The Kind of Reading and Developing Reading Skill

A. The Kind of Reading

According to river, there are two kinds of reading namely intensive reading and extensive reading.

1. Intensive Reading

Intensive reading:........as the term indicated, each vocabulary and structural item is explained and made as part of the student active language, pronouncation,and intonation are stressed and each concept or allusion is clarified.

In intensive reading that students are expected to read short passages and understand everything, and extensuve reading that the students read to understand the main idea of passage.

A distinction needs to be made between intensive reading where the student is expected to read short passage and understand everything, anf reading that students read to understand the main idea of passage but it is not concerned with understanding every word.

In line it will with this Haycraft skill that reading passages can be used for consolidating structure and vocabulary, as a springboard for other classroom activities, to increase students passive vocabulary and for pleasure. 
In intensive reading the teacher has responsibility to guide his or her students this responsibility :

a.   Finding out what students can do and what they cannot, and working out a programme aimed at giving theme the skills they need.

b.   Choosing suitable texts to work on

c.   Choosing or devising tasks and activities to develop the required skills

d.   Preparing the class to undertake the tasks

e.   Making sure that everyone in the class works productively and extracting maximum effort and best results by encouraging the students and by prompting and probing until they produce the answer, instead of telling them what it is.

f.     Making sure everyone in the class improves steadiky according to his own capabilities.

Here the teacher should not translate the reading materials into his own language, it could be wrong kind of help.

2. Extensive Reading

Extensive reading:.......extensive reading, the principle aim is comprehension he student are trained to comprehend or to understand the meaning or concept from a passage silently without teacher’s help.

Here the stundents are trained to comprehend or understand the meaning or concept from a passage silently without teacher’s help.

On higher-level extensive reading is very useful to gain the aim of extensive reading. Teachers have to teach their students the techniques of efficient and effective reading such as skimming. Skimming has an important role in reading; it is a kind of reading, wich makes our eyes move quickly on the printed material in order to get information within a short time. The quicker we read the more information we get.

So in extensive reading the principal aim is comprehension from what the students read.

B. Developing Reading Skill

1. Reading and language skill

The goal of reading in the comprehension of meaning. The initial step in this proces is the association of an experience with given symbol. This is absolutely necessary, but is the most elemental form of comprehension. Complete meaning is not conveyed by a single word. The good students learn to interpret words in their contextual setting. He comprehends words as parts of sentences as part of paragraphs and paragraphs as part of stories.

Vaughan James has explained in this book about reading that the aim of most language teaching programmed should be to develop the students reading competence.

Clearly reading in the foreign language deserves attention, and reading passages should not be viewed merely as a springboard for speaking or writing activities.

Meaningful reading includes not only a literal interpretation of an author’s words, but also an interpretation the implied meaning and prejudices of the writer. Students must recognize summary statements; make inferences and aplications of a passage. Students also must familiarize themselves with the time and place in which the words were written. They must use the peiods, commas, quotation marks and questons as aids to interpretation.

a.   Comprehension skill

In reading text students hoped become good comprehended from they read, so to become good reader the students must dig their ability in comprehending text.

Comprehension involves a complex of abilities. The good reader possesses :

1)   The ability to associate experiences and meaning with the graphic symbol.

2)   The ability to react the sensory images (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, taste, smell) suggested by words.

3)   The  ability to interpret verbal connotations and denotations.

4)   The ability to understand words in context and to select the meaning that fits the context.

5)   The ability to give meaning to units of increasing size the phrase, clause sentence, paragraph, and whole selection.

6)   The ability to detect and understand the main idea.

7)   The ability to recognize significant details.

8)   The ability to interpret the organization.

9)   the ability to answer questions that are answered in printed passage.

10)       The ability to follow directions.

11)       The ability to perceive relationships part whole, cause effect, general specific, place, sequence, size, and time.

12)       The ability to interpret figutative xpressions.

13)       The ability to make inferences and to draw conclusions, to supply implied details and to evaluate what is read.

14)       The ability to identify and evaluate character traits, reactions, and motives.

15)       The ability to anticipate outcomes.

