9
e. Organizing strategies: track new information, construct and sort
meaning, and enhance retention.
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Those reading strategies can help students achieve one thing, that is understanding the text as easy as possible. On the other side, not all students
can construct perfect understanding and comprehending of a text with just the first reading. For those students who experience it, they will reread the text.
In addition, Lewin also proposes some reading repair strategies to get better understanding of a text. Those strategies as below:
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a. Reread an important part slowly to really get it.
b. Read a passage aloud softly to hear the words spoken.
c. Find out for sure which event happened before or after another
event. d.
Reread a key passage to see if you agree or disagree with it. e.
What do you think of the author’s decision to fill in something specific to the text in question?
f. Hunt for a key vocabulary word in its context to determine its
meaning. g.
Skim for evidence to prove or disprove that fill in something specific to the text in question.
h. Reread the title and change it to something better.
i. Return to the part where fill in something specific to the text in
question and look for some important insight. Those reading repair strategies can help students to recall information
from the first reading previously. They are great help to build better understanding of text. Good readers realize that go back to the text to read
again can increase understanding.
10
Larry Lewin, Paving the Way Reading and Writing: Strategies and Activities to Support Struggling Students in Grades 6-12, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003, p. 21.
11
Ibid., p. 49.
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4. Reading Ability
So far, readers only point out about information they have. Actually, readers not only have information, but also readers have abilities. Abilities are
not only to learn new information, but also abilities to deal with information. It is able to notice the difference between good readers and poor
readers, or good understanding and poor understanding. It is not only the ability to start the suitable drawing of the text, but also the cognitive ability to
understand the text and especially the description arrangement of the texts. As mentioned above, some reading researchers have attempted to
discover what verbal skills are needed to text comprehension and to recognize reading skills or abilities by giving a variety of passages and asking them
questions in order to test different levels of understanding those passages. One of reading researchers defines eight skills such as recalling word
meanings, drawing inferences about the meaning of a word in context, finding answers to questions answered explicitly or in paraphrase, weaving together
ideas in the content, drawing inferences from the content, recognizing a writer’s purpose, attitude, tone, and mood, identifying a writer’s technique,
and following the structure of a passage.
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5. The Problems in Understanding Texts
Many factors of text may tend to be difficult for students in reading process. Those factors can influence the students’ understanding becomes not
good enough. Nuttal points out that the factors include concepts, vocabulary and sentence structure, cohesive device, discourse markers, and problems
beyond the plain sense.
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Meanwhile, Alderson adds that the factors are text topic and content, text types and genres, literary and non-literary texts, text
organization, traditional linguistic variables, and text readability
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In addition, Lems and friends explain about the text structure specifically:
“Text structure affects the length of a text and the section in it, how it is subdivided headings, how material is summarized through indexes,
12
Alderson, op. cit., p. 9-10.
13
Nuttall, op. cit., p. 83.
14
Alderson, op. cit., p. 61-74.
