CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FOUNDATION

CHAPTER II

THEORETICAL FOUNDATION

A. Text

Textbooks, novels, magazines, newspapers, and mail are just a few of the things that people read every day. There was a text contains of information that people need.

The American Heritage Dictionary (2000) states that text can be defined in some terms:

First, the original words of something written or printed, as opposed to a paraphrase, translation, revision, or condensation. Second, the words of a speech appearing in print. Third, words, as of a libretto, that are set to music in a composition. Fourth, words treated as data by a computer.

In other words text is the words of something written, there were more than a thousand words of text, they handed out the printed text of the mayor's speech to reconstruct the original text. It is human-readable sequence of characters.

Holme (1991:3) states that a text may be introduced into the class for one or more of the following reasons:

It is thought that it will form a useful basis for a lesson and provide good language input. It is to be used in conjunction with other texts to improve reading skills. It is held to be valuable or worthy of study in itself. It is seen as motivating because it is an example of the kind of material to which students may be given access by the language they are learning. It is requested by the class. It is prescribed by or found relevant to another course over whose content the teacher has no control.

It means that the text is one of the supplements in teaching learning which has rules and goal.

B. Assessment

Assessment plays an important part in the teaching-learning process at all levels of education. Since assessment plays such an important and significant part in the future of a student there is no doubt that any assessment system will determine what students learn and the way in which they do this. Hence assessment will also determine the way in which the teacher teaches and what the teacher teaches.

Brown (2004:4) states,

Assessment is on-going process that encompassess a much wider domain. Whenever a student responds to a question, offers a comment, or tries out a new word or structure , the teacher subconciously makes an assessment of the student’s performance.

Assessment is not just about grading and examinations. It is also about getting to know the students and the quality of their learning and to use this knowledge and understanding to their benefit. Assessment is, without doubt, one of the major ''drivers'' of the teaching-learning process. It is thus important for teaching staff to be familiar not only with the technical aspects of the many different forms of assessment currently in use, but also with their advantages and limitations and about assessment issues and concerns

Herman & Knuth (1991) reveals,

Assessment is used to determine what a student knows or can do, while evaluation is used to determine the worth or value of a course or program. Assessment data effects student advancement, placement, and grades, as well as decisions about instructional strategies and curriculum.

Angelo and Cross (1993) states that assessment is an approach designed to help teachers find out what students are learning in the classroom and how well they are learning it. The following approaches have the following characteristics:

1. Learner-Centered

Assessment focuses on the primary attention of teachers and students on observing and improving learning, rather than on observing and improving teaching. Assessment can provide information to guide teachers and students in making adjustments to improve learning.

2. Teacher-Directed

Assessment respects the autonomy, academic freedom, and professional judgement of college faculty. The individual teacher decides what to assess, how to assess, and how to respond to the information gained through the assessment. Also, the teacher is not obliged to share the result of Assessment with anyone outside the classroom.

3. Mutually Beneficial

Because it is focused on learning, assessment requires the active participation of students. By cooperating in assessment, students reinforce their grasp of the course content and strengthen their own skills at self-assessment. Their motivation is increased when they realize that faculty are interested and invested in their success as learners. Faculty also sharpen their teaching focus by continually asking themselves three questions: "What are the essential skills and knowledge I am trying to teach?" "How can I find out whether students are learning them?" "How can I help students learn better?" As teachers work closely with students to answer these questions, they improve their teaching skills and gain new insights.

4. Formative

Assessment purpose is to improve the quality of student learning, not to provide evidence for evaluating or grading students. The assessment is almost never graded and is almost always anonymous.

5. Context-Specific

Assessments have to respond to the particular needs and characteristics of the teachers, students, and disciplines to which they are applied. What works well in one class will not necessary work in another.

