Paper Curdev Teaching Reading
Paper Curdev Teaching Reading
Paper Curdev Teaching Reading
Douglas Brown
Santi Anjar Wati (20177470207), Septian Aep Nugraha (20177470005),
CONTENTS
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 3
Discussions ............................................................................................................................................. 3
Research on Reading a Second Language .......................................................................................... 3
1. Bottom-up and top-down processing ...................................................................................... 3
2. Schema theory and background knowledge ............................................................................ 4
3. Teaching strategic reading ...................................................................................................... 5
4. Extensive reading .................................................................................................................... 6
The Importance of Understanding Genres and Characteristics of Written Language ........................ 6
Micro- and Macroskills of Reading Comprehension .......................................................................... 7
Microskills for reading comprehension .......................................................................................... 8
Macroskills for reading comprehension .......................................................................................... 8
Strategies for Reading Comprehension............................................................................................... 9
Types of Classroom Reading Performance ......................................................................................... 9
Principles for Teaching Reading Skills ............................................................................................. 11
Assessing Reading ............................................................................................................................ 14
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 15
Works Cited .......................................................................................................................................... 16
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
INTRODUCTION
Teaching students to become effective readers is an important goal of the compulsory
years of schooling, either reading in their first language, or in English, as a foreign language
that is unavoidable for them to learn. It involves extending student’s vocabularies and
knowledge of the world, developing their knowledge of English grammar and their decoding
skills, developing their reading fluency and extending their ability to comprehend what they
read and view from the literal level to the inferential and critical levels.
DISCUSSIONS
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
analyzing the smallest units of meaning. Bottom-up reading strategies begin with letter-
sound correspondences (the bottom) to achieve comprehension (the top). Bottom-up
processing begins with letters and sounds, building to morpheme and word recognition,
and then gradually moving to grammatical structure identification, sentences, and longer
texts. A phonics approach to teaching reading supports bottom-up processes. Phonics is a
method to facilitate students' access to text to ultimately lead to comprehension.
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
constructed by the reader through the concepts, past interrelationships, and potential
interrelationships of the words contained in the text based on interpretations using the
reader’s pre-existing knowledge.
What wells said is coherent to Brown, which stated that “A viable theory of
instructed second language acquisition can hardly be sustainable without a solid component
of strategic competence.” In other words, strategic reading is very important.
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
4. Extensive reading
Many research suggests that extensive reading, or free voluntary reading, is
important in improving students’ language proficiency on all four skills. Thus, instructional
programs in reading should teach extensive reading to strengthen intensive reading.
Besides those four major issues, some other issues that can be used in researches are
the topics about:
Now, what about the characteristics of written language? Why a language teacher
should show comprehension on them? This is because a teacher should help students to
understand the characteristics of English written language as these characteristics can be
different from those of the students’ native language. Furthermore, the characteristics can also
assist teachers in (a) diagnosing reading difficulties arising from the idiosyncrasies of written
language, (b) pointing techniques toward specific objectives, and (c) reminding students of
some of the advantages of written language over spoken.
What are the characteristics of English written language? Here they are:
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
This is different from spoken language, on which the processing time follows the
rate of delivery.
3. Distance. The written word allows messages to be sent across physical and temporal
distance. Thus, a reader has more task, which is to interpret the written language
that come from other place and other time with only the written words themselves
as the contextual clues. However, in this era of technology, verbal language can
also be sent across physical and temporal distance through audio and video
recordings. Thus, the distance characteristic of written language is fading.
4. Orthography. Spoken language that has various suprasegmental features like stress,
intonation, rhythm, juncture, pauses, volume, or even nonverbal cues. These
features enhance the message of an utterance. However, those features do not exist
in written language. In written words, written symbols, or orthography, stand alone
as the one set of signals the reader must perceive. English orthography is a little
different from how it is spoken. However, according to Brown, “For literate learners
of English, our [English] spelling system presents only minor difficulties.”
5. Complexity. Writing and speech has different mode of complexity. While spoken
language tends to have shorter clauses, written language has longer clauses and
more subordination. Therefore, readers have to readjust their cognitive device to
understand written language. Linguistic differences between speech and writing are
another major causal factor to difficulty.
6. Vocabulary. Written English typically utilizes more complicated vocabulary than
spoken English. Such words can be an obstacle to learners. Nevertheless, Brown
suggests learners to avoid using bilingual dictionary too much as it may hold back
their comprehension. This is because the meaning of many unknown words can be
predicted from their context, and sometimes the overall meaning of a sentence or
paragraph is still clear.
7. Formality. Formality refers to forms that a certain written messages must follow.
This formality is what makes us able to distinguish, for instance, an academic essay
to a love letter. Until a reader gets along with the formal features of a written text,
some hardship in interpretation may come up.
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
"macro-skills". This is in contrast to the "micro-skills", which are things like grammar,
vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling. Brown’s list of macro- and microskills of reading
comprehension can help students to become efficient readers. In Brown’s list, the first on the
list is essentially recognizing the alphabet, and automatically understanding how it combines
into words. As he moves down the list, the skills build upon each other, becoming increasingly
based on understanding larger meaning. The list is as follows:
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
It is also important to mention that those strategies can be applied in various teaching
techniques, especially the techniques that increases students talk time as the current curriculum
integrate student centered approach in which student talk time is supposed to be around 80%
during the course of the lesson (Nunan, 1991).
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
oral silent
intensive extensive
We use oral reading especially to beginner and intermediate proficiency as oral reading
can (a) serve as an evaluative check on bottom-up processing skills, (b) double as a
pronunciation check, and (c) serve to add extra student participation if a teacher wants to
highlight a certain short segment of a text. However, oral reading has some disadvantages so
that a teacher needs to make sure that this technique is utilized only to fulfill the goals
mentioned before.
