The Types of Classroom Reading Performance
However, Brown 2001:312 – 313 also mentions the disadvantages of reading
orally. He says that oral reading is not a very authentic language activity. While a student is reading, others can easily lose attention or prepare themselves for the next paragraph,
and it may have the outward appearance of students’ participation when in reality it is only a recitation.
The second type of reading performance is silent reading. It may be divided into intensive reading and extensive reading. Intensive reading is usually focused to develop
linguistic competence in which the teacher gives a short difficult text. Intensive reading also pays attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers and other surface details for
the purpose of complete and detailed understanding. Meanwhile, extensive reading is carried out to achieve literal meaning,
implications, and general understanding. It is usually somewhat longer text books, long articles, and other interesting reading materials. Extensive reading can help the learners to
get away from analysis or much look up unfamiliar words. Furthermore, Brown 2001:298-299 adds interactive processing as an additional
process in which a language is processed. 1 Bottom-Up Processing
In using bottom-up processing, readers start processing and analyzing a language from the narrow concepts to the broader concepts. It means that they try to understand the
linguistic aspects first such as: words meaning, synonyms, sounds and so forth. After that, they make use of the linguistic aspects to comprehend the discourse of the language in
both spoken and written texts. Smith 2004:234 defines bottom- up processing as “The
bottom-up view is outside-in, putting the text in charge, with the letters on the page the first and final arbiters of the readers responses.“ A clear explanation is proposed by
Brown 2001:299 in which he argues that readers must recognize the linguistic signals letters, morphemes, syllables, phrases, and etc. and make use of those linguistic signals
to draw the meaning of words and to understand the content of a text when they apply this process.
To sum up, in the bottom-up processing, it is important to understand the linguistic signals such as letters, morphemes, phrases and etc. Therefore, readers should
be able to recognize the words level of the text. After they understand the words level, they can try to make use of those signals to understand and to comprehend the content of
the text. 2 Top-Down Processing
Top-down processing requires readers to interpret a text by moving from the highest to the lowest unit analysis. According to Brown 2001:299, top-down processing
is a process done by the readers in which it involves the use of their experiences and background knowledge to comprehend the text.
In brief, top-down processing is a process in which the readers must look at the broad concepts first before looking at the narrow concepts or from the outside to the
inside of a text. In understanding the broad concepts, they make use of non-sensory information that can be from their experiences related to the topics, or their background
knowledge. 3 Interactive Processing
Interactive processing is the combination of top-down processing and bottom-up processing. It means that when readers are reading a text, they unconsciously use both
processing.
Classroom reading performance
extensive intensive
Skimming scanning global Brown 2000: 312
– 313 Figure 1 classroom reading performance