7. Problems of Reading
Some students might fail at reading unlike other students. There are many things that can cause this to happen. It could be physical or mental factor
furthermore it could be the situation or bad habits that develop unconsciously by students in their early years. In this section, problems of reading will be divided
into six parts, common reading problems, physical factor reading disability, intellectual factor, emotional factor, sociocultural factor, and school factor.
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a.
Physical factor reading disability
Students with low reading rates or lacking on certain understanding of text could be having a physical condition called dyslexia. Dyslexia is a condition
where a person has difficulties in decoding alphabet and thus resulting in difficulties when reading words. Children who suffer brain damage at birth will
find difficulties in reading word symbols too. They get confused with letters and affect their perception on it which resulting in interference with word recognition.
Most of the case, children with brain damage are easily distracted and hyperactive, only high skilled teachers can successfully teaching them to read.
b.
Intellectual Factors
In a group of children with high intellect, they tend to be a good reader. They can do several tasks that require reading with no problem. While children with
average intellectual, they have some difficulties in reading task and have no problem in task that requires no reading. The ability to remember sequence of
letters and words could be a factor in learning to read. Teacher can help students improving their ability to manage visual symbols.
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Robert Karlin. Teaching Elementary Reading: Third Edition. New York: Harcourt BRACE Jovanovich Inc., 1980, p. 448.
c. Emotional Factors
Children may experience failure in school because of their incapability to handle emotions. Psychologists have studied that problematic children with
insecurity, hostility, dependency can resist and even hate reading. In this case, children can be given treatment to relieve them from pressure and encourage them
to read. It has been proved that treatment not only helping students to read more but also effective for children personal adjustment.
d.
Sociocultural Factors
There are enough evidences that student with higher socioeconomic classes are far better readers than other. In this case, students with higher culture can read
proper English than students who speak dialects having hard time in written Standard English. this can be helped with reading program from the school,
parents and teacher together they motivates students and provide them variety in activities and books to read.
e.
School Factors
The school factors problem in reading is mainly from the teacher. If the teacher could not provide special instruction for student with reading problems,
they can fail and it will become worse. School administration can be blamed too if they could not provide support for teacher. They give teacher a large classroom
that is decreasing the teacher confidence to provide student in need.
B. Narrative Text 1. Definition of Narrative Text
Chatman in his book, state that narrative is a compiled series of events that ends with conclusion.
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That means Narrative text is a compiled sequence of problematic events, it always ends with resolution from the problems. In Narrative
text, plot became the main content, Gordon and Kuehner stated that plot could be
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Seymour Chatman, Reading Narrative fiction, Texas: Macmillan Publishing: 1993.
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