The importance of reading strategies in developing reading skill of B1 level learners

Dealing with reading, readers will always get in touch with written language. Of course, there are so many types of written language. Brown states several types of written language. They are: non-fiction (reports, editorials, essays, articles, and references), fiction (novels, short stories, jokes, dramas, poetry), letters (personal, business), greeting cards, diaries, journals, memos (interoffice memos), messages (phone messages), announcements, newspapers, academic writing (short answer test responses, reports, essays, and papers, theses and books), forms, applications, questionnaires, directions, labels, signs, recipes, bills (and another financial statements), maps, manuals, menus, schedules (transportation information), advertisements (commercial and personal), invitations’, directories (e.g., telephone, yellow pages), comic strips, and cartoons.1

Good readers tend to know the text that they read. Knowing the types of written language is helpful for them in analyzing the text that they face. That is why the teacher should provide the students as the readers a good text by considering the types of written language.

Types of Reading

The teacher has to know the types of reading since the types of reading are helpful as a consideration in providing students’ reading material. Many experts have their own definition about types of reading Nunan (1999) states two types of reading. They are receptive reading and reflective reading. Receptive reading is the rapid, automatic reading that readers do when they read narratives. Meanwhile, reflective reading is in which readers pause often and reflect on what they have read. In other hand, Brown also mentions several types of reading. They are: 1) Perceptive: In keeping with the set of categories specified for listening comprehension, similar specification are offered here, except with some differing terminology to capture the unique of reading. Perceptive reading tasks involve attending to the components of larger stretches of discourse: letters, words, punctuation, and other graphemic symbols. Bottom-up processing is implied.

• 2)    Selective: This category is larder an artifact of assessment formats. In order to ascertain one’s reading recognition of lexical, grammatical, or discourse features of language within a very short stretch of language, certain typical tasks are used: picture-cued tasks, matching, true/false, multiple-choice, etc. Brief responses are intended as well. A combination of the bottom-up and top-down processing may be used.

• 3)    Interactive: Included among the interactive reading types are stretches of language of several paragraphs to one page or more in which the reader must, in psycholinguistic sense, interact with the text. That is, reading is a process of negotiating meaning; the reader brings to the text a set of schemata for understanding it, and intake is the product of that interaction. The top-down processing is typical of such tasks, although some instances of bottom-up performance may be necessary.

• 4)    Extensive: Extensive reading applies to texts of more than a page, up to and including professional articles, essays, technical reports, short stories, and books. The purposes of the assessment usually are to tap into a learner’s global understanding of a text, as opposed to asking test-takers to “zoom in” on small details. The top-down processing is assumed for most extensive tasks.

The types of reading from different experts are exactly having the same use to be useful consideration for the teachers to provide the reading materials for the students. Teachers have to know what types of reading should be applied which match the students’ characteristic.

Richards (1983) in Brown mentions several micro-skills of reading.2 They are: 1) Discriminating among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.

• 2)    Retaining chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.

• 3)    Processing writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.

• 4)    Recognizing a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.

• 5)    Recognizing grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.

• 6)    Recognizing that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.

• 7)    Recognizing cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signaling the relationship between and among clauses.

• 8)    Recognizing the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation.

Skimming and Scanning . It means that skimming refers to looking only for the general or main ideas, and works best with non-fiction material. Skimming takes place while reading and allows you to look for details in addition to the main ideas. Scanning is another useful tool for speeding up your reading. When scanning, you look only for a specific fact or piece of information without reading everything.

General characteristics of the “TOP-DOWN and BOTTOM –UP” approaches in teaching reading

a)Top – Down Approach

A way to bring a wide variety of social contexts to your class is through Top – down approach. It is an approach in teaching reading that activates the broader knowledge of the students to understand the text in the beginning of the lesson. It uses schemata of the students as the readers to understand what the text tells about and the writer’s intention inside the text. Brown states that in using top – down, we draw on our own intelligence and experience to understand a text. Supporting this, Nuttall , in Brown defines top – down processing as taking an eagle’s – eye view of a landscape below. Then, Nuttall , in Rahman also defines the top-down approach as: We draw on our own intelligence and experience the predictions we can make, based on the schemata we have acquired to understand the text. … We make conscious use of it when we try to see the overall purpose of the text, or get a rough idea of the pattern of the writer’s argument, in order to make a reasoned guess at next step.3 The advantage of the top-down approach is that it can recall the schema of the past that the students have. By recalling that, the students are motivated to know more about the material that is discussed and the lesson can be more encouraging and attracting to the students. According to Vacca, teachers who have a top-down belief system consider reading for meaning an essential component of all reading instructional situations. They feel that the majority of reading or language arts instructional time should involve students in meaningful activities in which they read, write, speak, and listen. These teachers may also emphasize the importance of students’ choosing their own reading material and enjoying the material they read. Sentences, paragraphs, and text selections are the units of language emphasized instructionally. Because recognizing each word is not considered an essential prerequisite to comprehending the passage, word errors during oral reading may not be corrected. Instead, the teacher may advocate noninterference during oral reading or encourage a student to use the context or meaning of the passage to identify unrecognized words.

The bottom – up is the approach in teaching reading that uses smallest part of language (like letters, words or phrases) to begin with, then it continues to broader items (like sentences and paragraphs). This approach leads the students’ understanding about smallest part of language in detail in the beginning of the lesson. According to Nuttall, in Rahman, in Bottom – Up, the reader builds up a mea ning from the black marks on the page: recognizing letters and words, working out sentence structure.⁴

The good point in conducting bottom-up processing is that it can make the lesson focus on the structure and vocabulary that can be found out from the text that will be discussed. According to Morales, the emphasis on bottom-up processing helped students overcome difficulties regarding the structure and vocabulary of science texts. 5