The nature of reading

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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter describes the theories that provide foundations for the study. It contains of three sections; theoretical review, theoretical framework, and hypothesis. The first section discusses reading skill, CALL, and review of related studies. The second section describes the framework of the theories for answering the research questions. The last section elaborates the hypothesis of the study.

A. Theoretical Review

In this section, there are three main points that are discussed; instructional design, reading skill, CALL theories, affective domain, and review of related studies.

1. Reading Skill

In the first subsection, three features are expanded; the nature of reading, reading comprehension skills, reading strategies, and teaching reading.

a. The nature of reading

Many experts define the meaning of reading in various ways. Reading is the practice to create meaning using text in which it develops the skills which integrates visual and non-visual information to link one idea to another Johnson, 2008. Reading is also defined as extracting information from print Smith, 2004. Alderson 2000 describes the definition in more complex way. Reading does not only decide what they mean but also how they relate to other. It means that when reading a text, the reader is also thinking about what it means, how it relates to other things he has read, to things he knows, to what he expects to come next in the text. From those definitions, thus, it is concluded that the definition of reading in this study is a developing skill to extract information, visually or non-visually, from a printed text including conveying or synthetizing the meaning of the text, relating the text with background knowledge and predicting what comes next in the text. The practice of reading is associated with comprehension. Snow 2002 defines reading comprehension as “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language”. Snow thought that the concept of comprehension conveys three elements including reader who is doing comprehending, text which is to be comprehended and activity in which comprehension is a part. In addition, Alderson 2000: 48 believed that reader who is doing comprehending has not only knowledge but also abilities, abilities to learn knowledge and to process information. Alderson 2000: 7 also believed that text which is to be comprehended consists of different level of understanding; literal meaning of the text, inferred meanings, and reader’s critical evaluations of the text. To assess reading comprehension, Alderson 2000 promotes several strategies. Some assessment techniques for reading comprehension that were suitable to the Interactive PowerPoint Applications based on Alderson’s techniques include cloze test and gap-filling tests, multiple choice techniques, matching techniques, ordering tasks, dichotomous items True-false techniques. Cloze tests are typically a reading assessment strategy by deleting every n-th word in which the n is usually between 5 and 12 words. Alderson 2000 argues that since the cloze test technique is word-based, many reading skills may not be assessed by such deletions. However, to overcome such problem, Alderson offered another similar technique that enables the constructor to have control over the deleted words. It is gap filling tests. Gap filling tests are almost similar to cloze tests but in gap filling tests, the constructor uses some rational basis to decide which word to delete. Usually the constructor attempts to leave fewer than five or six words between the gaps. Multiple choices are the second technique promoted by Alderson 2000. This technique is the common tool to measure students’ comprehension skills. The advantages of this technique are in multiple choices the constructor has a control over the possible options usually four options to comprehension questions and also control over students’ thought in the process of reading. However, the disadvantages of multiple choices are the construction of the questions is difficult and time-consuming. Therefore, the constructor has to consider the very skilled multiple choices questions to measure reading comprehension. In addition, the weakness of this technique appears in which the constructor does not know the answers selected by the students are based on their own knowledge or prediction. Matching is another alternative techniques promoted by Alderson 2000. One objective of this technique is multiple matching. In this technique, two sets of group of words or phrases or clauses are matched against each other, for example, matching headings over the paragraphs, matching title of books against extracts from each book. However, the concept of matching in Interactive PowerPoint Application in this study is matching certain words against its definition. The fourth technique promoted by Alderson 2000 is ordering tasks. In ordering tasks, there were some categories that are put into correct order involving ordering words, sentences, paragraph or texts. The concept of ordering tasks in this study is that the students are given a scrambled set of words and they have to arrange then into a correct order. Although the technique seems attractive, it has disadvantage too. Some alternative orderings of the sentence that were proved acceptable, although the original sentence is only one order, can become a problem. Therefore, to overcome this problem, the Interactive PowerPoint Application uses answer key slide. The last technique that is applicable in the Interactive PowerPoint Application is dichotomous items True-False technique. In this technique, students are presented with a statement related to the reading text and they are instructed to determine whether it is True or False. The problem is that students have 50 probability to get the correct answer through guessing since the alternatives are only two. Through the five techniques to assess reading comprehension, the researcher has to consider the reading strategies that are suitable to the assessment technique.

b. Reading Comprehension Skills