Meanwhile, the extensive reading requires the students to choose the text by their own based on their interest. It is usually done outside of the class
time in which they can read the longer text like books and essays which they can understand. Thus, the extensive reading has purposes to prompt
the students to read for pleasure or even to read for understanding.
c. Micro- and Macro-skills of Reading
In reading comprehension, there are some micro- and macro-skills that should be mastered by the students. Brown 2004: 187-188 lists out
the micro- and macro-skills of reading comprehension, as follows:
Micro skills
1 Discriminate among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.
2 Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-terms memory.
3 Process writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.
4 Recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.
5 Recognize grammatical word classes nouns, verbs, etc. systems e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization, patterns,
rules, and eliptical forms. 6 Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in
different grammatical forms. 7 Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their
role in signaling the relationship between and among clauses.
Macro skills
8 Recognize the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation.
9 Recognize the communicative functions of written texts, according to form and purpose.
10 Infer context that is not explicit by using background knowledge.
11 Infer links and connections between events, ideas, etc., deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main
idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplication.
12 Distinguish between literal and implied meanings. 13 Detect culturally specific references and interpret them in a
context of the appropriate cultural schemata. 14 Develop and use a battery of reading strategies such as
scanning and skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning of words form context, and activating
schemata for the interpretation of texts.
d. Strategies for Reading Comprehension
Before teaching reading comprehension, the teacher should consider some strategies that are appropriate to be applied in the
classroom. Brown 2007: 132-136 proposes two types of strategy: learning strategies and communication strategies. He considers reading as
the receptive skill that is involved to the learning strategy. Some strategies such as bottom-up and top-down processing, predicting,
guessing from context, brainstorming, and summarizing have been conducted by the prior research and have been succeed to be taught as the
reading strategies. Furthermore, Brown 2001:306-310 proposes ten strategies which
can be applied in teaching reading comprehension. 1 Identify the purpose in reading.
2 Use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding especially for beginning level learners.
3 Use efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension for intermediate to advanced levels.
4 Skim the text for main ideas. 5 Scan the text for specific information.
6 Use semantic mapping or clustering. 7 Guess when you aren’t certain.
8 Analyze vocabulary. 9 Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
10 Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationships.