16)       The ability to recognize an understand the writer’s purpose.

17)       The ability to recognice literary and semantic devices and to identify the tone, mood, and intent or purpose of the wrider.

18)       The ability to determine whether the text affirms, dines, or fails to express an opinion about a supposed fact or condition.

19)       The ability to identify the antecedents of such words as who, some, or they.

20)       The ability to retain ideas.

21)       The ability to apply ideas and to intergrate them with one’s part experience.

Those are being intended to help the pupil to move from from elemental comprehension to higher level skills.

A major importance for interpretative from reading is a purpose for reading. The purposeful reader. If the students are understood what they are reading, they must know why they are reading.

They must know whether to read for information, to solve problem, to follow direction, to be entertained, to obtain details, to draw a conclusion, to verify a statement, to summarize or to context.

b.   Reading the context

The development of the contextual reading skill begins in the context offers the rader many types of clues to word, sentence, an paragraph meaning. It may provide a definition of word may relate it to previous experiences. May associate it with a whole word may whose meaning is known, may provide a synonym and it may indicate the mood and the tone that writer attaches to the word.

1)   Reading for the main idea

The ability to identify the main idea is necessary for interpretations and understanding of what is written. It is based on an accurate comprehension of the word, the phrase and the sentence.

Robinson suggests that the students first learn to identify the main idea of a sentence. They may be taught this skill by being required to undeline key words then move to dentifying the key sentence in a paragraphs do not have a single sentence that summarizes the main idea. Eventually the students need to learn the main idea may be spread over two or three paragraphs.

2)   Reading for detail

Learing to follow directions through reading essentially is reading for details. In direction every litle step is significant. The students must give full attention and must look for a definite sequence of data.

Learning how to develop a simple paragraph is a further step in this process. The pupil may be taught how to read and answer a specific question. They are tested on a paragraph to see whether they remember significant detail.

3)   Reading for the organization

The good students also comprehend the organization of what is being read. They think with the reading materials, outlining it as they go along. They see the relationship between the main ideas and subbordinate ideas and arrange these in some logical order. They utilize materials from many sources and able to draw conclusion.

Reading in the content areas specially depends upon proficiency in this skill. Textbookx have a characteristic paragraph organization. The topic sentence sets the theme paragraph. There follows a sequence of details. The paragraph is concluded by a summarizing sentence.

Numerous activities help the pupil to learn how to organize what they are reading. The following are suggestive :

a)   Ask the students to retell a story that they had read.

b)   Have the students group a series of pictures in logical or chorological sequence.

c)   Let the students group a series of details about main idea.

d)   Let the students develop an outline for a story, with headings and subheading.

e)   Have the students arrange records, directions, or ideas in a sequential order.

f)    Have the students assemble various bits of infromation and group them into an informative story.

4)   Reading for evaluation

The students must constanly read to evaluate. The good  students are critical readers. They chechk the truth, logic, reliability, and accuracy of what is written. They look for contradictory material. They relate the material to their experience. They distinguish fact from fiction, concerned with the timelines of material and to understand the author’s motives.

The critical is as much interested in why something is said as in what is said. They sre sensitive to how we used and are or slightly suspicious of the author’s biases. They pay particular attention to words with several meaning.

2. Using Authentic Text

Authentic texts are those produced for the genuine reader not for teaching. There is an increasing tendency for language teachers to use these texts rather than contrived ones. At the same time these teachers try to ensure that the task they set are also authentic. The trend is good one not least because most pedagogic texts are impoverished sources of language input. They were contructed to promote oral practice, so they do not develop the sort of reading skills that will be useful to students later in life.

Authentic texts are obtainable without difficulty in most countries. Newspaper or magazines are excellent sources for cutting and offer constant variety. Short stories and novels can be read in their entirety at advanced levels, but selected paragraphs or pages are often usable lower down the school. Recipes, books, labels, poems, instructions, songs, letters to newspapers, airline schedules, advertisements, rhymes, menus, the leaflets from a medicine pack and so on, all offer short reading possibilities. Anything that was written for a native speaker community is the possible basis of short reading activity or even a full lesson.

