Levels of Reading Comprehension

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c. Levels of Reading Comprehension

Burn, Roe Ross propose four levels of reading comprehension: literal comprehension, interpretive comprehension, critical reading, and creative reading. 15 1 Literal comprehension The basis of literal comprehension is recognizing main ideas, details, causes and effect, and sequences. It is important since it is as prerequisite for higher-level understanding. It means that the literal comprehension question test the readers‟ ability to think within the text and consider what has been literally and explicitly stated. There is no hidden meaning so the reader can take what is presented at face level. 2 Interpretive comprehension Interpretive comprehension consist of 1 inferring main ideas of passages in which the main ideas are not directly stated; 2 inferring cause-and-effect relationships when they are not directly stated; 3 inferring referents of pronouns; 4 inferring referents of adverbs; 5 inferring omitted words; and 6 drawing conclusion. It means that interpretive meaning often hidden throughout the text and requires the use of inference and understanding the relationship between events and characters or causes and consequences. 3 Critical reading Critical reading is an activity in which the students are able to provide evaluation or take conclusion from a text accurately and compare the ideas in writing. A critical reader must be an active reader, who always asks, looks at the fact contained in the text to understand the meaning of the text itself. 4 Creative reading Creative reading involves going beyond the material presented by the author. It requires readers to think as they read. It can also help students creatively explore their reading skills in which teacher should be able to be a model in teaching learning process. 15 Burn Roe Ross, Teaching Reading in Today’s Elementary School, USA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990, p. 177. Review Of Related Literature 17 Based on four levels of reading classified by Burn, Roe and Ross, the researcher interprets that reading comprehension not only means comprehending or recognizing the main point of the text but also stimulating the readers to think critically during reading activity to make them become critical readers who are able to conclude the text accurately and compare the ideas. d. Reading Comprehension Strategies Brown states that reading comprehension is primarily a matter of developing appropriate, efficient comprehension strategies: 16 1 Identifying the purpose in reading Efficient reading consists of clearly identifying the purpose in reading something. By so doing, the reader knows what he is looking for and can weed out potential distracting information. 2 Using grapheme rules and patterns to aid bottom-up decoding for beginning level learner At the beginning level of learning English, one of difficulties students encounter in learning to read is making the correspondences between spoken and written English. Learners may need to be given hints and explanations about certain assumption that one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondence will be acquired with ease, other relationship might prove difficult. 3 Using efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension for intermediate to advance levels a To increase efficiency of reading by a few silent reading rules. b You don‟t need to “pronounce” each word to yourself c Try to visually perceive more than one word at a time, preferably phrases d Unless a word is absolutely crucial to global understanding, skip over it and try to infer its meaning through its context. 16 Brown, H. Dauglas, Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to language Pedagogy, United States of America: Longman, 2007, pp. 366 —371. Review Of Related Literature 18 4 Skimming Skimming consists of quickly running one‟s eyes across a whole text to get the gist. Skimming gives reader the advantage of being able to predict the purpose of the passage, the main topic or message, and some of developing supporting ideas. 5 Scanning Scanning is searching quickly for some particular piece of information in a text. Scanning exercise may ask learners to look for names or dates, to find a definition of a key concept, or to list certain specific information without reading through the whole text. 6 Semantic mapping or clustering The strategy of semantic mapping, or grouping ideas into meaningful clusters, helps the reader to provide some order to the chaos. Making such semantic maps can be done individually, but they make for a productive group work. 7 Guessing Learners can use guessing to their advantage to: a Guess the meaning of a word b Guess a grammatical relationship c Guess a discourse relationship d Infer implied meaning e Guess about cultural reference f Guess content message 8 Vocabulary analysis Several techniques are useful here: 1 look for prefixes, 2 look for suffixes, 3 look for roots that are familiar, 4 look for grammatical contexts, and 5 look at the semantic context topic for clues. 9 Distinguish between literal and implied meanings This requires the application of sophisticated top-down processing skills. The fact that not all language can be interpreted appropriately by attending to its literal, syntactic surface structure makes special demands on readers. 10 Capitalize on discourse makers to process relationships Review Of Related Literature 19 There are many discourse makers in English that signal relationship among ideas as expressed through phrases, clauses, and sentence. A clear comprehension of such markers can greatly enhance learners‟ reading efficiency. The researcher has similar ideas with the statement of Brown in which silent reading, skimming and scanning are the efficient reading strategies that can help the readers to achieve reading comprehension. The researcher also thinks that by knowing the purpose in reading and the reason why they want to read, the readers will get easiness of what they are looking for. Besides, giving explanation before reading can assist them to understand difficult assumption from the text. e. Micro-skills for Reading Comprehension There are several micro-skills for reading comprehension proposed by Brown. They are as follows: 17 1 Discriminating among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns of English. 2 Retaining chunks of language of different lengths in short- term memory. 3 Processing writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose. 4 Recognizing a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance. 5 Recognizing grammatical word classes nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., systems e.g. tense, agreement, and pluralization, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms. 6 Recognizing that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms. 7 Recognizing cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signaling the relationship between and among clauses. 17 Brown, Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. United States of America: Longman, 2001, p. 307 Review Of Related Literature 20 8 Recognizing the rhetorical forms of written discourses and their significance for interpretation. 9 Recognizing the communicative functions of written texts, according to form and purpose. 10 Inferring context that is not explicit by using background knowledge. 11 From events, ideas, etc., described, inferring links and connections between events, deducing causes and effects, and detecting such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification. 12 Distinguishing between literal and implied meanings. 13 Detecting culturally specific references and interpreting them in a context of the appropriate cultural schemata. 14 Developing and using a battery of reading strategies, such as scanning and skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning of words from context, and activating schemata for the interpretation of texts. Referring to the theories presented above, it suggests that reading comprehension is a complex process in which the reader interacts with the text to construct the meaning by means of his or her previous knowledge. Comprehension can be enhanced to the higher level if background knowledge can be activated by setting goals, asking questions, asking predictions, teaching text structure, and etcetera. Then, in order to support comprehension, the reader must equip him or herself with reading comprehension skills involving mentioning the main idea, getting explicit message, recognizing communicative function, interpreting and implicit meaning. By looking at Brown‟s theory, the researcher gets the point that micro skills for reading comprehension are recognizing the meaning, grammar used in the text and coherence of the sentences contained in the text besides defining the written symbol. In other words, it can be said that micro skills for reading comprehension involves explicit and implicit information. Review Of Related Literature 21

f. The Purpose of Reading