Types of Reading Reading

d. Inferring opinion and attitude A reader often has to be able to work out what the writer opinions and attitudes are, particularly since they are not always directly stated. The experienced reader will know, from various clues he receives while reading, whether the writer approves of the topic he is discussing, or whether his opinion of the personality he is describing is favourable or not. The ability to infer opinion and attitude is largely based on the recognition of linguistic style and its use to achieve appropriate purposes. e. Deducing meaning from context Even native speaker often come across words in written text that they do not understand. Most usually, however, the fact that a word is unknown to them does not cause any particular problem. Based on the context in which the word occurs the native speaker guesses its meaning. Usually, too, his guess will be right. The point is that the deducing of meaning is important for a language user who will often meet unknown words. It should be said that for a native speaker there is a point at which they are not able to deduce meaning from context where there are a great number of word that they do not understand. f. Recognizing function and discourse patterns and markers Native speakers know that when they read ‗for example‘ this phrase will be followed by an example. When they read ‗in other word‘ a concept will be explained in a different way. Recognizing such discourse markers is an important part of understanding how a text is constructed. It is important to know, for example, which sentence in a paragraph is a generalization and which sentence then backs up that generalization with evidence. It is also important to be able to recognize devices for cohesion and understand how a text is organized coherently. 12 12 Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching. New York: Longman Inc., 1989, pp. 144 —145.

6. Types of text

a. Authentic text Authentic texts are those which are designed for native speakers. They are real texts designed not for language students, but for the speakers of the language in question. Any English newspaper is composed of what we would call authentic English.

b. Non-authentic text

A non-authentic text is one that has been written especially for language students, but here again there is a distinction to be made between texts written to illustrate particular language points for presentation, and those written to appear authentic, even though there has been some language control of the ‗rough tuning‘ type. The justification for the latter is that beginner students will probably not be able to handle genuinely authentic texts, but should nevertheless be given practice in reading to texts that look authentic. The reading of such text will help students to acquire the necessary receptive skills they will need when they eventually come to tackle authentic material. 13

7. The Problems of Reading

According to Jeremy Harmer in his book ―The Practice of English Language Teaching ‖, there are a number of particular problems in reading. It consists of language, topic and genre, comprehension tasks, and negative expectation. 14 a. Language In the case of written text some researchers look at word and sentence length. Truly, the text with longer sentences and longer words will be more difficult to understand than those with shorter ones. If reader does not know half the words in a text, they will have difficulty in understanding a text as a whole. To be successful they have to recognize many vocabularies without consciously thinking about it. In short, it is clear that both sentence length and unknown words both play their role in a text‘s comprehensibility. 13 Ibid., p. 146. 14 Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching, Third Edition, Harlow: Longman, 2002, pp. 203 – 208.