Related Literature Essay

Reading is an important skill to help people learn from human knowledge and experience. Through reading, knowledge has greatly contributed to the growth of mankind. Reading is the fastest and simplest way to raise people’s educational level (Hung & Tzeng, 2001). Thus, reading also improves the cognitive perspective of a person. No people are more educated unless they read. Reading also enhances not only the brain, but the awareness of a person to different words that he/she didn’t encounter before. It increases one’s vocabulary and comprehension. Through reading also, many people increased their critical thinking skills especially when finding the main ideas or for analytical purposes. In short, reading is the best and only way of enabling humans to absorb new experience and replace old views. Reading is a process of how information is processed from the text into meanings, starting the information from the text, and ending what the reader gains. Goodman (1976) and Smith (1973) indicated that reading is a language process, not merely the sum of various decoding and comprehension skills. In short reading is the process of reconstructing the author’s ideas, perspective and information. On the other hand, Aikat (2007) stated that the â€Å"the act of reading is a dynamic transaction between the reader and the text† (p. 700), an idea taken from Louise M. Rosenblatt’s 1978 book, The Reader, The Text, The Poem. According to the aforementioned book, there are two kinds of reading – reading for leisure, called Aesthetic Reading and Efferent Reading in order to gain information. Efferent readers read for the purpose of the facts they will learn, while aesthetic readers read for the reading experience making it easier for them to â€Å"connect emotionally† to the text. In order to for readers to attain this connection and fully comprehend the text that they read, Dolch (1951) asserted that the process of reading requires the different capabilities of the mind, as the reader processes words and their meanings. To become a skilled reader, children need a rich language and conceptual base, a broad and deep vocabulary and verbal easoning abilities to understand messages that are conveyed through print. Children also must develop code-related skills, an understanding that spoken words are composed of smaller elements of speech (phonological awareness); the idea that letters represent these sounds (the alphabetic principle), the many systematic correspondences between sounds and spellings, and a repertoire of highly familiar words that can be easily and auto matically recognized (McCardle & Chhabra, 2004; McCardle, Scarborough, & Catts, 2001). According to Carrell, Pharis and Liberto (1989), they explained the term metacognition refers to a reader’s understanding of any cognitive process. Metacognition in the context of reading consists of a reader’s knowledge of strategies for learning from texts, and the control readers have their own actions while reading for different purposes. In brief, metacognition refers to awareness of one’s own reading processes (Brown 1980). It means awareness of one’s own understanding and non-understanding of reading strategies, and of monitoring comprehension during reading. Nuttal (1996) proposed that learners needed to understand how texts worked and what they did while reading, they must monitor also their own comprehension. For example, students are able to recognize that they don’t understand a text, and then adopt a strategy that will improve matters.