Text-Based Approach Analysis

Many students learning foreign language consider reading as a challenging aspect. It is not easy for them to understand the text thoroughly because of the language barrier. The number of researches; therefore, have been conducted to find some good reading pedagogies helpful with students. As Renandya (2015) pointed out, there are two main popular approaches to teach reading: strategy-based and text-based approaches; however, the latter seems better for students who are at low level and acquire inadequate vocabulary. In my viewpoint, I totally agree with this idea. It comes without any surprised that reading strategies such as skimming, scanning, predicting and so on has played a crucial role in teaching reading for the past few decades.

In the past, I and my colleague did not consider reading text as much important as skills, tips, or strategies as we thought that what we taught are enough for students to learn reading. However, the article shows that strategy-based approach is quite old-fashioned and we need to change our mind to apply a better one. In my opinion, it is not easy to conduct a reform in teaching method at my school because some conservative teachers, especially those have worked for many years still prefer the traditional method than the latter. They often complain about time, or material shortage as the way to reject extensive reading approach. Also, they think that reading is silent, so how to organize the activities without bore is a challenging problem. Therefore, I and some colleague need to do more to convince the administrators about the significant effect of extensive reading. Moreover, the condition of language learning “abundant and regularly available” mentioned in the article remind me the principle I love the most “learner read as much as possible” (Day & Bamford, 2002). What I am trying to do now is encouraging and rewarding students who read more in classroom. I usually organize the context, group activities or role-play to help students share the different knowledge and find interest through discussion so that extensive reading becomes the healthy habit as Rynandya’s saying. I and my colleague believe that various topic can attract readers concern as well as improve their background knowledge, which might be helpful for students in the coming years. In the next semester, we will also design an online library and instruct students to use online reading resources to deal with the limited paper material. After all, I think this article has changed my view about extensive reading a lot and make me think of a suitable curriculum for the next