Second Review : Journal of "How Can Student Improve Their Reading Comprehension Skill?"

Assalamu’alaikum... Hello good readers, as I promised before, I will review more about journal which has become a comparison of the journals that I reviewed earlier. So, check this out.

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Tittle          : How Can Students Improve Their Reading Comprehension Skill?

Author       : Abbas PourhoseinGilakjani

This journal discussing about reading  strategies and literary elements have a role and influent to improve students’ reading comprehension. More specific, this journal define the term of reading and reading comprehension, explain the types of reading, declare models of reading process, state theories of reading comprehension,  review  the  effective  strategies  for  reading  comprehension,  and  finally mention findings of learners’ reading strategies and their reading comprehension proficiency.

Definition of Reading

According to Grabe (1991 as cited in Alyousef 2005) defined reading as an interactive process between readers and texts that result in reading fluency. Its mean that readers interact with texts to making meaning from written text.

Definition of Reading Comprehension

Duke (2003) stated that comprehension is a process in which  readers  make  meaning  by  interacting  with  text  through  the combination  of  prior knowledge and previous experience, information in the text, and the views of readers related to the text. Its mean that readers making meaning from text influenced by their bacground knowledge, views and last experience.

Kinds of Reading
There are two different kinds of reading :

·         Extensive Reading

Extensive reading is skimming and scanning activities. The benefits of extensive reading as follows: Students can make their language proficiency, advance in their reading skill, become more independent in their learning, learn cultural knowledge, and expand confidence and incentive to continue their own learning.

·         Intensive Reading

Learners read a page to find the meaning and to be familiar with the strategies of writing.

Models of Reading Process  

There are three models for the second-language reading process:

1)      The bottom-up model (the main focus of this model is the smaller units of a text like letters, words, phrases, and sentences)

2)      The top-down model (The readers do not read every word of a text but they focus on identifying the next words to guess the meaning of words or phrases)

3)      The interactive model (the effective reading needs both top-down and bottom-up decoding, this model is based on information from various sources like orthographic, lexical, syntactic, semantic knowledge, and schemata).

Theories of Reading Comprehension

There are three types of theories of reading comprehension. They are mental representations, content literacy (ability to read, understand, and learn from texts from a particular matter) , and cognitive processes (The application of syntactic and semantic rules together with the activation of more particular previous knowledge occurs automatically and unconsciously).

Effective Strategies for Reading Comprehension

There a lot of strategies for reading comprehension. These strategies are explained in detail in this section.

• Activating and Using Background Knowledge
•  Generating and Asking Questions
•  Making Inferences
•  Predicting
•  Summarizing
• Visualizing
•  Comprehension Monitoring

Conclusion

The great impact on the students’reading comprehension ability. they are  active  makers  of  meaning. Imdasition, Laders should be involved in the ng process by using strategies  to  monitor  their   meaning.  reading materials and activities should be very attractive to students in order to understand a text easily and they should be related to the students’ proficiency levels. Teachers  have  a  big  responsibility  to  motivate  their  students in  reading  these  materials, should be very sensitive to their learners’ comprehension difficulties, and should help their learners to modify their views towards reading and have positive attitudes towards their reading activities so that they can better understand the different texts.