CHAPTER II THEORITICAL FRAMEWORK AND ACTION RESEARCH

A. Reading Reading is saying the words from the book or something written loudly or silently. Reading has a positive effect on students vocabulary knowledge, on their spelling and on their writing. 1. Definition of Reading Reading has always been different from writing. Writing prioritizes sound, as the spoken word must be transformed or deconstructed into representative sign(s). Reading, however, prioritizes meaning. The faculty of reading has, in fact, very little to do with the skill of writing.1 Reading is an interactive process that takes place between the text and the reader is processing strategies and background knowledge.2 Katharine said on her book : It is now well accepted that reading consists of two components, decoding and comprehension. Decoding is the word recognition process that transforms print to words, whereas comprehension assigns meaning to words, sentences, and texts. It is also now widely accepted that reading is a language-based skill. Word recognition relies heavily on phonological
1 2

Fischer Steven. A History of Reading, (London, Reaktion Book Ltd, 2003), p. 11. Kristin Lems, et al, Teaching Reading to English Language Learner, Birch, 2007; Rumelhart, 1980, (New York, The Guilford Press, 2010) p. 33

14

15 and lexical knowledge, whereas comprehension of larger discourse units requires syntactic, morphologic, semantic, and discourse knowledge3 From Elizabeth and friends, Reading is about understanding written texts. It is a complex activity that involves both perception and thought. Reading consists of two related processes: word recognition and comprehension. Word recognition refers to the process of perceiving how written symbols correspond to ones spoken language. Comprehension is the process of making sense of words, sentences and connected text.4 Readers typically make use of background knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, experience with text and other strategies to help them understand written text. According Wikipedia, Reading is the cognitive process of understanding a written linguistic message; interpretation: a mental representation of the meaning or significance of something.5 Meaning, learning, and pleasure are the ultimate goals of learning to read. Although fundamental skills such as phonics and fluency are important building blocks of reading, reading comprehension is the sine qua non of reading. Knowing how to read words has ultimately little value if the student is unable to construct meaning from text. Ultimately, reading comprehension is the process of constructing meaning by coordinating a number of complex

Katharine, Elaine, Speaking, Reading, and Writing in Children With Language Learning Disabilitieas: New Paragdigms in Research and Practice. Adapted fromH. Catts&A. Kamhi (1999), Language and Reading Disabilities, Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Reprinted by permission.(New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2008),p. 45 4 Pang Elizabeth. Et al. Teaching Reading. (UNESCO. IBE Publication. Switzerland), p. 6 5 Reading. Download 20 May 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org.wiki/reading.html

16 processes that include word reading, word and world knowledge, and fluency.6

2. The Stages of Reading Geoffrey on his book explains there the stages of reading can be illustrated as follows7: 1) The symbols and letters have to be perceived and then decoded. 2) We have to understand the words to understand the text. 3) From this, understanding we gather meaning from the text. Read in the context of teaching English as a foreign language is a skill that is very complex. There are two aspects of reading skills: 1) Lower order mechanical skill, which consists of skills: a) Recognition of letter shapes b) Recognition of linguistic elements (phoneme/grapheme, words phrase, clause pattern, sentence) c) Recognition of sound/letter spelling pattern correspondence (ability to bark at print) d) Slow reading speed

Janette K, et al, Teaching Reading Comprehension to Students with Learning Difficulties , (New York, Guilford Press, 2007), p. 33 7 Broughton Geoffrey. Et al. Teaching English as a Foreign Language. ( Routledge Education Book, Second Edition 1980) p. 89-93

17 2) Appropriate to purpose skill, which consists of skills: a) Reading aloud b) Silent reading There are many reason why getting students to read English texts is an important part of the teacher job. In the first place, many of them want to be able to read texts in English either for their careers, for study purpose or simple for pleasure. Anything we can do to make reading easier for them must be a good idea.

