovative materials to enhance learning in the formal classroom environment. A textbook is just a material that has been altered and simplified for the consumption of the learner. Davis believes that other materials should be introduced into the class to expose students, both physically and mentally, to the outside world, particularly in EFL settings where authentic models are scarce. Therefore, in this design, the writer would like to use fables as the supplementary reading materials in order to develop students’ reading ability. As a result, they would be accustomed to reading English textbooks from the simple to the complicated ones. Since fables are used as the supplementary reading materials in the design, the writer would also like to illustrate the meaning of fables and all of its characteristics. To begin with, a fable means a brief story that conveys some pointed statements of truth. Everything in a fable leads directly to the moral or message which is sometimes stated at the end Kennedy and Gioia, 1999: 4-5. Henceforth, the moral lessons taught in each fable take important part in the design because the 13 writer would like the students to learn something from the messages. The lessons would be very useful for them to improve not only their reading skill but also their attitudes in their societies. According to Kennedy and Gioia 1999: 5, the characters in a fable may be talking animals, inanimate objects, or people and supernatural beings. However, the characters are not widely developed in a fable because their actions are led to a certain message. By its very bareness and simplicity, fables seem to be designed to teach lessons about human life. It means that fables are read to let the readers understand what the message is. Therefore, the designed materials do not focus on the characters’ development of a story, but they offer some valuable moral lessons to the students.

2. Teaching Reading