Graded Readers for Teaching Reading

Learning English as a foreign language remains uninteresting activity among Indonesian students. It is difficult, because they have to memorize a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary with different spelling and pronunciation from Indonesian. Also, they should understand the meaning which intended to be useful in communication with people from different countries. As being seen from the four strands of language course, reading and listening are part of “meaning focused input”. Here, reading should be done purposely; reading to get information, reading to learn, reading for pleasure, reading for critical thinking, and reading to write (Nation & Newton, 2009:6).  Reading, as a basic skill, equips students meaningful input; including vocabulary and grammar, to develop their language proficiency.

Realized that reading is a way of develop thinking and behavior and the low reading culture becomes national issue (Aziz, 2010), reading should be done in easier way in comfortable environment. However, there is still smaller number of fan although reading has been one of academic activities. In contrast, learning through movie or internet based becomes new trend. Thus, reading also can be delivered through multimedia to reduce students’ boredom. Time allotment is common problem in every school, because teaching and learning English must be at four language skill attentions. Besides, there is no listening, reading, speaking or writing class, which meant that English should be taught integrated. Extensive reading can be a choice to solve this problem.

Extensive Reading

Extensive reading gets less attention from teachers. Reading activity at school may follow intensive reading approach which applies the classic procedure of grammar translation. It focuses on comprehension of the text which involves comprehending particular text with sound spelling, vocabulary, grammar, cohesion, information structure, genre structure and reading strategies (Nation & Newton, 2009:25-27). Intensive reading is more likely to engage students in text by which they gain more knowledge of the language.

Far different from intensive reading, extensive reading approach allows students to choose what they read by themselves. Overall, this is aimed at reading pleasure. That is why students can read everything at their appropriate level easily and confidently (Harmer, 2007:283). Day and Bamford (1998 as cited in Harmer (2007:283) state that extensive reading materials are ‘language learner literature’, known as graded readers or simplified readers. Further, extensive reading involves the reading of a large amount of materials, at students’ level of ability by which students can read confidently and joyfully. Nation and Newton (2009:50) add that two major reason of establishing extensive reading. First, reading includes letter and words recognition, large vocabulary and grammatical understanding, and ability of developing knowledge in reading task. Second, extensive reading focuses on the general meaning of the text, not the language features.

The main characteristics of extensive reading are the goal, guidance and facilities. The goal of this approach is to make reading as a source of learning and enjoyment. Therefore, learning through extensive reading needs good guidance that is laid down the teachers’ persuasive roles. Teachers encourage learners by promoting the benefit, allow them with free choice, and provide attractive follow up activities (Harmer, 2007:284-285). For the facilities, teachers should provide plenty of interesting and appropriate reading texts. It means that this program needs to prepare a collection of graded readers, such as Oxford Bookworms series. Then, these materials can be set up in portable or permanent library. Besides, extensive reading will run well under the condition that the students are already familiar with the text. It means that the vocabulary in the text is 95 to 98 percent have been understood (Nation & Newton, 2009:52). Thus, this is a kind of repeated and continuity activity for long time, which in the progress becomes a culture habit.