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creative response questions Burns, 1984: 203. The brief explanations are as follows:
a. Main Idea questions Asking students to identify the central theme of the selection
b. Detail questions Asking students for bits of information conveyed by the material
c. Vocabulary questions Asking students for the meaning of words used in the selection
d. Sequence questions Asking students to require knowledge of events in order of
occurrence e. Inference questions
Asking students for information that is implied or not directly stated in the material
f. Evaluation Questions Asking students for judgements about the material
g. Creative response questions Asking students to beyond the material and create new ideas based
on the ideas they have read The types of the questions above can be used by a teacher as the guidance
to construct the reading comprehension test items. In this research, the researcher used the types of questions to construct pre and post test.
7. Units of Reading Comprehension
According to Burns 1984: 151, the basic comprehension units in reading are words, sentences, paragraphs and whole selection. The brief explanations
are as follows. a. Comprehending words Vocabularies
Vocabulary development is an important component of comprehension skill. Students comprehend the printed page only to understand the
specific meaning of essential word used by the author.
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b. Comprehending sentences Student may find complicated sentences difficult to understand, so
they need to know ways to attack them or derive the meaning. By asking who, what, where and why questions detail information can
help students identifying a noun to which pronoun refers reference and good punctuation which represent pauses and pitch changes that
would occur if the passage were read aloud can be applied as some ways to increase sentence comprehension.
c. Comprehending paragraphs Paragraphs are group of sentence that serve a particular function within
a whole selection or passage. They may be organized around main idea or topic. Understanding their functions, their general organization and
the relationship between the sentences in a paragraph is important to reading comprehension.
d. Comprehending whole selection The entire selections consist of words, sentences and paragraphs and
that understanding of whole selections depends upon understanding the smaller units. Teacher may use a number of strategies to help students
understand whole selection, including, the cloze procedure, semantic webbing, listening-reading transfer lesson and story grammar
activities.
8. Construct
Reading is an active process to obtain meaning from the written text. Readers should bring their knowledge of the language, knowledge of the
writing system and ability to interpret to get meaning from the text. In other word, reading is an activity that needs comprehension and
interpretation of written language in which readers must be aware of an idea, understand it in terms of their experiential background and interpret it in
relation to their own needs and purpose. In the teaching and learning process, a teacher must understand and help the students to solve the causes of
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students’ difficulties in comprehending the text. Moreover, knowledge of the causes may help the teacher to prevent the occurrence of serious deficiencies.
After knowing the problems, a teacher should understand the skills of reading based on the reader’s purpose; they can be used as a guidance to plan
the way how to make students comprehend what is read by them. The basic comprehension units in reading are words, sentences,
paragraphs, and the whole selection. In this study, the indicators of reading comprehension that should be achieved by students are:
a. the ability to identify word meanings in the text, such as synonym and
antonym. b. the ability to identify detail information and reference of a text
c. the ability to identify the main idea of the text
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B. Teaching Reading
