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17 Teachers can make their students become accurate guessers by
encouraging them to use effective compensation strategies in which they fill gaps in their competence by intelligent attempts to use whatever clues
are available. 8 Vocabulary analysis
Several techniques in analyzing vocabulary are as follows: 8.1.
Looking for prefixes 8.2.
Looking for suffixes 8.3.
Looking for roots that are familiar 8.4.
Looking for grammatical context that may signal information 8.5.
Looking for the semantic context for clues 9 Distinguishing between literal and implied meanings
The fact that not all language can be interpreted appropriately by attending to its literal, syntactic surface structure makes special demands
on readers. Implied meaning usually has to be derived from processing pragmatic information.
10 Capitalizing on discourse markers to process relationships There are many discourse markers in English that signal relationships
among ideas as expressed through phrases, clauses, and sentences. A clear comprehension of such markers can greatly enhance learners’ reading
efficiency.
f. Micro Skills for Reading
Reading comprehension involves some skills that can indicate the students’ competence in having good reading skill. Brown 2001: 307 states
that there are fourteen micro-skills for reading comprehension:
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18 1 Discriminating among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns
of English. 2 Retaining chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.
3 Processing writing at efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose. 4 Recognizing a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their
significance. 5 Recognizing grammatical word classes noun, verb, 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. 7 Recognizing cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in
signaling the relationship between and among clauses. 8 Recognizing the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their
significance for interpretation. 9 Recognizing the communicative functions of written texts, according to
form and purpose. 10 Inferring context that is not explicit by using background knowledge.
11 Inferring links and connections between events, ideas, supporting ideas, etc., deducing causes and effects, and detecting such relations as main
idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
12 Distinguishing between literal and implied meanings. 13 Detecting culturally specific references and interpret them in a context of
the appropriate cultural schemata.
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19 14 Developing and use a battery of reading strategies such as scanning and
skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning of words from context, and activating schemata for interpretation of texts.
In relation to what Brown states, here are sub skills that can also be used: 1 Recognizing the script of a language.
2 Deducing the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items. 3 Understanding explicitly stated information.
4 Understanding conceptual meaning. 5 Understanding the communicative values of sentences and utterances.
6 Understanding relations within the sentence. 7 Understanding relations between sentences through grammatical and
lexical cohesive devices. 8 Interpreting text by going outside it.
9 Identifying main points in a discourse. 10 Extracting salient points to summarize.
11 Basic reference skills contents, index, abbreviations, ordering 12 Skimming
13 Scanning 14 Transcoding written information to tabular or diagram form and vice versa
file:G:readingApproaches20to20Reading.htm. From the definition given above, reading comprehension can be
summarized as the act of one’s mind to understand or to interpret written or printed material containing information. It involves the activity of the mind to
comprehend the meaning of the text intended by the writer, to know the
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20 organization of the ideas and finally reuse it in writing or future activity.
Those activities include deducing the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items, guessing the meaning of words from context, understanding explicitly stated
information, distinguishing between literal and implied meanings, detecting culturally specific references, detecting such relations as main idea, and
recognizing the communicative functions of written texts, according to form and purpose.
g. Classroom Approaches to Reading
