Reading Strategies – 6 Great Ways to Overcome Reading Obstacles

Subject : Basic Reading (Reading Strategies and Reading Techniques)

Today, I would like to explain about reading strategies in basic reading class.

To make this explanation becomes easier and convincing, allow me using an external source that I take from thejakartapost.com.

Choosen Reading Text for Reading Strategies

Skyscraper of waste – Greater Jakarta drowning in mountains of trash

Do you ever count the amount of waste you produce?

Greater Jakarta, with more than 30 million people, sends more than 14,000 tons of waste to eight landfills every day.

To put it into perspective, the waste that Greater Jakarta has produced in the past three years could fill up Jakarta’s tallest skyscraper, the 310-meter-tall Gama Tower.

The gigantic flow of trash, coupled with poor waste management, has brought the metropolitan area into a crisis.

Some of the landfills are already overloaded or face the risk of becoming overloaded. Soon, Greater Jakarta residents will run out of places to dump waste.

The crisis has affected the people living near landfills. Smelly piles of waste – comprising everything from leftover food and plastic grocery bags to used diapers – cause environmental and health disturbances.

The pungent smell of garbage is enough to numb our olfactory nerves. The wastewater flowing from these trash mountains has contaminated the groundwater, which the residents use for their daily needs.

During rainy days, the same mountains will become extra slippery and prone to falling apart. This, however, does not stop the landfill workers from operating excavators to pile the waste higher – simply because they have no other choice.

Bogor municipality, Bogor regency, Depok and South Tangerang have been hoping to dump the waste in the newly constructed Lulut-Nambo landfill in Bogor regency. However, the facility has yet to open due to a protracted payment dispute between the contractor and the investor. Adding to that dispute is the bickering between the four regencies and municipalities that want a greater trash quota for each of their regions.

In 2018, the Public Works and Housing Ministry revitalized the Rawa Kucing landfill in Tangerang by making it a sanitary landfill where the trash is compressed and buried in a pit with a protected bottom to allow it to decompose into biologically and chemically inert materials.

Bantargebang landfill in Bekasi operates a waste-to-energy plant and a composting facility.

All these innovations, however, have a limited capacity and cannot keep pace with Greater Jakarta’s ever-increasing amount of waste.

Reading Strategies & Techniques

Before going to reading tips explanation, let me explain about the 6 strategies I use to make a perfect and meaningful reading.

  1. Previewing. It is like spending a few minutes before you read. So you will get about the general idea of what it will be about.
  2. Scanning. it is finding specific information through the keyword you find when you preview the text.
  3. Context clues to clarify meaning. It the great way to figure out the unknown word
  4. Finding the main idea. The main idea of every text is often clearly stated in the first paragraph, usually in the first or the last sentence.
  5. Summarizing. It is how to discern about the most important idea in the text.
  6. Making Inferences

Ok. Let’s start!

Implementing Reading Strategies

In implementing reading strategies, I have to do all these 6 techniques to make our reading easier.

Previewing & Finding Main Idea

We should start analyzing a text through previewing. If we see to the tittle, Skyscraper of waste – Greater Jakarta drowning in mountains of trash, We know that the article talking about waste which is almost drown a greater Jakarta.

From the tittle, we know that it talks about a lot of waste but we still don’t know where the author will direct his writing along with the motives. To do that, Let’s jump to the first paragraph or couple of sentences at the beginning.

In this article you can see that the writer give the reader a question as an introduction. So the main Idea might be in the next sentence.

We can see that the author forms a different paragraph pattern. I assume that the writer targeted the mobile user as their visitor which will make it mobile friendly paragraph.

In this case let’s see the next to 1 to 2 next sentences. Second and the third sentence are the main idea of whole paragraph in that reading text where also fit the tittle.

Scanning

After previewing, the next thing to do is scanning the whole text. It is like finding text’s keywords and then search any more information such specific things, numbers, places etc.

