the meaning conveyed in a text. Though it sounds simple, reading is a skill that needs a great deal of practices as an active process. In order to understand the content of a text, a
reader first should be able to pronounce the words and to “read” pictures before he or she
makes meaningful interpretation from the words and the pictures.
Meanwhile, Alderson 2000:3 defines reading as an interaction between the reader and the text. In the process of reading, the reader also thinks about what it means
to him, how it relates to things he knows and to what he expects to come next into the texts. Moreover, Smith 2004:2 defines reading as making sense of something and then
interpreting it. In line with Smith, Urquhart and Weir in Grabe 2009:14 argue that reading is the process of receiving and interpreting information asserted from visual or
written form. In brief, it can be concluded that reading is an active cognitive process of getting
the author’s idea through interpreting the written symbols. In the process of reading, the readers are influenced by their past experiences, language background, cultural
framework, and the purpose for reading.
b. The Types of Classroom Reading Performance
In the reading activity, the students may conduct two activities, which are reading silently and reading aloud. Brown 2001:312
– 313 mentions that there are two types of classroom reading performance, namely oral and silent reading. The first of reading
performance is oral reading. Sometimes, the teacher asks the students to read orally. At the beginning level and intermediate level, oral reading can be useful as an evaluating
check on bottom – up processing skills, check on the pronunciation and can be useful to
add some extra student participation if the teacher wants to emphasize a short part of a reading passage. Meanwhile, for advanced level, oral reading can be useful to add some
extra student participation if the teacher wants to emphasize a certain short part of reading passage.
However, Brown 2001:312 – 313 also mentions the disadvantages of reading
orally. He says that oral reading is not a very authentic language activity. While a student is reading, others can easily lose attention or prepare themselves for the next paragraph,
and it may have the outward appearance of students’ participation when in reality it is only a recitation.
The second type of reading performance is silent reading. It may be divided into intensive reading and extensive reading. Intensive reading is usually focused to develop
linguistic competence in which the teacher gives a short difficult text. Intensive reading also pays attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers and other surface details for
the purpose of complete and detailed understanding. Meanwhile, extensive reading is carried out to achieve literal meaning,
implications, and general understanding. It is usually somewhat longer text books, long articles, and other interesting reading materials. Extensive reading can help the learners to
get away from analysis or much look up unfamiliar words. Furthermore, Brown 2001:298-299 adds interactive processing as an additional
process in which a language is processed. 1 Bottom-Up Processing
In using bottom-up processing, readers start processing and analyzing a language from the narrow concepts to the broader concepts. It means that they try to understand the
linguistic aspects first such as: words meaning, synonyms, sounds and so forth. After that, they make use of the linguistic aspects to comprehend the discourse of the language in
both spoken and written texts. Smith 2004:234 defines bottom- up processing as “The
bottom-up view is outside-in, putting the text in charge, with the letters on the page the first and final arbiters of the readers responses.“ A clear explanation is proposed by
Brown 2001:299 in which he argues that readers must recognize the linguistic signals letters, morphemes, syllables, phrases, and etc. and make use of those linguistic signals
to draw the meaning of words and to understand the content of a text when they apply this process.