6. Ongoing

Assessment is an ongoing process, best thought of as the creating and maintenance of a classroom "feedback loop." By using a number of simple Classroom Assessment Techniques that are quick and easy to use, teachers get feedback from students on their learning. Faculty then complete the loop by providing students with feedback on the results of the assessment and suggestions for improving learning. To check on the usefulness of their suggestions, faculty use Classroom Assessment again, continuing the "feedback loop." As the approach becomes integrated into everyday classroom activities, the communications loop connecting faculty and students and teaching and learning becomes more efficient and more effective.

7. Rooted in Good Teaching Practice

Assessment is an attempt to build on existing good practice by making feedback on students' learning more systematic, more flexible, and more effective. Teachers already ask questions, react to students' questions, monitor body language and facial expressions, read homework and tests, and so on. Assessment provides a way to integrate assessment systematically and seamlessly into the traditional classroom teaching and learning process

As they are teaching, faculty monitors and reacts to students’ questions, comments, body language, and facial expressions in an almost automatic fashion. This "automatic" information gathering and impression formation is a subconscious and implicit process. Teachers depend heavily on their impressions of student learning and make important judgments based on them, but they rarely make those informal assessments explicit or check them against the students' own impressions or ability to perform. In the course of teaching, college faculty assume a great deal about their students learning, but most of their assumptions remain untested.

Even when college teachers routinely gather potentially useful information on student learning through questions, quizzes, homework, and exams, it is often collected too late at least from the students' perspective to affect their learning. In practice, it is very difficult to "de-program" students who are used to thinking of anything they have been tested and graded on as being "over and done with." Consequently, the most effective times to assess and provide feedback are before the chapter tests or the midterm and final examinations. Assessment aims at providing the early feedback.

Angelo and Cross (1993) reveals that assessment is based on seven assumptions:

1. The quality of student learning is directly, although not exclusively, related to the quality of teaching. Therefore, one of the most promising ways to improve learning is to improve teaching.
2. To improve their effectiveness, teachers need first to make their goals and objectives explicit and then to get specific, comprehensible feedback on the extent to which they are achieving those goals and objectives.
3. To improve their learning, students need to receive appropriate and focused feedback early and often; they also need to learn how to assess their own learning.
4. The type of assessment most likely to improve teaching and learning is that conducted by faculty to answer questions they themselves have formulated in response to issues or problems in their own teaching.
5. Systematic inquiry and intellectual challenge are powerful sources of motivation, growth, and renewal for college teachers, and Classroom Assessment can provide such challenge.
6. Classroom Assessment does not require specialized training; it can be carried out by dedicated teachers from all disciplines.
7. By collaborating with colleagues and actively involving students in Classroom Assessment efforts, faculty (and students) enhance learning and personal satisfaction.

So that, assessments help teachers to keep track of the zone of proximal development for each child and instruction can be designed. This is neither too easy nor too challenging.

Brown (2004:5-6) reveals,

There are two kinds of assessment: formal and informal assessment. Formal asseessment are exercises or procedures specifically designed to tap into a storehouse of skills and knowledge. They are systematic planned sampling technique constructed to give teacher and students an appraisal of student’s achievement. Informal assessment can take a number of forms, starting with incidential, unplanned comments and responses, along with coaching and other impromptu feedback to the student. A good deal of teacher’s informal assessment is embedded in classroom tasks designed to elicit performance without recording results and making fixed judgements about a student’s competence.

Angelo and Cross (1993) states

“…to begin assessment it is recommended that only one or two of the simplest Classroom Assessment Techniques are tried in only one class. In this way very little planning or preparation time and energy of the teacher and students is risked”.

In most cases, trying out a simple Classroom Assessment Technique will require only five to ten minutes of class time and less than an hour of time out of class. After trying one or two quick assessments, the decision as to whether this approach is worth further investments of time and energy can be made. This process involves three steps:

Step 1: Planning

Select one, and only one, of the classes in which to try out the Classroom Assessment. Decide on the class meeting and select a Classroom Assessment Technique. Choose a simple and quick one.

Step 2: Implementing

Make sure the students know what the teacher is doing and that they clearly understand the procedure. Collect the responses and analyze them as soon as possible.

