Principles of Teaching Reading

In teaching English at junior high school, the teacher should consider the characteristics, ages, needs, and interests of the students. Junior high school students, considering their ages, belong to teenager. Penny Ur in Harmer 2001: 38 suggests that teenage students are in fact overall the best language learners. Added to this, Harmer 1998: 2 says: “They may push teachers to the limit, but they are much happier if that challenge is met, if the teacher actually manages to control them, and if this is done in a supportive and constructive way so that he or she ‘helps rather than shouts’.” He also states that teenagers, if they are engaged, have a great capacity to learn, a great potential for creativity and a passionate commitment to things which interest them. Herbert Puchta and Michael Scratz in Harmer 2001: 39 see the problems with teenager as resulting in part, from ‘. . .the teacher’s failure to build bridges between what they want and have to teach and their students’ worlds of thought and experience’. Students must be encouraged to respond to texts and situations with their own thought and experience, rather than just by answering questions and doing abstract learning activities. Teachers must give them tasks which they are able to do rather than risk humiliating them. According to the theories above, it can be concluded that teenager learners can be very potential if the teachers know how to deal with the m. Therefore, the teachers’ duty is provoking students’ engagement with materials which are relevant and involving. To guide the teachers in creating and developing materials for teaching and learning activities, the government, the Ministry of Education, has arranged the curriculum. According to Laws of National Education System No. 20 of 2003, a curriculum includes some ways or methods as manual of learning activities in order to achieve some specific educational purposes. The school-based curriculum is now the curriculum applied in the schools by the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education has arranged the regulations which standardize the national curriculum. So the teacher should use the curriculum documents as the guideline in making decision about what to teach and how to teach. Based on the curriculum, students of junior high school should attain some competencies related to reading. The competencies can be attained by mastering reading materials. The learning materials of reading stated in that curriculum are short functional texts such as tables, lists, cautions and warnings and essays in the form of descriptive texts and procedure texts. Based on the background of this study, identification of problem and delimitation of problem, the researcher focuses on descriptive text. According to the school-based curriculum, there are one standard of competence and two basic competences of descriptive text reading. The following table presents the standard of competence and basic competences SK and KD of descriptive text reading for Grade VII students of the junior high school according to Badan Standar Nasional Pendidikan BNSP 2006.