Reading Comprehension In Literature

Reading is indeed an integral component of foreign language skill, and most of the time students are overwhelmed with the amount of vocabulary that they need to know. When assigning reading materials, teachers should not just provide a glossary for students and have them refer to it when they do not understand and can not comprehend. Instead, it will be a stimulating classroom task for students to infer unknown word even phrases meanings in written text, i.e. to do lexical differencing when an unknown part of reading is come up with in the text (Soria, 2001). Soria revealed that his learners‟ familiarity with the theme and topic of the text, and cultural familiarity were important sources of clues for inferring the meanings of a text;

The understanding that results is called reading comprehension” (Richards & Schmidt, 2002, p. 443). And River (1988) notes that reading is a problem-solving activity that involves the reader in the process of deriving and constructing meaning. There are three parts in the reading skill; “the first one is the identification of the black marks; the second is correlating them with linguistic elements; and the third is correlation of the result with meaning which is essentially an intellectual skill; this is the ability to correlate the black marks with the meanings which those words represent”. (Brumfit, Flavell, Hill & Pincas, 1980, p. 89) Reading is regarded as a main source of comprehensible input and as the skill that many serious learners most need to employ (Eskey, 2002). Carrell and Eisterhold (1983) concluded that: our understanding of reading is best considered as an interactive process that takes place between the reader and the text. The basic concept is that the reader reconstructs the text information based in part on the knowledge drawn from the text and in part from the prior knowledge available to the reader. Reading as an interactive process refers to the interaction of many component skills potentially in simultaneous operation; the interaction of these cognitive skills leads to fluent reading comprehension. Simply stated, reading involves both an array of lower-level rapid, automatic identification skills and an array of higher-level comprehension or interpretation skills. In literature, three stages for teaching reading are identified. Chastain (1988, pp 225-229) introduces a three stage plan for teaching