Step 3: Responding

To capitalize on time spent assessing, and to motivate students to become actively involved, "close the feedback loop" by letting them know what the teacher learned from the assessments and what difference that information will make.

C. Reading Assessment

Wren in his article states the ultimate goal in reading is, of course, to make meaning from text. That is, to comprehend the information that is conveyed in the text. What that means is that, at the least, the reader should gain some understanding of the message that is being conveyed by the author. However, comprehension should go beyond simply understanding the explicit message being conveyed by the author. To truly comprehend text is to make connections between the information in the text and the information in the reader's head, to draw inferences about the author's meaning, to evaluate the quality of the message, and possibly even to connect aspects of the text with other works of literature.

The most common reading comprehension assessment involves asking a child to read a passage of text that is levelled appropriately for the child, and then asking some explicit, detailed questions about the content of the text (often these are called IRIs).

According to Pressley (1995:135),

Constructing an IRI consists of two stages. The first is developing the material: selecting reading passages, creating comprehension questions, retelling outlines, and prior knowledge items for each passage, and making up both reader’s copy and examiner’s form. The second stage, often omitted in directions for IRI construction, is critically important: Try out and evaluate the instrument before use it to make decisions about student’s reading.

However, accurate assessment of reading comprehension is necessary to know if this goal is being met, to identify students who need remediation, and to help plan future instruction. However, many scientific investigators of reading agree that further work on measures of reading comprehension is essential, including development of comprehensive systems of assessment that pinpoint key strengths and weaknesses in individual student.

The type of assessment that informs instruction does not necessarily need to be a formal reading test that was purchased from a publisher, although it certainly can be. Assessment can be a simple observation of a student’s behaviour when writing; it can be an observation of how well a child plays a word game; it can be an observation of a student's oral reading fluency. Every observation has the potential to be an assessment.

It is a good idea, however, to combine teacher observations with more formal and objective assessment information the two complement each other, and give the teacher a much better informed picture of each child's reading related skills.

Brown (2004:189) reveals:

In the case of reading, variety of performance is derived more from multiplicity of types of texts than from the variety of overt types of performance. Nevertheless, for considering assessment procedures, several types of reading performance are typically identified, and these will serve as organize of various assessment tasks.

1. Perspective

Perspective reading tasks involve attending to the components of larger stretches of discourse: letter, words, punctuation, and other graphemic symbols. Bottom-up processing is implied.

2. Selective

This category is largely an artifact of assessment formats. In order to ascertain one’s reading recognition of lexical, grammatical, of discourse features of language within a very short stretch of language, certain typical tasks are used: picture cued tasks, matching, true/false, multiple choice, etc.

3. Interactive

Included among interactive reading types are stretches of language of several paragraphs to one page or more in which reader must, in phsycolinguistic sense, interact with the text.

4. Extensive

Applies to text of more than a page, up to and including professional articles, essays, technical reports, short stories, and books.

Finally, Reading Comprehension assessments typically describe the student's reading level. Reading Comprehension assessments should be more diagnostic than they currently are, and student should be challenged to attack different genres of text and critically examine the text in a variety of ways, gathering explicit information, drawing inferences, and making evaluations.

D. Crossword Puzzle

Hornby (1974: 2006) states a crossword puzzle puzzle is words have to be written and stated in spaces on a chequered square or oblong (from numbered clues) vertically (clues down) and horizontally (clues accross).

Webster Dictionary (1989: 347) mentions that a crossword puzzle is a puzzle in which words corresponding numbered clues or defines are supplied and fitted into correspondingly numbered sets of squares, one letter per square, the most being arranged horizontally or vertically.

Neufeldt (1996: 332) states crossword puzzle as an arrangement of numbered squares to fill in with words, a letter each square, so that a letter appearing in a word placed vertically: numbered synonyms and definitions are given clues for the words. The word, which is formed in the blank squares, mostly containing the synonym and definitions, etc.

