schools students in reading comprehension. The level of words included in the text significantly influences to the readability level of the text. In
addition, the difficulties of reading comprehension are not just influenced by word recognition and decoding, but many other factors are involved
such as fluency, short-term memory, lack of strategies, and so on. In addition, Harmer 2001:203-205 presents that a number of
problems arise in teaching reading, two of them are language and topic or genre. Firstly, the students will find it difficult to read the longer words
or sentences rather than the shorter one. They cannot comprehend the text if there are so many difficult words found in a half of the text.
Secondly, the students’ motivation in reading will decrease if the topic is unfamiliar or uninteresting.
Based on the opinions explained above, we can emphasize that the difficulties of the students’ reading comprehension are categorized into
two points: the students’ lack of vocabulary and the teacher’s lack in implementing the appropriate strategy to teach reading comprehension.
Therefore, the Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy VSS is considered as the appropriate strategy to teach reading comprehension since it can
help the students to understand the vocabulary found in the text by defining it based on the context of the text.
2. Teaching Reading a. Theory of Teaching Reading
Reading, as one of the receptive skills in language learning, puts an important role in influencing the success of the productive skill like
speaking and writing. The way of teaching gives the crucial effect to the success of reading. It is easier for the students to read if the teacher can
teach in the appropriate way. As described in the point of the difficulties in reading
comprehension, Harmer presents the language and genre or topic as the major problems of reading comprehension. To cover these problems he
also suggests the solutions that can be done by the teacher in teaching reading. Based on Harmer 2001:203-206, there are three alternatives
that can be done to cover the language problems: pre-teaching vocabulary, extensive reading, and authentic language. In pre-teaching
vocabulary, teachers can lead the students to predict the unfamiliar words that may be found in the text. They ask the students to make a prediction
related to the words including the meaning of those words. Moreover, related to the genre or topic, Harmer proposes some
solutions, such as choosing the right topics, creating interest, activating schemata, and varying topics and genres. In this context, trying to choose
the text that is close with the students’ life can help them to understand the text easily since the topic is familiar for them. Second, the creative
teaching is needed when we want to activate the students’ interest in learning. There are many ways to create an interesting learning such as
by asking the students to try to guess what topic that will be going to learn just by talking the important words that may give a big influence to
comprehend the text, by showing a picture which can tell the sequence events of the story so that the students can guess how the story will be
going on. This activity can also activate the students’ schemata since it can build the background knowledge before doing the main task. Lastly,
giving the students with the different genre of the text will help them to get familiar with a certain genre or topic.
In addition, Brown 2001, 298:299 states that in teaching reading there are three ways that can be highlighted; those are bottom-up, top-
down and interactive reading. Bottom-up processing emphasizes the recognition of linguistic signals, such as letters, morphemes, syllables,
words, phrases, grammatical cues, and discourse makers, before understanding the whole text. Meanwhile, top-down processing starts
reading from the whole text. It supposes the students to activate their background knowledge to guess the unfamiliar words connected with the
context. Moreover, the interactive reading which is the combination of bottom-up and top-down processing places the two processes as the
important things to be implemented in teaching reading. The two processes cannot be separated each other and should be implemented
continuously.
