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terms of the degree to which their particular objective is fulfilled by the activity required by exercises Phiepho in Candlin, 1983, p.47.
2. Three levels of choosing exercises by teachers
McNeil, Donant, and Alkin in How to Teach Reading Successfully mentioned the three levels used by teachers to choose exercises. The levels are
goal level, the instructional objectives or skills level, and the activity level 1980, p. 8.
a. The goal level
A reading goal is one level of purpose for the guidance of educational activity p. 8. Statements of goals imply both values and commitment of
instruction for their attainment. b.
The instructional objectives or skills level An instructional objective is a statement of what pupils are supposed
know, be able to do, or believe as a result of instruction pp.8-9. c.
The activity level Activities or learning opportunities include the lessons, reading selections,
games, learning centers, discussions, cassettes, films, all of the things and events that learners engage in when learning to read p.9.
3. Types of exercise
Classroom tests and assessments play a central role in the evaluation of student learning. They provide relevant measures of many important learning
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outcomes and indirect evidence concerning others Miller, Linn, Gronlund, 2009, p.139. Many different types of assessment data might be useful in a
particular situation. The teaching-learning process involves a continuous and interrelated series of instructional decisions concerning ways to enhance student
learning p. 28. Assessment, on the other hand, may include both quantitative descriptions measurement and qualitative non-measurement of students as in
figure 2.1 p. 29. Tests and other assessments procedures can also be classified terms of
their functional role in classroom instruction Miller, Linn, Gronlund, 2009, p.38. The categorized are as follows.
a. Format of assessment
1 Selected-response test is that students select response to question from
available options. 2
Complex-performance assessment is that students construct extended response or performs in response to complex task p.45.
b. Use in classroom instruction
1 Placement assessment is concerned with the student’s entry performance and
typically focuses on questions. It is to determine student performance at the beginning of instructions.
2 Formative assessment is used to monitor learning progress during
instructions. Its purpose is to provide continuous feedback to both students and teachers concerning learning successes and failures. Formative assessment
depends on specially prepared tests and assessment for each segment of
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instruction. Because formative assessment is directed toward improving learning and instruction, the results are typically not used for assigning course grades. To
be effective tools of teaching and learning, formative assessments must be consistent with important student learning goals p.21. Teachers must be able to
control the time that formative assessments are administered and the choice of tasks that students are asked to perform. Thus, exercises are kind of formative
assessment. 3
Diagnostic assessment is a highly specialized procedure. It is concerned with the persistent or recurring learning difficulties that are left unresolved by
formative assessment. The aim of diagnostic assessment is to determine the causes of persistent learning problems and to formulate a plan for remedial action.
4 Summative assessment typically comes at the end of a course of instruction. It
is designed to determine the extent to which the instructional goals have been achieved and is used primarily for assigning course grades or for certifying
student mastery of the intended learning outcomes Miller, Linn, Gronlund, 2009, pp.38-39.
In planning for a reading assessment, for example, a list of the reading skills and the number of test items for measuring each skill may be sufficient for
specifying what the test is to measure Miller, Linn, Gronlund, 2009, p.149. Tests and assessments given during instruction provide the basis for formative
assessment p.141. Teachers commonly call these formative tests as learning tests, practice tests, quizzes, unit tests, and the like. Therefore, Basic Reading I
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used various types of test items as the exercise intended to develop the reading skills. The types of items used are as follows.
1. Supply type is the type that requires students to supply the answer p.151.
Both short answer and completion are the types that can be answered by a word, phrase, number, or symbol.
a. Short answer
Short answer uses to direct question. The short answer is suitable for measuring a wide variety of relatively simple learning outcomes p. 172. For
example, “what is the name of the man who invented the steamboat? Robert Fulton” p.172. Short-answer question provides possibility to interpret the
students’ response to see if they have really understood Alderson, 2000, p. 227. b.
Completion Completion is used to answer the incomplete statement. It is like fill in the
blank. For example, “the name of the man who invented steamboat is _________ Robert Fulton” p.172. Fill in the blank type required students to read a text,
read a summary of the same text, from which key words have been removed. Their task was to restore the missing words Alderson, 2000, p.240.
Both short answer and completion are common used in as follows. 1
Knowledge of terminology Example: “Lines on a weather map that join points of the same barometric
pressure are called _____________. isobar” Miller, Linn, Gronlund, 2009, p.172.
2 Knowledge of specifics facts
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Example: “A member of the United States Senate is elected to a term of ___________ years.” Miller, Linn, Gronlund, 2009, p.172
3 Knowledge of Principles
Example: “If the temperature of a gas is held constant while the pressure applied to it is increased, what will happen to its volume? It will decrease” Miller, Linn,
Gronlund, 2009, p.172 4
Knowledge of method or procedure Example: “What device is used to detect whether an electric charge is positive or
negative? electroscope” Miller, Linn, Gronlund, 2009, p.173 5
Simple interpretations of data Example: “How many syllables are there in the word Argentina?” Miller, Linn,
Grondlund, 2009, p.173 2.
