Report of Teaching Reading and Writing

Language teaching deals with many aspects interactive and integrated approaches to emphasize the relationship of skills. We must know that reading ability will be developed best in association with writing, listening, and speaking activities. Even the labelling “Reading” skill must be interrelationship of skill especially in reading-writing (Brown, 2002:298). Based on my reading of that book, I have to put forward five questions for it.

My first question, I propose the question about how the research on reading in second language, particularly in bottom-up and top-down processing. To answer my question, I red a book by Brown (2002), he wrote that research on reading in second language was almost nonexistent in the 1970s. At the time, the research about first reading had been flourishing to find why some children could not read. Then, after three decades, the research reveals some significant finding for teaching reading in second language.

Then, for the next question, I have to ask what the result of research to teach reading skills. For this question, Goodman (1970) confronted the differences between bottom-up and top-down processing became a cornerstone of reading methodology for years to come (Brown: 2002). Still in Brown, bottom-up processing related to the recognizing reader to a multiplicity of linguistic signal (letters, morpheme, syllables, words, phrases, grammatical cues, discourse markers) and use their linguistic data-processing mechanism to impose some sort of order on these signals. And about top-down or conceptually driven is processing in which we draw on our own intelligence and experience to understand a text. Actually, there are any other processes in teaching reading just like schema theory and background knowledge that hallmark the text does not by itself carry meaning. The reader should bring the information, knowledge, emotion, experience and culture to printed word (2002:299).

Based on the last teaching demonstration on reading, the process of bottom-up that could be found when the teacher recognize the student about new word in hang-man games. The teacher gave some words to their students; it could be a new word or difficult word- and then the teacher gave the definition of it words. I think that is as a teacher effort to recognize the words for students’ enrichment of vocabulary. Then, for the top-down process, still in teaching demonstration on reading, the teacher asked the students to make map their concept from the sum up of words to make the wholeness of story based on their guess. Here, the teacher tried to make students’ mind guided and trained the students’ experience to make a story from the words that was given by the teacher. While, in schemata and background knowledge, the students tried to bring information from the narrative text that was given by a teacher after the students had map the story before.

And my next question is about what reading skill that the student should acquire. According to Harmer (1998); the students need to able to do a number of things with reading text. They need to be able to do skim and scan a text. They do skim or scan depend on the what kind of text are read and what they want to get out of it. They do skim to get a general idea of what it is about and do scan to get all details at this stage; they may not be able to get general idea because they concentrate too hard in specific.

From the teaching simulation, the teacher asked the students to do skim in read the narrative text to get the general idea or o gather a gist form that story. The teacher did not ask the student to read the whole text because the aim of read the text was about check their coherence guess with the true story in the text.

For my next question is about what the types of classroom reading performance. Here, Brown explained that variety of reading performance in language classroom is derived more from the variety of text (2002:312). So that, what kinds of performance that we are used depend on the variety of text. Oral and silent reading becomes types of performance in reading. But, here the teacher has to reason to ask their students to read orally or silent. Actually, at the beginning and intermediate levels, oral reading serve as an evaluative check on bottom-up processing skill, and for advance level, oral reading is not very authentic language activity. And in silent type, there are two branches; intensive (classroom-oriented activity in which students focus on linguistic or semantic details of passages) and extensive (caring out to achieve general understanding of usually somewhat longer text).

My experience in elementary school, my teacher asked me to read the text orally and loudly. But when I was in junior and senior high school, my teacher did different ways or type to ask me to read, not orally, but silent. I think those all has a purpose for each level.

And for my last question, I have to ask what the principles for teaching of reading. To answer this question, Harmer stated that there are six principles reading is not passive skill, students need to be engaged with what they are reading, students should be encouraged to respond to the content of reading text, not just to the language, prediction is major factor in reading, match the task to the topic, and good teacher exploits reading texts to the full (1998:70-71). From the reading teaching demonstration, the teacher asked the students to predict what the story about. It includes to the one of those principles.