include: Summarizing, Sequencing, Inference, Comparing and contrasting, drawing conclusions, Self-questioning, Problem-solving, relating background
knowledge, distinguishing between fact and opinion, Finding the main idea, important facts, and supporting details and these skills are particularly important
for comprehending what is generally known as information reading or expository reading. Moreover according to Carlisle, J. F Reading comprehension requires
complex thinking, specific strategies, and motivated reading.
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Just like other reading skills, comprehension takes years to become fluent and automatic.
Teachers can assess children’s comprehension with questions, tests, writing, and discussions to diagnose strengths and weaknesses. Research has shown that when
teachers provide instruction on specific strategies to monitor and repair comprehension, it improves children’s reading achievement. Expert teachers
embed strategy instruction in guided reading, informal assessments, and discussions about content so that students learn to construct, analyze, and extend
the meaning of texts whenever they read
.
5. Factors Influence of Reading
Reading is a complex cognitive activity that is indispensable for adequate functioning and for obtaining information in contemporary society. Reading skill
as a process that involves the activation of relevant knowledge and language skills to get information across from one in
dividual to another. İn the reading skill, there are many factors influencing the readers to comprehend the reading text, as
follow: a
Background Knowledge Background knowledge plays an essential role in reading comprehension.
In an effort to comprehend a text, students rely on their background knowledge to link what they already know to the text they are reading. Background knowledge
includes both a reader’s real-world experiences and literary knowledge. Drawing
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Carlisle, J. F. and M. S. Rice, Improving Reading Comprehension: Research-Based Principles and Practices, York Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 2002.
parallels between background knowledge and texts helps students become active readers, improving their reading comprehension.
b Vocabulary
Whether or not students have mastered vocabulary skills affects their reading comprehension. Students must be able to comprehend a familiar word and
its relationship with other words within a text. Mastering vocabulary includes recognizing a word’s part of speech, definition, useful context clues, and how it
functions in a sentence. These vocabulary strategies can help improve comprehension.
c Fluency
Reading with fluency allows students to retain information with accuracy, expression and increase speed. The ability to read fluently develops through
reading practice. As students become fluent readers, they will spend less time trying to decipher the meaning of words and more time considering the overall
meaning of the sentences. Over time, fluent readers will develop the ability to insightfully respond to a text.
d Active Reading
Beginning readers often rely on skilled readers to guide them through a text. However, as readers develop, they will be able to monitor their own reading
comprehension. Students can actively guide their own reading by targeting comprehension problems as they occur. Students can troubleshoot comprehension
problems by recalling what they read, asking themselves questions or evaluating the text.
e Critical Thinking
Students can actively respond to a text more efficiently when they possess critical thinking skills. As students read, they can determine the main idea and
supporting details, the sequence of events and the overall structure of the text. Students will also be able to identify literary devices and their effect on the text.
Having critical thinking skills help to deepen a student’s comprehension of a text, resulting in a positive reading experience.
6. Descriptive text
Descriptive text is a text which has social purpose to give an account of imagined or factual events.
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Hyland explains more about description that it tends to use present tense and description makes use of “be” and “have”.
There are three steps within a descriptive text; a.
İdentification: has purpose to define, to classify or generalize about phenomenon. b.
Aspect: has purpose to describe atributes of each category of the phenomenon. c.
Conclusion: has purpose to sum up the description. Harwell and Dorill state that the purpose of description is tos hare sense
impressions and to record thought and feelings stimulated by those impressions, in other words, they are both an objective relaying of sense data and a subjective
interpretation of that data. Furthemore, he
continues that a descriptive paraghraph share its writer’s sense impressions. This method, relying heavily on visual details, begins by
establishing the perspective from which something is seen and then guides a reader’s eyes from this point to the other points.
C. Relevant Previous Studies
Many studies have been conducted to study about critical thinking in the ESL and EFL learning area in Indonesia and other countries. Many of them
investigated about the correlation between critical thinking ability and language proficiency as well as in reading proficiency. This part will refer to some of them:
The first research was conducted by Isik, H., which entitles The Relationship between Critical Thinking and Language Proficiency of Turkish
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Ken Hyland, Genre and Second Language Writing, Michigan: The University Language Press, p. 34.
