Procedure Text

Procedure text is text that explain the way to operate or how to make something. Examples of the operate something are how to operate computer, how to drive a car, etc. Examples of the make something are how to make meatballs, how to make orang juice, how to make cupboard, etc. Procedure text make the reader know how to do or to make something correctly.

HOW TO INSERT SIM CARD

First off all, switch off the phone. Second, slide the cover, and pull out the battery. Then, insert the SIM card into its slot. But, remember, do it carefully.
Now, slide the cover back onto the mobile phone. Finally, switch on your phone and you’ll see the signal of your SIM card on the phone screen. You can start using your phone.

Characteristics of procedure text :
1. Generic structure, divided to :
- Goal : apa yang ingin dicapai atau diraih. Contoh, How to Insert SIM Card (according to the text above).
- Material/Tool: bahan atau alat-alat yang dibutuhkan untuk membuat/melakukan sesuatu. Contohnya, Phone (according to the text above).
- Steps/Procedures: langkah-langkah atau prosedur dalam melakukan/membuat sesuatu. Reader can see the text above.
2. Using “simple present tense”. Contoh: Switch, slide, pull, and insert.
3. Using imperatives sentence. Contohya, Switch off the phone, slide the cover, pull out the battery, and insert sim card.
4. Sequences Word. Contoh: first, second, then, and finally.

Exercise
Arrange the sentence below according the correct step!
a. Then, the computer will scan in computer about viruses.
b. Wait a moment while your computer is starting scan data automatically.
c. Save your work at the computer and turn off the computer.
d. Plug the cable into the socket and turn on your computer.
e. Enter a keyword if you use it.
f. After that, choose programs as needed, for example you want to type, the program to choose is Microsoft Word.

Answer!
a. Plug the cable into the socket and turn on your computer.
b. Wait a moment while your computer is starting scan data automatically.
c. Enter a keyword if you use it.
d. Then, the computer will scan in computer about viruses.
e. After that, choose programs as needed, for example you want to type, the program to choose is Microsoft Word.
f. Save your work at the computer and turn off the computer.

HOW TO OPERATE COMPUTER

First, plug the cable into the socket and turn on your computer. Second, wait a moment while your computer is starting Scan data automatically. Next, enter a keyword if you use it. Then, the computer will scan in computer about viruses. After that, choose programs as needed, for example you want to type, the program to choose is Microsoft Word. Finally, save your work at the computer and turn off the computer.

Source :

To Be Continued »

Teaching reading

Teaching reading as a foreign language such as English is not easy to do. A teacher before teaching his/her students has to know his duty as a teacher. In general, the teacher should acknowledge or identify what target or goal that should be achieved in teaching English and to whom she or he teaches. Successfulness is determined by the use of appropriate method and technique. Therefore, in preparing the materials, an English teacher has to choose a method, which is suitable with the instructional aim written in the curriculum, the situation, and also his or her students’ ability level and interest. The use of an inappropriate method and technique cannot lead the teacher to a successful teaching although he or she completely masters the subject matter.

To Be Continued »

Motivation for reading

Kembo, 1993:37 in Nani suggested some procedures to motivate the students in learning reading subject as follows:

1) Start from the student’s reports, taking time to discuss what they are reading. This technique has a twofold benefit: it boots individual morale as the teacher focuses on individual during discussing, and the teacher can probe students on their perceptions of and reactions to what they have read.

2) Students who read the must books can be rewarded with small tokens at the end or middle of their term. These tokens need not be expensive-they can be as simple as exercise books, pens, mathematical sets, or small story or poetry books.

3) Interesting books reports can be pasted up or pinned to the soft board so that the other students will be encouraged to read them. One important way to provide motivation in reading is to link it with actual language lessons by trying it to other language skills. This helps students realize that they can do the best.

