Predictive Skills Extracting Specific Information

to get meanings with sufficiently efficient speed. What follows are some activities which are worth doing in order to develop text-based processing skills. Thus, it can be concluded that reading comprehension is an action, interactive, interpretative, and active process of a person to look at and understand the meaning of written or printed words. In this case, the reading ability means the ability of the students in looking at and understanding the written or printed words. In relation to the statements, Harmer 1991: 183 states that readers or listeners employ a number of specialist skills when reading or listening and their success at understanding the content of what they see or hear depends to a large extent on their expertise in these specialist skills. He looks at six skills predictive skills, extracting specific information, getting the general picture, extracting detail information, recognizing function and discourse patterns, and deducing meaning from context.

a. Predictive Skills

Harmer 1991: 183 states that efficient readers or listeners predict what they are going to hear or read; the process of understanding the text is the process of seeing how the content of the text matches up to these predictions. As they continue to listen and read, however their predictions will change as they receive more information from the text.

b. Extracting Specific Information

Harmer 1991: 183 states that very often readers and listeners read something or listen to it because they want to extract specific bits of information- to find out a fact or two. They may quickly look through a film review just to find the name of the star. They may listen to the news, only concentrating when the particular item that interests them comes up. In both cases they may largely disregard the other information in the review or the news bulletin. They will be aware of this information and may even at same level take it in, but they do so at speed as they focus in on the specific information they are searching for. This skill when applied to reading is often called scanning. Crandall in Richards 2001: 273 also states that scanning activities that highlight key including technical vocabulary, as well as names, dates, places, and other important facts. In relation to these definitions, successful readers can scan things they read to locate facts or specific information. Another statement is stated by Mc Worter in Fauziati 2005: 144 that going over the text quickly while trying to pick out ideas will also provide background knowledge. Scanning involves quickly looking through a text, or surveying it, in order to find specific information Jordan, 1997: 17. In scanning, the candidate can quickly find: specific words or phrases; figures, percentages; specific items in index; specific names in bibliography or set of references Arthur Hughes, 2003: 138. From the descriptions it can be concluded that scanning is making a quick overview of a passage, looking for specific information.

c. Getting the General Picture