It doesn’t mean that I have to read the whole text, no. What I need to do is to look at each paragraph and try to find any useful keyword and then see what is that sentence talks about.

Example

Let’s see the example at the fifth sentence.

There are repeated and unimportant words. Just ignore them. Find the keyword that could help you understand whole sentence.

In this case, I found three important keywords. They are :

  1. Landfills
  2. Overloaded
  3. Jakarta

If we glimpse the three words above and try to connect them, we will find a sentence that is more or less like this,

“Landfills in Jakarta that has been overloaded”.

That is the result of the scanning that we did, the sentence and the information is clearer and straight to the point.

To make sure, let’s compare the sentence from the scanning result above with the whole sentence from the fifth sentence of the text.

Some of the landfills are already overloaded or face the risk of becoming overloaded. Soon, Greater Jakarta residents will run out of places to dump waste.

Even though the sentence looks shorter, it doesn’t change the main idea of ​​the sentence, and makes the sentence shorter. So, we will be able to save time in reading by ignoring any unimportant information.

What about the word “resident”?, I don’t understand that word.

Will talk about an unfamiliar word in the next section.

Context Clues

Context Clues is a useful method to guess the meaning of unknown words in the text. It’s like guessing the meaning from related words or phrase that are in the same paragraph.

There are many ways to apply this method into your reading strategy, but I usually use this four things:

  1. Synonym
  2. Antonym
  3. Example or Explanation
  4. Definition

Let’s go to practice.

I found six unfamiliar words from the text above. Let’s talk about those words one by one. The Unfamiliar words in the following examples are in red and the clues are on green for easy identification.

LANDFILLS

…sends more than 14,000 tons of waste to eight landfills every day.

To know the meaning, we should read the rest of the sentence. It stated in second sentence of the text. The word “ton of waste to eight…” is clear enough to describe the meaning of “landfills”.

How?

Well, where else tons of waste is dumped? Yeah, in garbage dump or in this case the author use the word “landfills”.

PUNGENT

Let’s see this word in the complete sentence.

The pungent smell of garbage is enough to numb our olfactory nerves.

The word pungent is unfamiliar to me but not to the word “smell” as noun. Based on the structure, adjective modifies noun. So, the word pungent provides more detail about a noun.

Then read the complete sentence, there we find the phrase that related to smell. It is “numb our olfactory nerves”. So, the word pungent more or less has the same meaning to that phrase.

WASTEWATER

At a glance, the word “wastewater” may mean water, but when looking the whole sentence, the meaning is unrelated. Let’s use context clues to know what does this word mean.

The wastewater flowing from these trash mountains has contaminated the groundwater,

The phrase above clearly describe the meaning of wastewater. It is water flow from trash mountains that has contaminated the groundwater.

PROTRACTED PAYMENT DISPUTE

Unlike the previous discussion, this is the unfamiliar phrase that I need to know about the meaning.

However, the facility has yet to open due to a protracted payment dispute between the contractor and the investor. Adding to that dispute is the bickering between the four regencies and municipalities that want a greater trash quota for each of their regions.

Phrase “protracted payment dispute” may look a little unfamiliar. To solve this problem, read the first sentence, then connect it with the green phrases.

After connecting them, we will understand that “protracted payment dispute” means a delay in payment because of internal problems.

Summarizing

From the article I can know the summarizing from the first and the last paragraph but of course without ignoring facts on entire text.

In this case, we can know that the author informs the reader that greater Jakarta produces tons of waste and can’t handle additional load from the waste even with the innovations mentioned above, especially with the disputes between cities.

Making Inferences

In reading strategies Making inferences is the effort to guess the author’s mind which is not mention on the text. In this case, I would infer my thought as following.

When I read the text, it makes me realize that it is a form of concern for Jakarta in the future if garbage waste will continue to increase from time to time.

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Mr. Khalid
Mr. Khalid

InggrisPRO merupakan wadah pembelajaran bahasa inggris serta menyediakan resource untuk mendukung pembelajaran bahasa inggris.

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