To Be Continued »

Reading Technique

Reading is an active cognitive process of interacting with print and monitoring comprehension to establish meaning. Simanjuntak (1988: 16) says that the first point to be made about the reading process is reading comprehension knowledge is basic element we do not know, or new information, to what we already know. Both points are describing that reading comprehension is reading process in which the reader’s knowledge of the language or text he read is required to be able comprehend to understand the massage or at least to approach the original massage of the writes in the text.
Simanjuntak in Developing Reading skill (1988: 4) says, “Reading comprehension is most likely to occur when the students are reading what they want to read, or at least what they see same good reason to read.”
Reading technique is important to understand reading material. Otherwise, if the student read without any technique, they cannot find what they want from their reading. Therefore, students who have determined what they expect to gain from their reading should select a purpose in this case; they must be able to project the ideas, application and conclusion. These reading necessities should be taught to help to improve the student reading abilities. Kustaryo (1998: 4) said that student should know same reading technique that they need for their college work. They should be sure understood the reading materials. Different types of reading materials call different reading techniques.
The gestation above indicates that the importance of reading technique that reader can obtain information, the main idea or understand the whole materials. Some reading techniques are presented as follows:

1) Survey reading. In survey reading, a reader surveys some information that they went to get. Thus, before that reading process, a reader must set what kind of information the reader needs.

2) Skimming is a technique used to look for the gist of what the author is saying without a lot of details (Kustaryo, 1998:5 in Hernia). This used if the reader only wants a review or an overview of the material. According to Smith and Johnson (1980), skimming is reading technique for getting information to satisfy certain reading purpose rapidly.

3) Scanning is also a technique for finding specific information without reading the entire selection, (Smith Johnson, 1902:402). When a readers need to locate specific information, he might read carefully to find the information that they read.

4) Reading in depth - this involves reading a text or passage thoroughly, paying attention to detail.

To Be Continued »

Important Factors in Reading Comprehension

Dealing with the improvement of the reading comprehension, it is very important to concern with factors that influence the reading comprehension. Salman (2004: 10-11) stated seven attention steps that can increase reading:

a) Attention is an absolute pre requisite to intensive metal impression.

b) Interest to the author’s ideas will make the readers easy to comprehend them.

c) Purpose contributes greatly to the amount that someone speed on a certain reading.

d) Concentration it is a process of holding on enough attention to establish the vivid impression which contributes so much to recall.

e) Association natural in rational association of ideas is very useful way to fix them in one is mind for later retention because the reader tries to association the author’s ideas with what he has mind.

f) Repetition means reviewing, in this case, the readers read something few times to understand it better.

g) Through distributed practice the reader will be a good and will have better retention in this reading if he always practices speed-reading and comprehension retention.

Tola (2003: 2) states that to understand reading, there are three principles of comprehension. These principles includes the importance of the student prior knowledge in the acquisition of information, the level of the text understanding to be achieve in the lesson and the organization of information to and long learn retention.

To Be Continued »

Level of Comprehension

As we know, reading is a thinking activity. By now, we have read this several times. This process involves getting meaning from the printed word or symbol. In his resource, the researcher finds all levels of meaning or comprehension. In this case, levels mean different depths of understanding and different analysis. In other words, the reader of this research paper will be expected to read at different levels of comprehension. These three different levels of comprehension can be called the literal level, the interpretive level and the applied level. Let us examine what each means briefly.

a) Literal Level
The first level of comprehension can be called the literal level for the sake of wording because it is the most simple. At this level, readers or students can attempt to answer the question: “What did the author say?” At this level, the readers would not have to understand the true meaning of a paragraph; however, the readers could memorize the information. Instructors might ask them to read a chapter dealing with dates or specific facts. At the literal level, the readers would memorize these dates and facts. However, even though the readers have memorized these facts, this does not mean that they necessarily understand their full meaning or see the implication of these dates and facts applied to other situations. At the literal level, the readers are looking at what was written by an author at “face value”, little interpretation is needed.