B. Communicative Language Teaching Method The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) method is an integration of skills taught and learned with a communicative view. The objective of this approach is to help students develop communicative competence, i.e. the ability to communicate original messages in real life situations in meaningful contexts. This method was first developed in Europe in the mid 1960s. The increasing interdependence of European countries required the language teaching system to change. Linguists called for language teaching to focus on communicative proficiency instead of mere mastery of structures in order to meet the communicative needs of people across countries. In this method, students are supposed to develop their communicative competence in real life contexts.

18 Teachers act as facilitators and directors, while students are the main actors of the class. Authentic input and interactive activities are primary. It is fluency focused, achieving tasks through the use of language, not the analysis of the language. It emphasizes sensitivity to learner differences and variation in language use. Students initiatives and interaction play a major role in language acquisition. Harmer explains that the purpose of Communicative Language Teaching as follows: The communicative approach or CLT have now become generalized terms to describe learning sequences, which aim to improve the students ability to communicate, in stark contrast to teaching, which is aim more at learning bits of language just because they exist and without focusing on their use in communication.8 Once of the most characteristic feature of Communicative Language Teaching is that it pays systematic attention to functional as well as structural aspects of language, combining these into a more communicative view.9 There are three distinction the proposed from Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), there are : 1. Mechanical practice, refer to a controlled practice activity which students can successfully carry out without necessarily understanding the language they are using. Example of this kind of activity is repetition drills and

8 9

Harmer Jeremy, The Practice of English Language Teaching, (England, Longman 2003), p. 86 Littewood William, Communicative Language Teaching, An Introduction, (United Kingdom, 2002, University Press Cambridge), p. 1

19 substitution drills designed to practice use particular grammatical or other items. 2. Meaningful practice refers to an activity where language control is still provided but where students are required to make meaningful choices when carrying out practice. 3. Communicative practice refers to activities where practice in using language within a real communicative context is the focus, where real information is exchanged, and where the language used is not totally predictable. 10

C. Technique of Teaching Reading through Communicative Language Teaching Method There are many reason why getting students to read English texts is an important part of the teachers job. The teaching reading has often involved little more than assigning the students a text, read, and giving them instruction to answer the question. This procedure is like testing or evaluation rather than teaching strategy. They get nothing. They just spent their time without get comprehension or information from the text. From his book, Jeremy Harmer said, There are kind of reading students should do, if they are all business people, the teacher may well want to concentrate on business texts. If they are science students, reading scientific texts

10

Richards. C Jack, Communicative Language Teaching Today, (United Kingdom, 2000, Press Cambridge University), p. 15

20 may be priority. But if, as is often the case, they are mixed group with differing interest and careers, a more varied diet is appropriate. 11 Among things the teacher might want them to read are magazine, articles, letters, stories, menus, advertisements, reports, plays extracts, recipes, instruction, poems, and reference material. Being able to decode letters and symbols does not signify reading. Neither does pronouncing the words aloud. The more incomprehensible the text is the longer it takes to read it. Reading a second or foreign language is a difficult task. Teachers have to be aware of these factors as they proceed in their instructions. In teaching reading, we know of pre-reading activities, while reading activities and post reading activities. Pre-reading activities are: 1) Providing scaffolding to help students understand text 2) Discuss pictures/activities to activate prior knowledge of the text 3) Vocabulary preview to prepare students for unknown words Once the text is started, it also requires some skills, such as: 1) Outlining the main idea 2) Developing language-learning strategies use synonyms, antonyms, and contextual clues. 3) Connecting the reading topic with real life experiences and knowledge of the world i.e. their schema.
11