3. Class Reading Task

There are many ways in which teacher can help students to develop an interest in react ional reading.

a.   One way to make reading attractive to children is to read to them. In many instances a teacher wil want to read a book or story in its entirety. Sometimes the teacher read just enough to whet appetites, and students will want to read the book for themselves. The teacher must read with expression and feeling so as to provide a model interpretation.

b.   Teachers must be prepared to guede students in selecting books which the are capable of reading and which they wil enjoy. Nothing kills interest in reading so quickly as material for which one does not have an adequate background or in which one has interest. Often the teacher can hel supply these pre-requisites.

c.   to guide students toward wide reading is a worthy objective, but at the same time a balanced diet is not necessarily the first step. Students should be permitted  to read what they enjoy. The teacher’s preference does not always coincide with the students interest.

d.   In some situation it may be necessary to use extrinsic motivations. Librarians and teachers have found that keeping record of the books they read favorably influences some students.

Having aroused interest in a text, elicited ideas and presented any needed lexical items (pre-reading stage), the class should be given a purpose in reading. The task like the follow-up activity will depend on the linguistic complexity, the level of the class and the interest level. Difficult texts can be used with one or more of the simple tasks suggested below where as simple texts can be assigned a difficult task.

a.   Scanning task

If the students are reading may be looking quickly through the text searching for a spectific piece of information or to see if the text is suitable for a specific reading purpose this we call scanning.

From scanning we have to be ready on a specific reading purpose like names, definitions, important conclusions, places, numbers, and some explanations, because find answers to specivic questions.

The aim of the scanning is to practice scanning is achieved quickly. After one or two scanning tasks have been carried out the text is discarded so that the class can get on with another activity.

All of these tasks are given orally. For example the teacher tells the class to find new words for old, locate grammar features, find a specified advertisement, dompare details, check dates, shoping list, make word sets, sewspaper headlines.

b.   Skimming task

Reading does not always mean that we must read slowly and carefully every word, comma, and stop, but sometime we need reading quickly in order to spend less time not only we could get the main and detail idea, we could also get better information.

Skimming is the method of reading quickly by skipping details, minor ideas and examples to skim is to glide along the surface.
It is really necessary to read reading materials by following this method it is actually not a new skill, we could star skimming by surveying the passage, as follow :

“Unlike scanning this involves reading but done at fast speed. Most of these tasks can usually be given orally. Ask the class to do any of the foolowing : compare values, find and compare events, select a titel, draw inferences, decide the question, create a title”. 

Students would practice skimming when they are reading English materials like newspaper; magazine, or lightweight literature. Students looked at the topic heading and than read the first paragraph to see what is all about, and than move our eyes quickly over the text, try to read the first and the last sentence is conclusion, than we will find that the important ideas of facts are expressed there.

4 Conducting Reading Lesson With Authetic Materials

Before discussing about conducting reading the lesson it is better t explain about authentic materials. Authentic materials are that a native speaker would perform in reading those materials.

The students were told to use their exercise books for their limited writing. In this way the whole package can be used again in the future. The lesson was in there stages in which reading led into a communicative discussion stage.

Stage one: Anticipation

The worksheet was given out but without the article. The students looked at all the reproduced headlines. In pair then in public they anticipated the topic, the countries ideas and vocabulary that might be met in the article that they were soon to read. There was no formal presentation of lexis or grammar during this pre-reading stage as the aim of the reading lesson was to get the students scanning and skimming using an authentic piece of journalism.

Stage Two: Reading

The article was distributed, the students read it in pairs, summarizing the main arguments. Those who finished went on to do the questions. When most had completed the summaries seighboring pairs compared their finding. As the summarize were literally a few words long this took only a few moments, but there was a useful buzz of interaction and it certainly served to depend comprehension for some of the students.

Stage Three: Follow up

Randomly chosen students presented their summary of a viewpoint. These were challenged or improved upon by the others. After checking the new titles that they has composed, we moved into class discussion and students volunteered their own reactions to the pece, which touched upon their own lives. Finally the answers to the written questions were rapidly checked.

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