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5. recognizing grammatical word classes nouns, verbs, etc.,
systems e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms,
6. recognizing that a particular meaning may be expressed in
different grammatical forms.
Meanwhile, the micro-skills for reading comprehension are broken down into more specific eight points:
1. recognizing cohesive devices in written discourse and their role
in signaling the relationship between and among clauses, 2.
recognizing the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation,
3. recognizing the communicative functions of written texts,
according to form and purpose, 4.
inferring context that is not explicit by using background knowledge,
5. inferring links and connection between events, ideas, etc.;
deducing causes and effects; and detecting such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given
information, generalization, and exemplification,
6. distinguishing between literal and implied meanings,
7. detecting culturally specific references and interpret them in a
context of the appropriate cultural schemata, 8.
developing and using a battery of reading strategies such as scanning and skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing
the meaning of words from context, and activating schemata for the interpretation of texts.
2. Teaching Reading for Grade VII Students of Junior High School
The teaching and learning process at Indonesian schools are controlled responsibly by the Ministry of Education and Culture through the
implementation of a national standard curriculum which is used within a particular length of time and according to the school levels evenly.
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Print 1993 defines a curriculum as all the planned learning opportunities offered to learners by the educational institution and the learning
experiences the learners encounter when the curriculum is implemented. Meanwhile, in more detailed description of the planned learning opportunities,
Richards and Schmidt 2002 describe a curriculum as a written document describing the academic curriculum of a school and usually containing a
description of its teaching philosophies, its goals and objectives, and its methods of teaching and assessment.
Moreover, according to the Acts of National Education System No. 202003, a curriculum is a set of plans and arrangements of objectives,
contents, and learning materials, as well as methods used as a manual of learning activities implementation in order to achieve some specific
educational purposes. The current curriculum is the 2013 Curriculum. In the 2013 Curriculum, as stated in the Ministerial Regulation No. 652013
regarding the Standard of Process, learning objectives of junior high schools encompass students’ development in three aspects namely attitudes,
knowledge, and skills. Reading, as one of the skills in the four macro-skills of English, is
taught to students responsibly along with the other skills. Hence, it should be developed in line with the students’ level of education to make them easier to
learn the skills so that they can have proper learning materials which meet their needs in sync.
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Teaching reading is so crucial that it cannot be taught carelessly. However, reading has always been taught traditionally by the most teachers of
English. They usually only make the students read some texts and answer questions related to the texts they read before. Besides, teachers also usually
expand their teaching to dictate vocabulary which seems difficult for the students and do either let them find the meaning by themselves or directly tell
them the meaning. Regarding this traditional method of teaching reading, it is important
to have well information about the level and the characteristics of the students in order to maximize the teaching method applied and adjust it to the right
portion of learning for them. As stated in the background of the study, this study is conducted for Grade VII of junior high school students. Therefore,
before developing the reading materials needed, it is important to find out the characteristics of Grade VII students at their average age. Brown 2007
claims that high school-age children whose ages range between 12 and 18 or so are categorized into young adults or teens. They are at the age of puberty
and often deal with the age of transition matters such as confusion, self- consciousness, growth, and changing bodies and minds. However, it becomes
a kind of challenge to the teachers to teach them. Moreover, there is a list of some characteristics of teenagers which can
guide teachers to be more aware of teaching them especially for teaching the reading skill. The first is due to the fact that intellectual capacity adds the
