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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 for example
enumerative, additive, logical sequence, explicative, illustrative and contrastive.
Nuttall 1996 argues that it is important to know the students problems in reading to decide what strategy to use. The students need to know how the
strategies work through modeling and they need to practice them a lot Lems et al., 2010.
f. Teaching Reading Comprehension
Teaching reading comprehension is essential because reading is the most important activity in any language class. Besides it becomes a medium to get
information, it is also a means for expanding students‟ knowledge about language Rivers, 1981. According to Brown 2001, reading can be divided into silent
reading and oral reading or reading aloud. Oral reading is taught to beginning and intermediate students of English while silent reading is taught to intermediate and
advance level students. The stages of reading lesson according to Brown 2001 and Vaughn
Bos 2009 can be summarized as follows: 1
Before reading In this stage, the teacher should introduce the topic of the text that the students
will read in order to activate the students‟ background knowledge. The teacher should also introduce strategies of reading such as skimming, scanning,
predicting, activating schemata, and other strategies that can help students
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understand the text. The teacher may also assist the students to think about how the text they read may be related to other texts. The use of prompts such
as visuals, realia, photos, etc is recommended Gower et al., 1995. 2
During reading In this stage, the teacher monitors the students‟ comprehension by encouraging
them to self-questions. 3
After reading In this stage, the teacher may provide follow-up activities such as discussing
the content of the text, retelling the text, answering comprehension questions, learning vocabulary found in the text, identifying the author‟s purpose, etc.
g. Principles in Teaching Reading Comprehension
In order to have a good impact on the students‟ comprehension, teachers should teach reading by principles. Anderson 2003 proposes eight principles of
teaching reading as follows: 1
Exploit the reader‟s background knowledge As it has been stated that background knowledge helps students comprehend
the text Brown Yule, McCarthy Carter, Cook, Nunan in McDonough Shaw, 2003; Spratt et al., 2005; Shrum et al., 2005; Day Bamford, 1998, it
is important to activate the students‟ background knowledge in pre-reading activity. The activities can be asking goals, asking questions, making
predictions, teaching text structure, etc. Anderson, 2003.
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2 Build a strong vocabulary base
It is valuable to teach the students how to guess the meaning of a difficult word from the context.
3 Teach for comprehension
It is more important to model how to comprehend a text rather than testing reading comprehension.
4 Work on increasing reading rate.
The teacher should develop fluent readers, not speed readers. One of the ways is by reducing students‟ dependence of a dictionary because they look for
every word in a text so it will take a long time to read. 5
Teach reading strategies Anderson, 2003; Brown, 2001; McDonough Shaw, 2003
Strategic reading is “not only knowing what strategy to use, but also how to use and integrate a range of strategies Anderson, 1991 in Anderson, 2003.
6 Encourage readers to transform strategies into skills
Strategies are conscious actions or plans equipped by learners to achieve a particular goal or to solve problems they have in reading Anderson, 2001;
Moreillon, 2007; Oxford, 1990 while skills are “strategies that has become
automatic” Anderson, 2001. The teacher should make the strategies automatic to be employed by the students with a lot of practices.
7 Build assessment and evaluation into your teaching
Assessment and evaluation can be done quantitatively or qualitatively. In quantitative assessment, the teacher can assess the students‟ reading
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competency and reading rate with tests. Meanwhile, qualitative assessment can be done using reading journal responses, reading interest surveys and
responses to reading strategy checklist. 8
Strive for continuous improvement as a reading teacher Anders, Hoffman, and Duffy in Anderson 2003 argue that a good teacher
needs to understand the nature of reading process.
h. The Teaching of Reading in SMP N 3 Pakem