When given too much, oral reading has some disadvantages, which are (a) oral reading
is not a very authentic language activity, (b) while one reads, other students may lose their
attention, and (c) it may have the outward appearance of student participation when in reality
it is only recitation. Therefore, silent reading is better for most of reading activities.
Silent reading can be subcategorized into intensive and extensive reading. Intensive
reading is classroom-oriented activity where students focus more on linguistic or semantic
aspects of a text. Meanwhile, extensive reading is usually carried out outside of class time. The
purpose of extensive reading is more to achieve a general understanding of a longer text.
“when the traditional textbook and teaching methods produce less than flattering results,
book-based methodology, such as the shared book approach or extensive reading
method in which pupils are given wide access to large quantities of comprehensible
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
input, may just be the right antidote for our pupils’ learning problems.” (Renandya,
2007)
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
speculation and prediction carried out during normal text processing. This frees up
greater attention for drawing meaningful inferences between prior knowledge and
the new information in the text.
“Reading”, during the reading portion of SQ3R the reader should progress
through the text section by section only moving on once a reasonable level of
understanding has been achieved and any relevant questions from step 2 are
answered. Further, the reader should begin to understand at this point the purpose
of the reading in regards to their goals. It is recommended that the reader keep notes
in the book margins or in a separate notebook as this will help the reader to better
understand the ideas and concepts contained in the text. While the physical act of
reading is largely a bottom-up process, a reader should be utilizing top-down
strategies to drive their attention towards monitoring their own comprehension and
addressing the questions devised earlier. Once the reader has completed the
chapter/section they should explore how much of the text they
understood/comprehended and begin step 4.
“Recite”, during which the reader will recite the answers to the questions
generated during the reading task. It is recommended that students record the
answers to these questions in their notes. Taking thorough notes will make it much
easier for the reader to continue from where they left off in the future and facilitates
the 5th and final step of the method, “Review”, where students can look back over
everything they have just read as well as the questions and answers they generated
and try to determine how much they understood and how much of the reading is
being retained. Throughout the reading, recitation, and review steps of the SQ3R
method the reader will be gradually be constructing a situation model of the text
and will begin integrating this model into their long-term memory. During the final
review step, students should reorganize the new information in a way that makes
the most sense to them (Artis, 2008)
7. Plan on pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading activities
Always make sure that reading activities are divided into three parts:
a. Before reading: Spend some time introducing a topic, encouraging
skimming, scanning, and activating schemata.
b. While reading: There may be certain facts or rhetorical devices that
students should take note while reading. Having while-reading activity is
important to give students sense of purpose for reading.
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
Assessing Reading
To assess reading comprehension, a teacher should be specific about which skills that
are being assessed; identify the genre of written communication that is being evaluated; and
choose carefully among the range of possibilities from simply identifying words all the way to
extensive reading. In addition, language teacher should also pay attention to the strategies that
becomes the focus of the reading activities before assessing reading, and the assessment should
represent what approach that is used (either, top-down, bottom-up, or interactive approach).
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
Picture-cued identification
2. Selective reading (focus on morphology, grammar, lexicon)
Multiple choice grammar/vocabulary tasks
Contextualized multiple choice (within a short paragraph)
Sentence-level cloze tasks
Matching tasks
Grammar/vocabulary editing tasks (multiple choice)
Picture-cued tasks (students choose among graphic representations)
Gap-filling tasks (for example, sentence completion)
3. Interactive reading
Discourse-level cloze tasks
Reading + comprehension questions
Short-answer responses to reading
Discourse editing tasks (multiple choice)
Scanning
Reordering sequences of sentences
Responding to charts, maps, graphs, diagrams
4. Extensive reading
Skimming
Summarizing
Responding to reading through short essays
Note-taking, marginal notes, highlighting
Outlining.
CONCLUSION
Reading comprehension is one of the four language skills that is needed to be taught.
Even though focusing on teaching reading is not wrong, it is encouraged to teach reading as a
skill integrated to the other skills so that the learning will occur more naturally and authentic.
When teaching reading, a teacher should consider what are the goals of the activities and any
strategies and texts chosen should fit those goals. Some things that needs to be reconsidered in
teaching reading is that to make sure that teachers give ample time of extensive reading and to
strengthen students’ silent reading skills beside focusing on intensive reading. This is because
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Teaching Reading Skills: A Review to Douglas Brown
extensive reading is proven to give better comprehension to students and silent reading helps
students to be more fluent.
WORKS CITED
Adams, M. J., & Collins, A. (1977). A Schema-Theoretic View of Reading. Center for the Study of
Reading: Technical Report (Vol. 32).
Artis, B. A. (2008). Improving Marketing Students' Reading Comprehension with the SQ3R Method.
Journal of Marketing Education, 130-137.
Brown, H. D. (2007). Teaching by Principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy (3rd ed.).
New York: Pearson Longman.
Nunan, D. (1991). Language Teaching Methodology: A Textbook For Teachers. London: Prentice Hall.
Renandya, W. A. (2007). The Power of Extensive Reading. RELC Journal, 133-149.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1975). Toward an Interactive Model of Reading. Dalam S. Dornic (Penyunt.),
Attention and Performance VI. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Sherfield, R. M., Montgomery, R. J., & Moddy, P. G. (2005). Cornerstone: Building on your Best. New
Jersey: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
Wells, G. (1990). Talk about Text: Where literacy is learned and taught. Curriculum Inquiry, 369-405.
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