As reading as well as writing is not Indonesian students’ most wanted activities, teachers teach English as a FL need to be well-prepared in conducting these teaching-learning activities. Understanding reading activities, therefore, is a requirement for teachers. Activity refers to any kind of teaching-learning process happens in the class that mainly consists of pre-, whilst-, and post-reading activity. It has two functions:
1. Helping readers understand particular text they are reading
2. Helping readers develop good reading strategies for reading other text
1. Pre-Reading Activity
As it is suggested by its name, this phase is used by teachers prior to reading the materials. It aims to get students attention and raise their interest. This will ensure that the students are interested in the reading exercise and it will also give teachers the opportunity to introduce them to new vocabulary that will help them understand the text better. Brown (2007:375) gives some example in pre-reading activity, such as introduce a topic, encourage skimming, scanning, predict, and activate schemata. There are some ways in activating schemata ‘prior knowledge’, such as brainstorming, mind-mapping as well as structural organizer (whether the text is cause-effect relationship or other types), pre-questions (this allows students to have a purpose for reading that leads to pose prediction of the outcome), vocabulary preview, or visual aid.
The purpose: to provide enough preparation for the students to be able to comprehend a text well
1. Assess students’ background knowledge of the topic and linguistic content of the text
2. Give students the background knowledge or activate the existing knowledge
3. Clarify cultural information
4. Make students aware of the type of text they will be reading and the purpose for reading
5. Provide collaborative work and
However, teachers ‘sometimes’ only give background knowledge need to understand the text
Kinds:
1. Predicting key words
2. Predicting from title or first sentence
3. Predicting from key illustration
4. Key sequencing (pictures)
5. Readers’ question (students read the first part, and ask ‘what do you want to know?’)
6. Storytelling by the teacher
7. Storytelling in mother tongue
8. Sharing existing knowledge
9. Vocabulary (to comprehension)
2. Whilst-Reading Activity
When students have generated some questions to be sought out in the text, teachers need to train the students to actively ask that questions during the reading phase. Students may take a note or a marker to notice certain important information.
Purpose:
To guide and help students to read strategically so they can comprehend a text effectively and efficiently
1. Modeled reading (teacher reads and then stops at a certain part and elicit questions, let the students know that teacher also think while reading)
2. Skimming and scanning
3. Rereading
4. Shared book and word masking
5. Pause and predict
6. Shadow reading (teacher reads and followed by the students)
7. Summarizing
8. Jigsaw reading
9. Reading aloud (by the teacher)
10. Vocabulary guessing
11. Answer question (pre-reading question)
12. Matching illustration-content
13. Note-taking
3. Post-Reading Activity
Teachers should always follow up reading activities with a post-reading activity. This will give students the opportunity to practice their reading and will reiterate what teachers have taught them in the lesson. Most importantly, however, it will give the exercise a sense of meaning so that the students feel they have achieved something. Brown (ibid) suggests have comprehension questions, do vocabulary study, identify the author’s purpose, examine grammatical structure as well as follow-up writing exercise.
The purpose:
1. Using the familiar text as basis for specific language study (grammar etc)
2. Allowing students to respond creatively
3. Focusing the students more deeply on the information in the text
Kinds:
Story innovation
Innovation on the ending
Cartoon strip
Reader’s theatre
Wanted poster
Story map
Time line
Hot seat (students are ‘interrogating some questions)’
Freeze frames
Cloze
Monster cloze
Vanishing cloze (omitting some words until they can remember the whole text)
Text reconstruction
Semantic mapping
T/F questions
Questioning the text
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