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.
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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.
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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.
4. Techniques of Reading
An appropriate technique helps readers or students to get comprehension or to improve their ability of reading. According to Ronald Mackay there are two
techniques in reading those are scanning and skimming. For further explanation as follows:
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1. Scanning
Scanning is that the reader pushing himself through a selection at an initially uncomfortable rate, but the search is more focused since the information
needed is very specific usually date, a number, or a place.
2. Skimming
Skimming is more complex than scanning; skimming is a quick reading for the general drift of a passage. It is an activity which is appropriate when there
is no time to read something carefully or when trying to decide it careful reading is merited. It is also a great way to review material that the reader
read before. The technique in reading including scanning and skimming is aimed to
comprehend the printed material as the reader read. However many teachers get misunderstanding about comprehension itself, they usually ask the students about
their comprehension by using conventional multiple choices, true false, or fill in the blank items on objective test.
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7
Ronald Mackay, Bruce Barkman and R.R Jordan, Reading A Second Language, Massachusetts: New Burry House, 1979, p.55.
8
John F Savage Jean F Mooney, Teaching Reading to Children with Special Needs, USA: Allyn and Bacon inc, 1979, p.30.