Selection types is the type that requires the students to select the answer from a given number of alternatives p.151
a. Multiple-choice
Multiple-choice type is quite used in any textbooks for teaching reading, in fact, some exercises are developed with this type Alderson, 2000, p.204. On the
other hands, the answers of every question in multiple-choice type include the distractor to represent a reasonable misinterpretation of some part of the text. The
purpose of it is that if a learner responded with an incorrect choice, the nature of his misunderstanding would be immediately obvious, and could then be ‘treated’
accordingly Alderson, 2000, p.204. This type is used only one absolutely correct response Miller, Linn, Gronlund, 2009, p.195. The functions of multiple-
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choice type are measuring knowledge outcomes and measuring outcomes at the understanding and application levels pp.196-199.
b. True-False or alternative response
True-false is dichotomous items. Because of its apparent ease of construction, are items with only two choices. Students are presented with a
statement which is related to the text and have to indicate whether it is true or false, or whether the text agrees or disagrees with the statement Alderson, 2000,
p. 222. The most common use of the true-false items is in measuring the ability to identify the correctness of statements of facts, definitions of terms, statements
of principles, and the like Miller, Linn, Grondlund, 2009, p. 179. One of the useful functions is in measuring the students’ ability to distinguish fact from
opinion p. 180. The type also can become measures of understanding if the opinion statements attributed to an individual or group are new to students. The
task then becomes one of interpreting the beliefs held by individual or group and applying them to new situation. This type can measure the ability to recognize
cause-effect relationships. Here, students are to judge whether the relationship between the statements is true or false p.181.
c. Matching
The matching type consists of two parallel columns with each word, number, or symbol in one column being matched to a word, sentence, or phrase in
the other column Miller, Linn, Gronlund, 2009, p.186. In any event, the students’ task is to identify the pairs of items that are to be associated on the basis
indicated p.186. The typical matching type is limited to measuring factual
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information based on simple associations. It is a compact and efficient method of measuring such simple knowledge outcome. This type provides two sets of stimuli
which have to be matched against each other, for example matching headings for paragraphs to their corresponding paragraph Alderson, 2000, p. 215. On the
other hands, students are asked to match the options associated with a given keywords “Questions based on Bloom’s taxonomy”, n.d.
However, other exercise types used in Basic Reading I are as follows. 3.
Summary Summary is one of the variant of the free-recall test. Students read a text
and are required to summarize the main ideas, either of the whole text or a part, or those ideas in the text that deal with a given topic. The requirement is that
students needed to understand the main ideas of the text, to separate relevant from irrelevant ideas, to organize their thoughts about the text and so on, in order to be
able to do the task satisfactorily Alderson, 2000, p. 232. 4.
Reader’s log Reader’s log gave some benefits for students such as students had an
occasion to speak their mind and it could encourage students to read more. Quite often, the conversation strays off the actual topic of an article, and students were
able to express their feeling about important, sometimes personal, issues. In addition, reader’s log also gave the lecturers benefits like the lecturers could help
the students particularly the quite students to revise their estimation of the students’ abilities Mikulecky, 2000, p. 20.
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5. Games
Game, as Wright, Betteridge, and Buckby 2006, p. 1 stated that is an activity that is entertaining and engaging, often challenging, and an activity in
which learner play and usually interact with others. Games are used because language learning is a hard work, so that someone must make an effort to
understand, repeat accurately, to adapt, and to use newly understood language in conversation and in written composition; games provide one way of helping the
learners to experience language; by making language convey information and opinion, games provide the key features of ‘drill’ with the added opportunity to
sense the working language as living communication p. 2. Games can be done in group, individual, and pair work. Those types of
grouping give value in ensuring that each and every learner has optimum opportunity for oral practice in using language. Moreover, games have eight
types; they are ‘care and share’, ‘do: move, mime, draw, obey’, ‘identify: discriminate, guess, speculate’, ‘describe’, ‘connect: compare, match, group’,
‘order’, ‘remember’, and ‘create’ pp. 4-5. 6.
Reading aloud Reading passages can be dealt with in the following ways: silent reading,
reading aloud by the teacher, reading aloud by individual members of the class and choral reading Candlin, 1967, p. 23. Reading aloud used to be one of the
normal methods for giving students language practice. Students’ pronunciation mistakes were encouraged by that method, because students often had to
pronounce words that they had never seen before.
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In early years, the reading aloud is useful for giving practice in pronunciation, though the amount read by each student should be short. In case, if
they should read a long passage, attention will often be attracted to meaning, and pronunciation will be forgotten. In addition, reading aloud also can be used to
improve tone, rhythm, and fluency; that is, an expression exercise. P. Gurrey, 1955, pp. 97-98 as cited in Byrne, 1972, pp. 97-98
7. Speed Reading
Speed in reading should be carried out by all students particularly students of foreign language in order to increase their vocabulary and fluency of reading
Byrne, 1972, p. 100. Speed Reading was aimed that increasing the students’ reading rate reinforces that the idea that it is possible to understand a passage
without necessarily reading every word, relating to students’ reading assignments they who do not learn to read faster can spend three or four times longer than
others, and improving comprehension Mikulecky, 2000, p.54. 8.
Discussion Discussion is strictly speaking in task activities. The goal is nonlinguistic.
The idea is to get something done via the language, to read a text and do something with the information Long Crookes, 1992 as cited in Knutson,
1998. Whole tasks involve performance of reading in conjunction with other skills: listening, speaking, or writing. For example, students in a small group
might read a number of texts, such as brochures, timetables, or maps, and listen to radio weather or traffic reports in order to carry out the larger task of deciding on
the best method of transportation to use on a trip. In such an activity, each student
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deals with one category of information, and all students must communicate their information to one another to come up with the best plan for the trip Knutson,
1998. 9.
Online tasks Online task is a kind of online learning that uses computer and internet as
the medium. The computer is merely the vehicle that provides the processing capability and delivers the instruction to learners Clark, 2001 as cited in Ally,
n.d. Online learning is an educational material that is presented on a computer Carliner, 1999 as cited in Ally, n.d. Khan 1997 as cited in Ally, n.d defines
online instruction as an innovative approach for delivering instruction to a remote audience, using the Web as the medium. The aims of Online learning are to access
learning materials; to interact with the content, instructor, and other learners; and to obtain support during the learning process, in order to acquire knowledge, to
construct personal meaning, and to grow from the learning experience.
4. Theory on reading