b) Interpretive Level
The second level of comprehension is called the interpretive level. At the interpretive level, the readers or students can attempt to answer this question: “What was meant by what was said?” At this level, the readers are attempting to understand what the author meant by what she/he said in the story, paragraph or textbook. It is presumed that the readers have already memorized certain facts at the literal level and then they are attempting to see the implications of the author’s words. At this level, the readers are attempting to read between the lines. At this level, the readers are trying to understand that which we memorized at the literal level of comprehension.
Knowing the how and why behind this level of understanding is obviously a much deeper or profound level of thinking. This level of comprehension is that college instructors will most likely expect their students to get in their courses. Of course, they want them to memorize dates, facts, details, but they also want us to be able to understand how that information relates to and is connected to the “bigger picture” of what the students are studying.

c) Applied Level
At this level, the readers are about to elevate or raise your thinking one more “notch” or level to a more critical, analyzing level. This presumes that the readers have already reached the previous two levels. At this level, the readers are “reading between the lines” and then examining the message from the author and attempting to apply that message to other settings.

Abderson in Yatim (1996:106-107) divided comprehension into three levels including reading between the lines. They are listed as follows:

a) Reading The Lines
At this level, a reader is expected to comprehend what the author says in order words, in reading the lines a reader tries to recall what the author explicitly states in writing

b) Reading between The Lines
This level is higher and more difficult than reading the lines. At this level a reader is demanded to understand what the author means not just what author says. When the reader comprehends the lines, he then tries to make interpretation between the lines

c) Reading beyond The Lines
This level is highest from to others, a reader at this level, is of drawing inferences and making generalization of what the reader has read.

To Be Continued »

Kinds of Reading Comprehension

There are many different kinds of reading, each requiring different approaches, techniques and levels of concentration. Some of the different types of reading people may use are listed as follows:

a) Reading for enjoyment – light reading (e.g. magazines, novels). This requires a minimum of effort and little concentration.

b) Reading for an overview or exploratory reading, involves skimming or pre-reading a book or journal to get the general idea of the topic. This is the sort of reading used when looking through a book before deciding whether or not to take it out of the library to read in greater detail.

c) Revision reading – re-reading material which you are already familiar with. Revision reading is used to test information recall.

d) Search reading – reading to locate specific information or an answer of a particular question; A trivial example of this technique is looking for a phone number in a telephone directory. You are not interested in reading all the names and numbers in the phone book but just the one you are looking for. All the other irrelevant information can be ignored.

e) Reading for mastery – reading to obtain detailed information and an understanding of a text; usually slow, careful and repeated reading requiring more intense concentration.

f) Critical reading, means reading to assess or review ideas. This also involves intense concentration. Critical reading requires that you distinguish between opinions, assumptions and fact, and recognize fallacious or illogical reason, false statement, emotional language, understatement, overstatement, irony, satire and omission of information.

g) Proof reading, refers to reading to correct grammar, spelling, punctuations. This requires meticulous attention to details. This is the final step in preparing any written work.

Burn et al (1984:177-178) categorized reading comprehension into four categories namely, literal reading, interpretive reading, critical reading, and creative reading.

a) Literal Reading
Reading for literal comprehension involves acquiring information that is directly stated in a selection. Answer to literal question simply demands the students from memory what the book says. Literal comprehension is the lowest level type understanding.

b) Interpretive Reading
The imperative involving reading between the lines or making is not directly stated in the text, but suggested or implied. Interpretive levels of reading comprehension go beyond literal comprehension.

c) Critical Reading
Just like the meaning of the critical reading revealed before, Burn views that the essential reading is evaluation of the ideas in the materials with known standard and conclusion about accuracy appropriateness. In the critical reading, a reader must be collected, analyze and synthesize the information.

d) Creative Reading
The creative reading involves going beyond the material presented by the author creative and requires the students to think as they read and to use their imagination. In creative reading, the reader tries to come up with a new or alternative solution to those presented by author.

Based on several definitions above, the researcher concludes that reading comprehension means the understanding, evaluating, utilizing of information gained through symbol of the text that involves any level concentration.

