Reading Comprehension and Its Affecting Factors

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4. Types of Reading

a. Perceptive.

Perceptive reading tasks involve attending to the components of larger stretches of discourse: letters, words, punctuation, and other graphemic symbols.

b. Selective.

This category is largely an artefact of assessment formats. In order to ascertain one’s reading recognition of lexical, grammatical, or discourse features of language within a very short stretch of language, certain typical tasks are used: picture-cued tasks, matching, truefalse, multiple-choice, etc.

c. Interactive.

Included among interactive reading types are stretches of language of several paragraphs to one page or more in which the readers must, in a psycholinguistic sense, interact with the text.

d. Extensive.

Extensive reading applies to text of more than a page, up to and including professional articles, essays, technical report, short stories, and books.

5. Reading Comprehension and Its Affecting Factors

Reading comprehension is the core of reading activity. It means that comprehending a text in order to convey the meaning is an influential factor the success of reading process. Francoise Grelet 1986: 3 states that reading comprehension is understanding a written text. It means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible. Comprehension involves all elements of the reading process working together as a text is read to create a representation of the text in the reader’s mind. It can be commit to user 15 concluded that reading comprehension is how the reader uses hisher skills in reading process as an integrated skills to extract or convey meaning from the text that is being read. Aebersold and Field 2000: 15 the process of comprehending involves decoding the writer’s words and then using background knowledge to construct an approximate understanding of the writer’s message. The process of comprehending a text is not so exact since reading is a personal activity. It means that reading comprension differs from one reader to another. For example: Dear and Nais who read the same text about Herman’s family. Dear can understand the content of the text. To show his understanding, he ilustrates the Herman’s family in form of tree diagram. Meanwhile, Nais can not do as the former can do. She summarizes the text into a short paragraph. She understands the text but she has different technique to show up. It is a fact that most students have difficulties in comprehending a text. Those difficulties cause deficiency in the reading process. Inadequate comprehension is usually created by some factors. Cushenberry 1985: 62 in Muhtar 2010: 10 there are several factors which influence reading comprehension is not optimum. They are: a. Emotional Factor Learners usually become severly frustrated when they are not able to comprehend reading material satisfactorily. Their unsuccessful commit to user 16 attempts to read, which makes them conspicuous in a socially unfavorable way, are the reason they are disappointed and ashame. Children who are depressed have great difficulty in reading. Their home environment which not harmonious with their psychology problems can hinder their concentration b. Intelligence Comprehension Wolf 1987: 307 in Muhtar 2010: 10 reading comprehension can be defined as information processing. It assumes that reading comprehension is a cognitive process, First, the input is perceived in its visual mode and then it is processed in a general cognitive level. Therefore, a particular level of comprehension needs a particular level of intelligence. There are different levels of intelegence needed in dealing with comprehension at the literal, interpretive, critical,and creative level. c. Physical factors Learners who have health problem such as obesity, malnutrition, neurological difficulties and granular disturbances may have a significant negative impact on reading in general and comprehension. commit to user 17 d. Background Experience Those who have limited experiences with words in the number of setting will have difficulty with comprehension in general because of their low level of schemata . Besides, Baker and Brown 1985: 32 in Muhtar 2010: 11 the ability to grasp the logical organization of the text is firmly rooted in the reader’s prior knowledge of the world. If a reader does not have the relevant background information, it may be difficult or imposible for him to detect the logical organization of the text being read. It can be said that efficient comprehension requires the ability to relate the textual material to the reader’s existing or prior knowledge.

6. The Level of Reading Comprehension