Levels of Reading Comprehension

14 teachers also provide students with necessary background. These pre-reading activities are also crucial since they elicit prior knowledge, build background, and serve to focus attention Ringler Weber, 1984. Background knowledge activation is the core of the beginning activity in this stage. It is in line with reciprocal teaching designed by Palincsar and Brown 1986. Predicting the content of the paragraph before reading is done as the initial phase. In addition, teacher could also teach some critical vocabularies that they need to understand the text Armbruster Osborn, 2002. 2 While Reading Activities In this activity, students are to interact with the text by the help of their relevant background knowledge. Thus, such interaction enables students to identify and understand the authors’ purpose, text structure, and content. However, it is necessary to develop the activity gradually William, 1984. The structure should be from global understanding of the text to smaller units. This is the right phase for the teacher to apply what strategy they would like to use. Other than that, Armbruster and Osborn 2002 remark that teachers are also expected to “encourage students to make inferences, draw conclusions, or predict outcomes”. Students are also expected to “record main ideas and supporting details, outline, and summarize” by the help of the teacher p. 86. 3 Post-reading Activities The essence of this last stage is drawing conclusion from what has been read. Besides, this post-activity also aims at measuring how far students 15 extend their background knowledge and understand the implicit meaning. After summarizing what they have read, students then seek for clarification on difficult points in the text. This is very important and useful because if students do not understand certain points in the text and ask teachers to clarify, there might be some misunderstanding or misconception. Eventually, it may lead them to incompleteness of the text comprehension. Furthermore, Armbruster and Osborn 2002 also suggest that: Post-reading activities should help students do something with what they have read in order to tighten the connection between prior knowledge and new information in the text. Teachers can encourage them to think critically and creatively about what they have read and to apply and extend their new learnings p. 87. Teacher could design such activities that can push students to do something after they read. Students might be invited to further questioning, discussion, andor writing.

e. Influential Factors in Reading Comprehension

In doing reading comprehension activities, it is undeniable that some factors are influential in the activity and the result as well. There are several internal factors that affect the readers’ succeeding in comprehending the text. Those are readers’ prior knowledge, reader’s motivation, reader’s skill, reader’s fluency, vocabulary, and physical characteristics Alderson, 2000. Although all factors are considered influential to one’s achievement in readi ng, the discussion will be about reader’s prior knowledge. This skill is supposed to be the initial step done by teachers and students. Students are PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 16 supposed to be accustomed to the activation of background knowledge prior to reading. Studies have shown that readers who activate their schemata, the “performance on reading tasks can improve as a result of such training” Alderson, 2000, p. 43. In reading a text, “readers actually bring information, knowledge, emotio n, experience, and culture” Those aspects are called schemata Brown, 2001, p. 358. Schemata are divided into two: formal and content schemata Carrell, 1983. Formal schemata include readers’ knowledge of the language and genres or text type. Meanwhile content schemata are more about knowledge of the content of the text. It includes knowledge of subject matter or topic, the world, and culture. As the word suggests, formal schemata mean readers’ background knowledge on formal surface. It is line with Nation 2005 that besides “the meaning of individual words, domain knowledge is also considered crucial for comprehension” p. 261. By possessing sufficient knowledge of the subject matter, readers are enabled to move from explicit words in a text to broader knowledge which is integrated from their prior knowledge. Even Chiesi, Spilich and Voss 1979 point out that readers’ background knowledge predicts their comprehension of the text. In formal schemata, the knowledg e includes readers’ knowledge of the language and text types Alderson, 2000. If someone reads in a foreign language, the process will be more complex and the comprehension might be