To Be Continued »

Definition of Reading

Reading is one of important skills in learning. The fundamental goal of any reading activity is to understand the concept and to know the language. Here are some definitions about reading:

1) Scheiner in Kustaryo (1998:2) defines reading as an active cognitive process of interacting with the print and monitoring comprehension to establish meaning.

2) Weaver has identified three definitions for reading:
a) Learning to read means learning to pronounce words.
b) Learning to read means learning to identify words and get their meaning.
c) Learning to read means learning to bring meaning to a text in order to get meaning from it.

3) Hornby in Syahriani HP (1945:1999) defines reading as an action of a person who reads.

4) Goodman (1971:135 in Pimsleur et at) states that reading is a psycholinguistic process by which the reader, a language user reconstructs, as best he can a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display”.
Concerning with some definitions of reading given above, the researcher makes his own definition that reading is the process of obtaining information from written language through looking at it and analyzing something from the written language.
However, defining reading is not that simple especially when reading comprehension is the focal point of a research study. Johnston (1983 in Carrell, 1991) tried to work out its closest meaning as such:

“Reading comprehension is considered to be a complex behavior which involves conscious and unconscious use of various strategies, including problem-solving strategies, to build a model of the meaning which the writer is assumed to have intended. The model is constructed using schematic knowledge structures and the various cue systems which the writer has given (e.g., words, syntax, macro-structures, social information) to generate hypotheses which are tested using various logical and pragmatic strategies. Most of this model must be inferred, since text can never be fully explicit and, in general, very little of it is explicit because even the appropriate intentional and extensional meanings of words must be inferred from their context.”

To Be Continued »

Learning Strategies

Language aptitude and motivation constitute general factors that influence the rate and level of L2 achievement. But how does their influence operate? One possibility is that they affect the nature and the frequency with which individual learners use learning strategies.
Learning strategies are the particular approaches or techniques that learners employ to try to learn an L2. They can be behavioural (for example, repeating new words aloud to help you remember them) or they can be mental (for example, using the linguistic or situational context to infer the meaning of a new word). They are typically problem-oriented. That is, learners employ learning strategies when they are faced with some problem, such as how to remember a new word. Learners are generally aware of the strategies they use and, when asked, can explain what they did to try to learn something.
Different kinds of learning strategies have been identified. Cognitive strategies are those that are involved in the analysis, synthesis, or transformation of learning materials. An example is ‘recombination’, which involves constructing a meaningful sentence by recombining known elements of the L2 in a new way. Metacognitive strategies are those involved in planning, monitoring, and evaluating learning. An example is ‘selective attention’, where the learner makes a conscious decision to attend to particular aspects of the input. Social/affective strategies concern the ways in which learners choose to interact with other speakers. An example is ‘questioning for clarification’ (i.e asking for repetition, pharaphrase, or an example).
There have been various attempts to discover which strategies are important for L2 acquisition. One way is to investigate how ‘good language learners’ try to learn. This involves identifying learners who have been successful in learning an L2 and interviewing them to find out the strategies that worked for them. One of the main finding of such studies is that successful language learners pay attention to both form and meaning. Good language learners are also very active (i.e they use strategies for taking charge of their own learning), show awareness of the learning process and their own personal learning styles and, above all, are flexible and appropriate in their use of learning strategies. They seem to be especially adept at using metacognitive strategies.
Others studies have sought to relate learners’ reported use of different strategies to their L2 proficiency to try to find out which strategies are important for language development. Such studies have shown, not surprisingly, that successful learners use more strategies than unsuccessful learners. They have also shiwn that different strategies are related to different aspects of L2 learning. Thus, strategies that involve formal practice (for example, rehearsing a new word) contribute to the development of linguistic competence whereas strategies involving functional practice (for example, seeking out native speakers to talk to) aid the development of communicative skills. Successful learners may also call on different strategies at different stages of their development. However, there is the problem with how to interpret this research. Does strategy use result in learning or does learning increase learners’s ability, it is not clear.
An obvious question concerns how these learning strategies relate to the general kinds of psycholinguistic proccess discussed in chapter 6. What strategies are involved in noticing or noticing the gap, for example? Unfortunately, however, no attempt has yet been made to incorporate the various learning strategies that have been identified into a model of psycholinguistic processing. The approach to date has been simply to discribe strategies and quantify their use.
The study of learning strategies is of potential value to language teachers. If those strategies that are crucial for learning can be identified, it many prove possible to train sudents to use them. We will examine this idea in the broader context of a discussion of the role of instruction in L2 acquisition.

