There are many definitions about graphic organizers. Among them are from Gregory and Carolyn, Hibbard
and Elizabeth, Sousa, Zwiers, and Hall & Nicole.
Gregory and Carolyn (2007: 101) state Graphic organizers are useful thinking tools that allow students to organize
information and allow students to see their
thinking. They are visual/spatial, logical/mathematical tools that appeal to
many learners for managing and organizing information.
Supporting
to Gregory and Carolyn opinion, Hibbard and Elizabeth (2003: 117)
state that graphic organizer is a diagram that represents a relationship directed
by a thinking-skill verb. Sousa (2005: 192) defines graphic
organizer as valuable tools for organizing and representing knowledge and for
illustrating relationship between concepts. Another definition is proposed by
Herley in Zwiers (2004: 17). She states that graphic organizers are drawings
that use geometric shapes or tables to show connections between pieces of information.
Again still about graphic organizer,
Hall & Nicole from National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum
(2002: 1) state that graphic organizer is a visual and graphic display that
depicts the relationships between facts, terms, and or ideas within a learning
task. Graphic organizers are also sometimes referred to as knowledge maps,
concept maps, story maps, cognitive organizers, advance organizers, or concept
diagrams.
1.
Advantages of Graphic Organizers
Graphic organizers benefits in many ways.
Gregory and Carolyn (2007: 103) state that graphic organizers can be used for
brainstorming at the beginning of lesson or unit to find out what students
already know. Graphic organizers, with reading assignment, can help students to
be able to organize and capture information. They are also as chronicle of a
sequence of events of a process. In addition, they relate new information to
previously learned information. Finally, they also function as tools for
checking understanding, note taking and summarizing and the culminating assessment.
Jones (2004: 15) states that graphic organizers
help to guide and to think by putting thoughts, which are inside of person’s
head, into something tangible to see.
Cleveland (2005: 3) adds more the use of graphic
organizers that gives more emphasize on reading. She states:
Graphic organizers are great tools when you are reading-they can help
you through a poem, a story, a biography or an informational article.
Organizers help you analyze what you are reading. You can use them to recognize
patterns in your reading, such as identifying the main idea of a story or an
article, and finding details that support the man idea. They can help you to
compare and contrast things within a story or between two stories. They can
even be useful after you read. You can use them to organize your notes and
figure out the most important point.
A.
Rationale
Reading comprehension is a process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through
interaction and involvement with written language. In doing so, the readers
involve so many reading skills. Among them are finding main idea, inference,
and paraphrasing.
In fact, some students
encounter problems to activate those skills in reading comprehension. These difficulties were indicated as students incorrectly interpreted
main idea with specific details; they could not relate between one clue to
another; and they failed in determining the key point of the sentence. The
classroom situation made these situations even worse. The students were passive
during the lecturing. They even showed no interest toward the subject. Then,
their low cooperation completed their negative response to reading class. The
students’ passivity in the classroom was indicated as students kept silent
during lecturing and they also had no response when they were asked questions.
In addition to their passivity, the students also showed no interest toward
reading class; many of them came late to the class, and many of them often went
out during the class. Furthermore, their low cooperation was identified as they
had no courage to share ideas with friends; tended to work individually, and talked
with their topics out of the discussion.
Teacher had also
contribution for such students’ difficulties. The
teaching learning process showed that it was monotonous. Teacher less monitored
the students’ activity. The technique which was applied during teaching
learning process made the students in such passive situation as they often got
broad oral explanation from their teacher.
Besides, the teacher’s broad oral explanation is even considered fast to
the students.
Knowing this condition, therefore, students have to have sufficient strategy to be successful in
reading comprehension. As it was found out that students got the problem in
main idea, inference, and paraphrasing, graphic organizers are selected as they can function at portraying the valuable
information from the given text. In
this way, they can provide the bridge from the abstract concepts of the text to
more visible ideas that ease readers getting the intended meaning. As the
answer of students’ passivity, graphic organizers also enhance the students’
participation in class interaction since that the students should be more
active in the text-interaction with the given graphic organizers. This model
are very helpful both in individual and group work tasks. From the
characteristics of graphic organizers above, it is believed that graphic
organizers can improve students’ reading comprehension in term of finding main
idea, inference, and paraphrasing. Furthermore, graphic organizers also enhance
the students’ participation in class interaction both in individual and group
work tasks.
The main concern of the research is about how to find main idea, how to
infer, and how to paraphrase. Therefore, the writer would like discuss further
on those aspects.
a. Main Idea
Spears (2000: 17) defines main idea as the author’s main point , a
sentence, or perhaps two that state what the whole thing is about. Further,
Spears (2000: 17-20) suggests how to locate the
main idea. The main idea may take place in the beginning paragraph, the
end of the paragraph, combination between the beginning and the end of the
poaragraph, or even omitted from the entire paragraph.
b. Inference
McNeil (1992: 77) defines inference as the derivation of some idea that
is not directly stated. To infer, Caroll in McNeil (1992: 77) suggests three
impoertant ways to infer. They are from subtleties of a verbal expression,
reasoning, making involvement of the reader’s experience to determine how the
character in the text might feel.
c. Paraphrase
Spears (2000: 12) defines paraphrase is putting someone else’s words into
your own words, restating the ideas without changing their meaning. Again, to
reach the succesful way in paraphrasing, again Spears (2000: 13) suggests that
there are important four important technique to apply. They are subtituting
synonyms for a key word or words in the original, changing the order of the
ideas withion sentences, and combining ideas when possible.
1.
Teaching Reading Comprehension
In this discussion, the writer would like to explain in more details
about teaching reading
comprehension in its steps, strategies, and material selections.
There are three steps in teaching reading comprehension. This idea
is proposed by Blachowicz and Donna (2008: 33-34). They state that teaching
reading comprehension covers pre-reading or before reading, during reading, and
post reading or after reading. In each step, they explain in details what
should be there in classroom performances. They state that before reading,
classroom activities include the activities such as previewing the text,
predicting from the preview, setting purposes for reading, and choosing an
appropriate strategy. Furthermore, they add that during reading, the classroom
activities include checking an understanding, integrating the new information
with what is already known, monitoring comprehension, and continuing to predict
or question. Finally, in the post reading, classroom activities should show
summarizing and synthesizing what has been read, responding appropriately, reading
multiple sources and cross checking information, checking for the fulfillment
of the purpose of the reading, and using what is read in some application.
In term of the teaching reading comprehension strategies, the
National Reading Panel in Seidel, et al. (2005:34)
state that:
The
current reading research in comprehension strategy instruction and concluded
that several reading strategies are beneficial to students' meaning
construction. These include: activating background knowledge, questioning, searching,
summarizing, self-explanation, and graphic organizing, etc. that enable
students to acquire relevant knowledge from text. Instruction using teacher
modeling, scaffolding, and coaching, with direct explanation for why strategies
are valuable, and how and when to use them, is important for strategy use to
develop.
Supporting to the idea from The
National Reading Panel above, Pearson & Fielding
in Teele (2004: 96) state that for students to develop comprehension skills,
teachers should teach them how to identity sequences in a text; answer factual questions
regarding the text; understand and follow directions; identify text features;
be able to discern main ideas in a text; understand the differences between
fact and opinion, cause and effect; be
able to draw inferences; understand the elements of story structure in a text;
and understand the differences between expository and narrative text structures
Dealing with the material selection, the teacher
has to consider some aspects. They are the familiarity of the topic and
vocabulary toward the students, the syntax level, the length of the text, and
the coherence of the text. All those factors have to be well checked based on
the students’ real condition. Another important feature of material selection is
whether or not material is authentic.
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