Harmer Jeremy, How To Teach English (England, Longman 1998), p. 68

21 These activities are not done by the teachers. The teacher's attitude towards these is that it is unnecessary. They start their tasks with the reading text. Students need scaffolding, immersion in the language and many follow up activities in order to. There some technique how to improve efficient reading skill, there are: a. Practicing scanning, By scanning, we read briefly to search for specific information, whether we read a discourse suitable or in accordance with the data we want. Scanning exercises can be given a tutor to students orally either individuals or in groups and done fast. b. Practicing skimming, Skimming requires more concentration than scanning because it is difficult to scan quickly through a discourse with a group of friends. These difficulties can be overcome by dividing the discourse of each member of the group read with the different paragraph Practice can also be given by a discourse with a few titles, figures topics such as pictures or diagrams. c. Making use of all the resource, The book contains a variety of sources of information that can help readers understand and search for data from linear and nonlinear discourse we need. From non-linear discourse we are and get a reference apparatus such as dictionary, appendixes, notes / footnotes, bibliographical references, list of symbols, list of special terms, glossaries, etc.

22 d. Improving reading speed, to practice speed reading, we start by selecting the discourse of the English language that is easy and interesting. Make reading a fun activity. Reading comprehension is not meant to understand the meaning of each word is read. To note is the meaning of the sentence or context in English called 'context'. Main idea of 'subject' and supporting detail sentences supporting. In the passages, eye movement and sense groups is essential A good reader, to move his eyes from left to right quickly and reading is not word for word, but phrase by phrase or group of words or clauses that are meaningful logic logically. Before we begin to teaching reading through the communicative language teaching method, we should do our best to offer a mixture of material and activities so that the student can practice these various skills with English text. Jeremy Harmer has reading suggestions as follow: 12 1. Using newspapers: there is almost no limit to the kinds of activity which can be done with newspapers (or their online equivalents). We can do all kinds of matching exercise, such as ones where students have to match articles with their headlines or with relevant pictures. At higher levels, we can have students read three accounts of the same incident and ask them to find the differences between them. We can use newspaper articles as a stimulus for speaking or writing ( students can write letters in reply to what they

12

Ibid p. 80

23 read ).We can ask students to read small ads ( advertisements ) for holidays, partners, thing for sale, etc, in order to make a choice about which holiday, person or thing they would choose. Latter, they can use their choices to role-play descriptions, contact the service providers or say what happened when they made their choices. We can get students to read the letters page from a newspaper and try to imagine what the writers look like, and what kinds of lives they have. They can reply to the letters. 2. Predicting from words and pictures: students are given a number of words from a text. Working in groups, they have to predict what kind of a text they are going to read- or what story the text tells. They then read the text to see if their original predictions were correct. We dont have to give them individual words, of course. We can give them whole phrases and get them to try to make a story using them. For example, the phrases knock on the door , Go away!, They find a man the next morning, He is dead, James is in the lighthouse will help students to predict (perhaps wrongly, of course!) some kind of story about a lighthouse keeper, some sort of threat and a dead person. They then read a ghost story with these phrases in it. We can also give students pictures to predict from or slightly bigger fragments from the text. 3. Different responses: there are many things students can do with a reading text apart from answering comprehension questions with sentences, saying

24 whether something is true or false or finding particular words in the text. For example, when a text is full of facts and figures, we can get students to put the information into graphs, tables or diagrams. We can also ask them to describe the people in the text (where no physical description is given). This will encourage them to visualize what they are reading. We can let students read stories, but leave off the ending for them to guess. Alternatively, they can read stories in stages, stopping every now and then to predict what will happen next. At higher levels, we can get students to infer the writers attitude from a text. We can also get the students involved in genre analysis- where they look at the construction of a number of different examples of, say, magazine advertisements in order to work out how they are typically constructed.

D. The Role of Teacher in Teaching Reading In order to get students to read enthusiastically in class, teacher need to create interest in the topic and task. However, there are further roles the teacher needs to adopt when asking students to read intensively: 1. Organizer, the teacher need to tell students exactly what their reading purpose is, and give them clear instructions about how to achieve it and how long they have to do this.