second language acquisition, 1997, ellis rod.

To Be Continued »

Tips for English Teachers

Here are some tips to help you on your teaching experience.

1. Dress right. Jeans, sneakers, and just-out-of-bed hair may be okay for teachers in the U.S., but in many parts of the world, a neat appearance counts far more than credentials. In Korea dark clothes lend an air of authority. Red is to be avoided at all costs. In Morocco female teachers don’t wear pants, sleeveless blouses, or short skirts.

2. Behave appropriately. When it asked 250 students at the Sichuan Institute of Foreign Languages in China what they liked and disliked about native speaker English teachers, the students’ main gripe was the informality of foreign teachers, who often seem to undermine their own authority by acting in undignified ways. In the U.S. teachers go on a first-name basis with students, sit on their desks, sip coffee, and even bounce off the walls without causing student discomfort or losing prestige. But these behaviors don’t export well.

3. Don’t worry if students seem unresponsive at first. Americans are used to participatory classrooms with plenty of teacher-student dialogue. Elsewhere, students are often trained to be silent, good listeners, and memorizers. It’s disconcerting to stand in front of a sea of blank faces, but expecting it reduces the shock. Introduce new concepts, such as discussion and role-play gradually. You’ll be surprised at how students will come to embrace the change.

4. Choose topics carefully. There are still many countries in the world where people are hesitant to voice opinions because of a fear of reprisal. If you’re conducting a classroom debate, remember that there’s a distaste for Western-style argumentation in Middle-Eastern societies, and in Japan it’s offensive for an individual to urge others to accept his opinion.
Certain topics may be taboo for cultural reasons: Most Americans don’t want to discuss their salaries or religious beliefs; Japanese may be disinclined to talk about their inner feelings; the French think questions about their family life are rude.

5. Don’t ask, “Do you understand?” In China and Japan, students will nod yes, even if they’re totally lost, in an attempt to save face for the teacher. Even in a country as far west as Turkey, yes often means no.

6. Avoid singling students out. Our society fosters a competitive individualism which is clearly manifested in our classrooms. American students are not shy about displaying their knowledge. In classrooms outside the U.S., however, showing solidarity with classmates and conforming to the status quo is often more important than looking good for the teacher. In Turkey and Montenegro students told me they disliked volunteering answers too often because it made them look like show-offs and attracted the evil eye of envy. If you want to play a game, make the competition among groups rather than among individuals. If you need to discipline a student, do so in private.

7. Be aware of cross-cultural communication styles. French students appreciate wit. Venezuelan students like boisterous rapid-fire exchanges. In Japan, where debate is not as valued as in the U.S., students appreciate long pauses in discussions and silent “think time” after you ask a question. “Hollow drums make the most noise” goes a Japanese proverb, and Japanese students are uncomfortable blurting out the first thing that comes to mind. American teachers, who are uncomfortable with silence, tend to anticipate the student’s words or repeat their original question—both irritating interruptions for the Japanese student.

8. Present a rationale for what you do in class. Your pedagogy is going to be very different from what students are used to. They’ll conform much more eagerly to new classroom content and procedures if they understand the benefits.

9. Expect the best of your students. They’ll be serious about learning English because their economic advancement often depends upon mastering it.

10. Relax and enjoy yourself. Happiness in the classroom is contagious.

source by http://english-trainer.blogspot.com/2010/06/tips-for-teachers-of-english.html

To Be Continued »