If either lets the other down, communication fails. That is why reading is regarded as an interactive process.
2. Kinds of Reading
a. Intensive Reading
In intensive reading, as the term indicates, each vocabulary and structural item is explained and made as fact of the students’ active language, pronunciation,
and intonation are stressed, and each concept allusion is clarified. Besides intensive reading is used to gain a deep understanding of a text, which is
important for the reader. The process of scanning takes a more prominent role here than skimming.
Absolutely we need to make distinction between extensive reading and intensive reading. The term intensive reading refers to the detailed focus on the
construction of reading texts which takes place usually but not always in classrooms. Here, the student looks at extract from magazines, poems, internet,
websites, novels, newspapers, plays and a wide range of other text genres.
4
Intensive reading is usually accompanied by study activities. The teacher may ask students to work out what kind of text they are reading. Look for details
of meaning, look at particular uses of grammar and vocabulary and then use the information in the text to move on to other learning activities and the teacher also
encourage them to reflect on different reading skill.
b. Extensive Reading
Extensive reading should involve reading for pleasure what Richard Day calls joyful reading, the reader deals with longer texts as a whole, which requires
the ability to understand the component parts and their contribution to the overall meaning. Example: reading newspaper article, short story or novel.
According to Jeremy Harmer that one of the fundamental conditions of a successful extensive reading program is that students should be reading material
which they can understand.
4
Jeremy Harmer, How to Teach English, Pearson: Longman, 2007, new edition, p. 99.
This is enhanced if students have a chance to choose what they want to read, if the students are struggling to understand every word, the students can
hardly be reading for pleasure. It is the main goal of this activity. This means that English teachers need to provide books which either by chance or because they
have been especially written, are readily accessible to the students.
5
3. Models of Reading
There are three complementary ways in processing a text.
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Those ways are as follows:
a. Bottom-Up Models
These models assume that reading involves the way the reader builds up a meaning from the text by creating a piece by piece mental translation.
Recognizing letters and words and working out sentence structures are conducted in a linear fashion. In this case, the reader must scrutinize the
vocabulary and syntax to meet the same point of view as the writer intended.
b. Top-Down Models
Top-Down Models state that r eading depends on the readers’ expectations
which is conducted to draw inferences and to interpret assumptions. The readers have their own set of goals while reading a text. They direct their eyes
to the most likely place where the useful information can be found. Furthermore, the reader may try to see the overall purpose of the text or get a
rough idea of the pattern of the writer’s argument.
c. Interactive Models
These models take useful ideas from a bottom-up perspective and combine
them with the key ideas from top-down views. Practically, a reader shifts from one focus to another, adopting top-down models to predict the probable
meaning, than moving to the bottom-up approach to check whether that is really what the writer says.
5
Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching, op.cit., p. 283.
6
William Grabe and Fredrika L. Stoller, Teaching and Reasearching Reading, England: Pearson Education, 2002, pp. 32
– 33.
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