By Yogo Gandjarwati
Reading
comprehension is the act of understanding what you are reading. While the
definition can be simply stated the act is not simple to teach, learn or
practice. Reading comprehension is an intentional, active, interactive process
that occurs before, during and after a person reads a particular piece of
writing. Reading comprehension is one of the pillars of the act of reading.
When a person reads a text he engages in a complex array of cognitive
processes. He is simultaneously using his awareness and understanding of
phonemes (individual sound “pieces” in language), phonics (connection between
letters and sounds and the relationship between sounds, letters and words) and
ability to comprehend or construct meaning from the text. This last component
of the act of reading is reading comprehension. It cannot occur independent of
the other two elements of the process. At the same time, it is the most
difficult and most important of the three, (Roger Farr and Jenny Conner :
2004).
Text comprehension is much more complex and varied
that vocabulary knowledge. Readers use many different text comprehension
strategies to develop reading comprehension. These include monitoring for
understanding, answering and generating questions, summarizing and being aware
of and using a text’s structure to aid comprehension. As you can see, reading
comprehension is incredibly complex and multifaceted. Because of this, readers
do not develop the ability to comprehend texts quickly, easily or
independently.
Reading
comprehension strategies must be taught over an extended period of time by
parents and teachers who have knowledge and experience using them. It might
seem that once a child learns to read in the elementary grades he is able to
tackle any future text that comes his way. This is not true. Reading
comprehension strategies must be refined, practiced and reinforced continually
throughout life. Even in the middle grades and high school, parents and
teachers need to continue to help their children develop reading comprehension
strategies. As their reading materials become more diverse and challenging,
children need to learn new tools for comprehending these texts. Content area
materials such as textbooks and newspaper, magazine and journal articles pose
different reading comprehension challenges for young people and thus require
different ccomprehension strategies.
Interpretative
comprehension is stimulated by purposes for reading and teacher’s questions
which demand thinking and imagination that goes beyond the printed page. The
skill consist in: first, reason with information presented to understand
the author’s tone, purpose, and attitude; second, infer factual
information, main ideas, comparisons.
Cause-effect relationships not explicitly stated in the passage; third,
summarization of story content.
The main idea of a
passage or reading is the central thought or message. In contrast to the term
topic, which refers to the subject under discussion, the term main idea refers
to the point or thought being expressed. The difference between atopic and a
main idea will become clearer to you if you imagine yourself overhearing a
conversation in which your name is repeatedly mentioned. When you ask your
friends what they were discussing, they say they were talking about you. At
that point, you have the topic but not the main idea. Undoubtedly, you wouldn’t
be satisfied until you learned what your friends were saying about this
particular topic.
Effective language instructors show students how
they can adjust their reading behavior to deal with a variety of situations,
types of input, and reading purposes. They help students develop a set of
reading strategies and match appropriate strategies to each reading situation.
Strategies that can help students read more quickly and effectively include: using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions
about content and vocabulary and check comprehension; using knowledge of the
text type and purpose to make predictions about discourse structure; using
knowledge about the author to make predictions about writing style, vocabulary,
content and paraphrasing: stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension by restating
the information and ideas in the text (Coady,1997, p. 40).
The students’ capability is influenced
by their learning style. Most students can learn the same
content. But how they best receive and then perceive that content is
determined largely by their individual learning styles. Simply
defined, a student's studying style is the way a student processes,
concentrates, internalizes and retain novel and often difficult bits of domain
specific content knowledge, usually for testing and examination purposes.
And as is the case with how one best learns information, many of the same
elements, emotional, environmental, biological, sociological, and physiological
must also be taken into account when studying, (Brown H.D,
1999, p. 27).
Applying LCD Projector is one of visual learning style. By using the facilitythe students more motivated in teaching and
learning activity. Students can acquire their lessons better and more
interestedly than other ways. The main focus of using of LCD Projector in the
classroom was not only to help students to learn more effectively but also to
have fun. And also applying LCD Projector can help teacher in explaining
material easily, (Denning K. & Leben, 1995, p. 78).
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