25 2. Observer, when the teacher asks students to read on their own they need to give them space to do so. 3. Feedback Organizer, when the students have completed the task, the teacher can lead a feedback session to check that they have completed the task successfully. 4. Prompter, when the students have read a text we can prompt them to notice language feature in that text.13

E. Classroom Action Research Action research is a collaborative activity among colleagues searching for solutions to everyday, real problems experienced in schools, or looking for ways to improve instruction and increase student achievement. Rather than dealing with the theoretical, action research allows practitioners to address those concerns that are closest to them, ones over which they can exhibit some influence and make change. Practitioners are responsible for making more and more decisions in the operations of schools, and they are being held publicly accountable for student achievement results. The term action research has often been used in a similar way to other terms used to describe research undertaken by educational practitioners, such as: classroom research; self-reflective enquiry; educational action research ; and,

13

Loc Cit p. 228

26 exploratory teaching and learning You may also find it referred to as 'practitioner enquiry', 'reflective analyses or 'evidence-based practice'. The most important component of action research is that it does include both action and reflection that lead to enhance practice.14 Action research is part of a broad movement that has been going on in education generally for some time. It is related to the ideas of reflective practice and the teacher as researcher. Action research involves taking a self-reflective, critical, and systematic approach to exploring your own teaching contexts.15 Action research is a process in which participants examine their own educational practice systematically and carefully, using the techniques of research. It is base on the following assumptions: 1) Teachers and principals work best on problems they have identified for themselves 2) Teachers and principals become more effective when encouraged to examine and assess their own work and then consider ways of working differently 3) 4) Teachers and principals help each other by working collaboratively Working with colleagues helps teachers and principals in their professional development

14

Coats Maggie, Action Research a Guide For Associated Lecturers , (Open University, Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA 2005), p. 8 15 Burns Anne, Doing Action Research in English language Teaching:A Guide for Practitioners , (New York, Routledge 2010), p. 2

27 1. Characteristic of Classroom Action Research Classroom Action research has different from the formal research (conventional). Classroom action Research has some characteristic, there are: a. On-the job problem oriented, problems studied are the real problems that arise in the working environment of the researcher. b. Problem solving oriented, oriented problem solving, an attempt to solve the problems faced by researchers. c. Improvement oriented, oriented quality improvement effort in repairing or improving the quality of the problems that arise. d. Cycle, concept is applied through a sequence of actions that consists of several stages of this cycle consists of four steps: planning, action, observation, analysis, or reflection. e. Specifics contextual, classroom action research activities triggered by practical problems faced by teachers in the learning process in the classroom. f. Participatory (collaborative), classroom action research conducted in a collaborative and partnering with other entities. 2. Four Aspects of Classroom Action Research According to Kemmis and McTaggart who are major authors in this field: Action Research typically involves four broad phases in a cycle of research. The first cycle may become a continuing, or iterative, spiral of

28 cycles which recur until the action researcher has achieved a satisfactory outcome and feels it is time to stop. Planning, developing action plans that are critical to improving what has happened.16 1)Planning In this phase the researcher identify a problem or issue and develop a plan of action in order to bring about improvements in a specific area of the research context. This is a forward-looking phase where the researcher consider: i) what kind of investigation is possible within the realities and constraints of the researcher teaching situation; and ii) what potential improvements you think are possible. 2)Action The plan is a carefully considered one which involves some deliberate interventions into the researcher teaching situation that the researcher put into action over an agreed period of time. The interventions are critically informed as the researcher question the assumptions about the current situation and plan new and alternative ways of doing things. 3)Observation This phase involves the researcher in observing systematically the effects of the action and documenting the context, actions and opinions of those involved. It is a data collection phase where you use open-eyed and open-minded tools to collect information about what is happening.

16

Ibid p. 7-9

29 4)Reflection At this point, the researcher reflect on, evaluate and describe the effects of the action in order to make sense of what has happened and to understand the issue you have explored more clearly. The researcher may decide to do further cycles of AR to improve the situation even more, or to share the story of your research with others as part of your ongoing professional development. This model of AR has often been illustrated through the diagram in Figure below to show it is iterative or recursive nature.

Cyclical AR model based on Kemmis and McTaggart (1988)