Micro- and Macro-skills of Reading

efficient ways to read comprehensively since we can understand the words by using the text surrounding the words. Guessing words can save more time because the readers do not need to interrupt their reading by searching the words in the dictionary or asking to the other readers. Another way to guess the meaning of the words is by analyzing the word itself. The words can be analyzed by seeing the morphological structure of the words. For instance, looking for the derivational affixes such as prefixes de-, dis-, re-, etc and suffixes -able, -ity, -ous, etc may give clues to determine the part of speech of the words. Analyzing the words can also be done through looking for the root of the certain word, determining from the grammatical context, and looking at the semantic context or topic of the text According to Nation 2011: 249, there are fourteen difficulties commonly faced by children in reading, two of them are decoding or recognizing the printed words and linguistic comprehension. Both factors have big influences to the success of reading comprehension. It will be unsuccessful if the students cannot be familiar with the words and cannot understand the words that they have decoded. Hence, the reading comprehension cannot be seen from one perspective. Students who have ability in word recognition do not necessarily succeed in reading comprehension if their knowledge and understanding of the words are still poor. Moreover, Leach in Woolley 2011: 25 asserts that the unfamiliar words found in the text become the major problem for the primary schools students in reading comprehension. The level of words included in the text significantly influences to the readability level of the text. In addition, the difficulties of reading comprehension are not just influenced by word recognition and decoding, but many other factors are involved such as fluency, short-term memory, lack of strategies, and so on. In addition, Harmer 2001:203-205 presents that a number of problems arise in teaching reading, two of them are language and topic or genre. Firstly, the students will find it difficult to read the longer words or sentences rather than the shorter one. They cannot comprehend the text if there are so many difficult words found in a half of the text. Secondly, the students’ motivation in reading will decrease if the topic is unfamiliar or uninteresting. Based on the opinions explained above, we can emphasize that the difficulties of the students’ reading comprehension are categorized into two points: the students’ lack of vocabulary and the teacher’s lack in implementing the appropriate strategy to teach reading comprehension. Therefore, the Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy VSS is considered as the appropriate strategy to teach reading comprehension since it can help the students to understand the vocabulary found in the text by defining it based on the context of the text.