2. Intensive and extensive reading Silent reading is categorized into intensive and extensive reading.
Intensive reading is usually a class-room oriented activity in which students focus on linguistic or semantic details of a passage. It calls students’ attention to
grammatical forms, discourse markers, and other surface structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning, implication, rhetorical relationship, and
the like. Extensive reading is carried out to achieve a general understanding of a
usually somewhat longer text book, long article, or essay, etc.. Most extensive reading is performed outside class time. Pleasure reading is often extensive.
Extensive reading can sometimes help students get away from their tendency to overanalyze or look up words they do not know, and read for understanding.
Extensive reading includes skimming reading rapidly for the main points, scanning reading rapidly to find the specific pieces of information, and global
reading.
6. The Types of Questions
Related to its questions types, Burns 1990: 203 states that there are seven major types of questions that should be found in reading comprehension:
a. Main idea questions: These ask students to identify the central theme of the selection. These may give students some direction toward the nature of the
answer. Main idea questions help students to be aware of details and the relationship among them.
b. Detail questions: These ask for bits of information conveyed by the material. Therefore, even though these questions are easy to construct, they should not
constitute the bulk of the questions that the teacher asks. c. Vocabulary questions: These ask for the meaning of words used in the
selection. For discussion purposes, a teacher might ask students to produce as many meanings of a particular word as they can, but purpose questions and
test questions should ask for the meaning of a word as it is used in the selection under the consideration.
d. Inference questions: These require some reading between the lines. The answer to an inference question is implied by the statement in the selection,
but it is not directly stated. e. Sequence questions: these require knowledge of events in their order of
occurrence. These check the student’s knowledge of the order in which events occurred in the story, for example: “what three things did Alex and Robbie do,
in order, when their parents left their house?” f.
Evaluation questions: These questions require the students to make judgments about the material. Although these judgments are inference, they depend upon
more than the information implied or stated by the story. The students must have enough experience related the situations involved to establish standards
for comparison. g. Creative Response questions: these ask the students to go beyond the material
and create new ideas based on the ideas they have read, for example: “if the
story stopped after Jimmy lost his money, what ending would you write for it?”
Based on some theories above, the researcher can infer that reading comprehension is the ability to understand the message from the texts they read.
In teaching reading comprehension, the teacher should choose the texts which are appropriate to the students’ level. By knowing students’ level, the teachers will be
easier to reach their objectives. Reading comprehension is influenced by both external and internal factors. One of the external factors is teaching technique
used in classroom. In this research, the researcher chooses reciprocal questioning technique to improve students’ reading comprehension.
B. ReQuest Technique 1. The Notion of Technique
