Critical Reading 6

Recently, I start to focus in exploring reading skill, especially teaching reading for EFL learners.  This time I read general explanation about reading. The title of the article is Teaching reading comprehension to ESL/EFL learners. The article discuss about the principle of reading comprehension, the cognitive task involved in reading or the activities used by teacher in teaching reading comprehension. Firstly, the writers give definition of reading. From the article we can conclude that reading is an interactive process between reader and text leading to autonomous learning. The processes involved in reading are bottom-up and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing occurs “when someone tries to understand language by looking at individual meanings or grammatical characteristics of the most basic units of the text, (e.g. sounds for a listening or words for a reading), and moves from these to trying to understand the whole text.”*). While top- down processing occurs “when someone uses background information to predict the meaning of language they are going to listen to or read.”**) .

The writers mention the type of reading. There are two types of reading, extensive reading and intensive reading. Extensive reading tends to reading for pleasure, whereas intensive reading is reading for details, whether its grammatical form, literal meaning or vocabulary. The importance of teaching reading also explained in this article. Effective reading strategy is the key of reading comprehension. Motivation and engagement become an issue in reading comprehension. That is why, teacher role in choosing material is really important. Teachers should aware to some aspect such as the level of the text and student’s interest. The activities conducted in teaching reading including pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading process. Pre-reading process is important to build student’s motivation. In the last section, the article conveys about how to teach reading. Expansion of vocabulary should be noticed by teacher to help them becomes a fluent reader. Therefore teachers should provide vocabulary list or puzzle to enrich student’s vocabulary.
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*)https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/top-down

**)https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/bottom

Citation :

Alyousef, H. S. (2006). Teaching reading comprehension to ESL/EFL learners. Journal of Language and Learning, 5(1), 63-73.

"Reading is dreaming with open eyes"