Significance of the Study

2 Vocabulary Knowledge The ability to determine word meaning from context and determine oral equivalent of words with their meaning are aspects of vocabulary knowledge. It is vital for teacher to help their students improving the vocabulary knowledge, as students will explore more unfamiliar subjects later in their lives. In the vocabulary knowledge process, using context clues is handy, when students are about to find the word meaning, they can look for it in the sentence after or before the word. 6 3 Syntactic Knowledge In comprehension process, the knowledge of sentence syntax or word order is important. It includes grammatical rules in a sentence and is useful to determine meaning and pronunciations of words. Syntactic knowledge is learned by the students from their early years with the help from their oral language ability. 4 Discourse Knowledge Discourse knowledge includes the knowledge of structural organization of many types of writing, for example, an argumentative essay will begin by thesis statement and so on. It is useful for reading comprehension process, it fasten the students ability to understand the story. 5 Readiness Aspects Reading Readiness is the skill of students when they are about to read, it means the benefits in comprehending text before reading a specific material. Readiness includes knowledge of letter-names, left to right sequence of writing, the ability to see similarities and differences in shapes, oral language proficiency, ability to hear similarities and differences in sounds, ability to work cooperatively in small groups and the ability to sustain independent works. Readiness consist of pre reading activity such as developing background knowledge, learning new vocabulary words, and so on. 6 J. Leu and Kinzer op. cit. p. 31. 6 Affective Aspects Improving the students’ comprehension in reading would have a lot work to do. Making a comprehension learning session is often boring for students, and it is encouraged to use as creative as possible in a way of learning comprehension in reading.

b. Reading Comprehension Skill Characteristics

1 Fluency Fluency is one of the required skills in comprehension. It is about the ability to recognize the word meaning automatically in order to comprehend the sentence. However, fluency appears to be a larger influence in developing reading comprehension skills for younger readers compared to older ones. Yovanoff et al in their study, proved that as text becomes more challenging with each grade level, fluency becomes less predictive of reading comprehension and, instead, gives way to vocabulary. 2 Vocabulary and Semantic Processing Semantic processing is important in order to understand the meaning of the text. It means, students must understand the word meaning before comprehending the whole sentence. In one study of children from kindergarten through second grade, Roth, Speece, and Cooper discovered that vocabulary skills, such as oral definitions and word retrieval, were the best predictors of reading comprehension development. A similar study conducted by Berninger et al at-risk second graders revealed that verbal IQ was a statistically significant predictor of reading comprehension in both the beginning and end of school year assessments 3 Visualization. Another key component of reading comprehension is the active construction of a mental image of the text. Woolley stated that the mental image helps the