Critical Journal Review Inggris.docx

REVIEW JOURNAL

1. Title

: Reading Journal: Its Benefits for Extensive Reading

2. Author

: Jonathan Aliponga

1. Journal

: International Journal Of Humanities Social Saince

2. Volume

: Volume 03, Number 12, June 2013

3. Year

: 2013

4. Introduction: In journal this writer discuss about the Reading Journal is It Benefits for Extensive Reading . This is a preliminary study, which aimed to investigate EFL students’ opinions on the benefits of the reading journal.It was limited only to finding out students’ opinions onwhether or not the reading journal could and how it could motivate students to read, enable them to understand the main idea and important details of the reading materials, and enable them to think critically. It was assumed that if all of these were achieved, students would be able to get better scores in the TOEFL test.

5. Summary Learning how to effectively use the reading journal is like learning how to effectively acquire and use a skill. The process of learning a skill by means of a course of instruction has been defined as a three-stage process: verbalization, automatization and autonomy (Ur, 2002). Verbalization, also known as presentation, requires teachers to mediate new materials or skills to be learned so they appear in an accessible form and thus can easily be perceived and understood. In this study, the reading journal as the learning strategy was presented. Ur further explains that in order for effective verbalization to take place, the following six guidelines for giving explanations and instructions should be taken account: 1. Explicit explanations and instructions must be given, 2. Ensurefull attention, 3. Present explanations and instructions more than once, 1

4. Bebriefbut clear, 5.Illustrate with examples relating these as faras possibl et othe learners’own live sand experiences, and 6. Get feed back from the learners. These six guidelines were observed when presenting the reading journal. After verbalization, learners need to practice repetitively, usually in meaningful exercises or activities until they achieve mastery. This is referred to as automatization. This is exactly what was done with the reading journal. It was made sure that the students had a good preliminary grasp of how to use the reading journal through engaging themselves in more practice until they achieved mastery of how to accomplish the reading journal.Once materials or skills are automatized, learners begin to improve on their own through further meaningful practice activities. Learners begin to speed up performance, to perceive or create new combinations, and to ‘do their own thing’. At this stage learners are autonomous. They have little need of a teacher except perhaps as a supportive or challenging colleague and are ready, or nearly ready, to perform as masters of the skills, or as teachers themselves. It is believed that almost all students became autonomous in using the reading journal. The successful implementation of the three-stage of skill or strategy learning is thought to have contributed to the other positive responses of the students, that is,the reading journal enabled to increase their reading speed, enabled them to concentrate, and aided them when they had trouble understanding the content.Again, these resulted in students’ motivation to read more. Bandura (1986) explains that motivation (or a lack thereof) is the result of an individual's self-efficacy related to a task. He defines self-efficacy as the beliefs we have about ourselves that cause us to make choices, put forth effort, and persist in the face of difficulty. It is believed that the reading journal provided students with a learning strategy that developed their self-efficacy to be motivated to read as revealed in their response. This finding finds support in the results from the survey studies, which suggested that the use of strategies is significantly related to self-efficacy beliefs. Specifically, the results of the study ofMagogwe and Oliver (2007) using 480 Botswana students who were learning English as a second language showed that there was a significant relationship between Botswana ESL learners’ strategy use and their self-efficacy beliefs. In another context, Su and Duo’s (2012) study of 200 Taiwanese students revealed that learning strategies were significantly associated with self-efficacy beliefs. The same is true with the study of Wong (2005) who 2

interviewed 6 Malaysian participants to explore their language learning strategies and selfefficacy beliefs. The results showed that high-self-efficacy learners used more language learning strategies. As far as reading is concerned, Wang and Li (2010) discovered that reading self-efficacy was positively correlated to reading strategies, namely, metacognitive, social/affective and cognitive strategies. Readers who had high efficacy used more reading strategies than reader who had low self-efficacy. As far as understanding the main idea is concerned, writing the summary in the reading journal helped the students. Summary writing gave students an overview of the text's whole meaning. It requiredstudents to pay careful attention to the meaning and shape of the entire text. Writing summary did not only help students understand the main idea of a reading material, but also its important details. This is because students had to select the important details and summarize them. Working in groups also enabled students to understand important details of their reading materials. During the group work, each student had to talk about what they read using their reading journal as a guide. All members of the group had to pay attention and were encouraged to ask questions. It is possible that the sharing and question and answer part of the group activity reinforced students’ understanding of the important details of the reading materials. The results also revealed that the reading journal enabled students to think critically. One source of critical thinking, which is taking control of our conscious thought processes, is the summary writing. It is possible that when students wrote the summary of their readings, they had to analyze, synthesize and evaluate what they read, which are essential steps in critical thinking process. Another source of critical thinking is finding an intriguing sentence or passage then interpreting the idea or situation by writing extended comments. As Facione (1990) explains, when we think critically, we make purposeful, self-regulatory judgment, which results in interpretation. Students had to interpret what they read in order to write extended comments about intriguing sentences and passages. They had to formulate inferential or critical questions and had to write the possible answers to those questions. They had to express opinions, specifically what they liked and did not like about the readings and had provide explanations for such response. The end-goal of utilizing the reading journal was to prepare students for the TOEFL test. Except for two students, all students thought that the reading journal could help them prepare to get better scores in the said test because it motivated them read more, enabled them to

3

learn more vocabulary, aided them to understand the main ideas as well as important details of the reading materials, were among the reasons. Finally, based on the results, it can be assumed that the two students, who did not find the reading journal useful for preparing them for the TOEFL test, did not have time to accomplish the reading journal. This lack of time, which may be due to busy schedule or part-time job, affected their motivation to accomplish the reading journal. This in turn resulted in their negative perceptions of the benefits of the reading journal as far as developing reading abilities is concerned.

6. Weakness • weakness journal is use language that chaotic. • journal this explain about Benefits for Extensive Reading. 7. CONCLUSIONS can concluded that journal this can help we make journal when we will finish study in university and journal this peachy for read because this explain that we should know many benefits for extensive reading journal. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that the reading journal motivated students to read more, enabled them to understand the main idea and important details of the reading materials of their choice, and enabled them to think critically

4