General Concept of Reading Comprehension

Anderson and Pearson 1984 contented that the reader comprehends a text by actively constructing meaning internally from interacting with the materials that are read. The comprehension process involves an understanding of words and how those words are used to create meaning. A large majority of authors on reading comprehension suggest that there are several critical elements: a the text, b the reader, c the interaction between the reader and the text, and d the mental state of the reader after the text interaction. Those critical elements are the important elements that are used for consideration of the teacher to establish the students to comprehend in reading. The students or the reader of a certain text should know and sort every single word in a text which one they get the meaning of that word or they should looking for the meaning that word to understanding the meaning of the whole text. If the students comprehend in reading the text, it means that the student integrates with the text. According to Van den Broek and Kremer 2000: 2 stated that when reading is successful, the result is a coherent and useable mental representation of the text. This representation resembles a network, with nodes and depict individual text elements, e.g., events, facts, setting and connections that depict the meaningful relations between the elements. This shows the mental state of a reader following the reading act. In this view understanding a text consists of forming a semantic network of the concepts and the relationship within the text. The students who said as the successful reader, they can mention the elements of the text such as events, facts, setting or other element which is connected with the whole text. The teacher sometimes gives the students a question related to the element of the text. The teacher will know which student who masters the text well or not from the answers of the questions. Reading comprehension is an important aspect to develop students’ ability to read with understanding. Barr, Sadow, and Blachwicz 1990 emphasized that reading is an active process in which readers interact with the text to reconstruct the message of the author or writer. In sum, Reading comprehension is the reading activity which more thorough to understand the meaning, find the message of the text and reconstruct the idea of the reader. So, in reading process the reader or the students should understand the meaning of language that is used in text in order to they can comprehend to analyze and explain the content of the text by using their own language.

2.2.3 General Concept of Semantic Mapping Strategy

In teaching process, semantic mapping strategy allows the students to explore their knowledge of a new word by creating a map using other related words or phrases similar in meaning to the new word. According to Pearson and Johnson 1978 as cited by Clark 2005: 133 Semantic mapping is a strategy that helps students to organize the information they know about a subject into different categories. It is a visual representation of the subject. The steps for creating a semantic map are the following: 1 The subject being discussed is written on the board, a chart, or on a transparency. An oval is drawn around it. 2 Students think of words to describe the subject. As they share them, the teacher writes them on chart in boxes and connects them to the oval with arrows. Above the arrows the teacher writes phrases or words to show the relationship between the subject and the other words. 3 Students give examples of the subject, and the teacher writes these in the ovals with arrows connecting them to the subject in the center oval. Using semantic maps requires full participation by students who are engaged during the teacher-directed discussion students will be required to use maps before, during and after reading the text. Therefore the step by step procedure is designed for using semantic maps as a strategy at different phases of reading information or fiction text. The strategy which is included in semantic mapping strategy has the different treatment when it applied in certain text. So, we should pointed that the chosen strategy is appropriate for the chosen text also. As stated in Antonacci and O’Callaghan 2011: 9 Semantic mapping strategy most effective when a they are used with teacher-guided discussion before, during, and after reading a text; b teachers select a few critical key words to be taught; and c students are actively engaged in constructing their word maps through participating in lively discussions on the conceptual nature of words. The efficiency of applying semantic mapping strategy in teaching learning process not only depends on the discourse of each step in semantic mapping strategy but also this efficiency needed a balancing among the teacher