Teaching Reading Comprehension in Junior High School

19 define assessment as a systematic approach to collecting information and making inferences about the ability of a student or the success of a teaching course. Furthermore, Brown 2004 classifies assessment into some categories. Among of them are informal and formal assessments. Informal assessment is incidental and unplanned. It occurs during the whole process of teaching-learning activities in the class. However, teachers cannot make fixed judgement about a learners competence based on the result of this informal assessment. Meanwhile, formal assessment is exercises or procedures specifically designed to assess learners achievement at the end process of teaching-learning activities. One way to perform formal assessment is by conducting tests. Unlike speaking and writing, the reading process and product cannot be seen and observed spesifically. For this reason, all assessments of reading must be carried out by inference Brown, 2004:186. Some considerations are needed in designing assessment of reading, such as the types of genres of written text, the components of reading ability, and specific tasks. Furthermore, the types of reading performance will influence the assessment tasks as well. Brown 2004:189 lists a number of possible tasks for assessing perceptive, selective, interactive and extensive reading. Related to the specifications of reading in this study that is assessing learners interactive reading performance so there are three types of possible assessment tasks applied as follow: 1 Impromptu Reading Plus Comprehension Questions. This kind of test gets test-takers to read a passage and answer a set of questions. The question 20 items cover the comprehension of features such as mainideas, expressionsidiomsphrases in context, inference, grammatical features, details, unstated details, supporting ideas, and vocabulary in context. 2 Short-Answer Tasks. In this type of task, a reading passage is presented and test-takers read questions that must be answered in a sentence or two. This type of task requires consistent specifications for acceptable student responses. 3 Ordering Tasks. In ordering tasks, as the name implies, learners receive little strip of paper; each with a sentence on it, and then construct them into a story. These tasks can serve as an assessment of overall global understanding of a story and of the cohesive devices signalling the order of events and ideas. Those three types of tasks can be given either in the form of multiple-choicequestions or open-ended questions. Especially for open- ended questions, Richardson et al. 2001 state that it is important that the assessment is done systematically in order that all learners are assessed on the same basis. Criteria are required to evaluate learners reading performance since learners understanding upon the text is not only a matter of communicating it to themselves but also enabling them to communicate it to others. There must be two criteria to evaluate learners reading performance such as the correctness and the accuracy of their answers. 21

9. Recount Text

Recount text is one of the text genres that should be mastered by the grade VIII learners of junior high school. It is a type of text that retells past events. This type of text usually retells orders in which events happened. The purpose of a recount text is to give audience a description of what event occurred and when it occurred. Recount texts consist of several paragraphs. The first paragraph called orientation. It gives background information about who, what, where, and when. The next paragraphs tell events in which they happened. The writer sometimes presents a concluding paragraph at the final paragraph of the text. In addition to the generic structure, recount texts also contain specific language features. According to Knapp and Watkins 2005, readers need to recognize grammar so they can effectively handle the information presented in the text for a range of purposes. Other language features usually found in a recount text are proper nouns. They identify those that are involved in the text, descriptive words to give details about who, what, when, where, and how, the use of past tense to retell the events, and words that show the order of events.

10. The Nature of Direct Reading Thinking Activity DR-TA Strategy

Directed Reading-Thinking Activity DR-TA strategy is the teaching of reading strategies developed by Russell Stauffer. DR-TA strategy is used in each of the three stages of reading: before reading, while reading, and after reading. It can be implemented both in groups and individually. In DR-TA strategy, predictions play an important role to provide learners with reading purposes. The teacher can raise questions that help learners activate their prior knowledge and 22 uses clues such as the title and pictures from the text to stimulate the learners to make an accurate prediction. The teacher should also pre-teach vocabulary because vocabulary is considered important to support learners making an accurate prediction of the text. DRTA strategy can be adapted for any material and any level of difficulty and may be used for both group and individual use Vacca Vacca inRenn, 1999:22. The value of Directed Reading-Thinking Activity strategy is making predictions before reading each section Odwan, 2012:141. This value is linear with the process of acquiring comprehension that is activating learners background knowledge and experiences. Learners are encouraged to use context and clues and to set up the purpose of reading. In implementing DR-TA strategy, readers should make predictions before reading a text. To make predictions, they should use any hint that they find in the text and their background knowledge of the text. Then, their reading purpose is to find whether their predictions about the text are accurate or not. In addition, DR-TA strategy is also beneficial to improve learners reading skill especially in recognizing the relationship among segments or paragraphs that related to cohesive aspect in reading.

11. Teaching Learning Process Using Direct Reading-Thinking Activity DR-TA Strategy

As this study employs the use of DR-TA strategy, teaching and learning process includes steps for both the teacher and learners. The steps require the learners to set reading purposes and make predictions, read a text, verify and