Besides, Soeparno (1980:73) states that a crossword puzzle is a kind of games by filling in the blank form presented with letters forming words as the answer of questions given. The materials carried out are about the definition of terms, antonym, synonym, preposition, etc.

The crossword puzzle can be done individually or in group. Crossword puzzle provides the following variations on the Crossword theme.

1. Type of Crossword Puzzle

http://www.crauswords.com/crossword/crossword.html states that there are two types of crossword puzzle as follows:

a. American style crossword puzzles

.

The most obvious feature of American style crosswords is the fact that every letter in the puzzle is an interlinking letter. In other words, every letter in the puzzle is a letter in an across word, and also in a down word. In some ways, this makes the puzzle easier to solve. If the writer is having difficulty with a word, the writer can expect some assistance as the writer solves those words which intersect with it. On the other hand, it also makes the puzzle considerably harder to construct. Even so, Crossword Express will generally have no trouble completing the construction if the writer uses a dictionary of sufficient size. The English dictionary provided with the program contains over 30,000 words, each having one or more clues.

b. British style crossword puzzles.

In some ways, a British style crossword puzzle is the complete opposite of an American puzzle. Typically, there will be many more pattern cells in the puzzle, and only around one third of the letters will interlink. This makes the puzzle much easier to construct, and as the writer might expect it is correspondingly more difficult to solve. This graphic demonstrates a feature of Crossword Express which allows the pattern cells to be printed in various shades of gray (or any other colour for that matter). You might want to do this for aesthetic reasons, or perhaps to conserve ink. The colour used for the letters and for the grid lines is similarly selectable.

According to the data above, the writer decides a British style grid crossword puzzle as an assessment.

E. Scanning

Brown (2004:209) states that scanning is a strategy used by all readers to find relevant information in a text. It is a technique the readers often use when looking up a word in the telephone book or dictionary. The readers search for key words or ideas. In most cases, the readers know what they are looking for, so they are concentrating on finding a particular answer. Scanning involves moving their eyes quickly down the page seeking specific words and phrases. Scanning is also used when the readers first find a resource to determine whether it will answer their questions. Once they have scanned the document, the readers might go back and skim it.

Brown (2004:209) reveals

“…among the variety of scanning objectives (for each of genres named above), the test taker must locate: a date, name, or place in an article, the setting of a narrative or story, the principal divisions of chapter, the principal research finding in technical report, a result reported in a specified cell in a table, the cost of an item on a menu, specified data needed to fill out an application”.

F. Crossword Puzle As An Assessment To Scan A Text

Teaching students to read with increased comprehension and acquisition of new vocabulary is a challenge teacher’s face on a daily basis. Teachers have long realized that choosing a good skill textbook and various class readers is just the beginning to achieving this goal. The next step is to plan creative, interactive lessons, one of the key words being interactive according to Mikulecky (1990). However, this interaction is not merely between the student reader and a text (Johnston, 1983). Peer interaction is equally important and can add interest, fun, and an increase in learning in the reading class. Also, listening, speaking, and writing activities can be utilized to enhance and expand the reading program.

Scanning is an important skill that requires students to read a text to find answers to specific questions such as who, what, when, where, why, how much, how many, or what kind. Speed and accuracy are the focus of this skill.

Winnie (2005) in his article addresses and offers suggestions to achieve the instructional goals of scanning.

Teacher prepares a handout with student-teacher assignments. There are two kinds of activities: vocabulary and comprehension. For vocabulary, students are asked to make a crossword puzzle or matching words with definitions handout, and for comprehension, students can prepare a true/false or wh-question handout.

Wade (2005) from Georgia Department of education designs a lesson plan which contains crossword puzzle as an assessment. (table 2.1). Ridgewood Public School also uses crossword puzzle as an assessment of reading activities. (table 2.2).

Crossword puzzle has been used as an assessment. It became a few of kind reading activities. It means crossword enjoyable to give an information and easy to do.

Gardner tells the most important thing about assessment is knowing what it is that you should be able to do. So that the writer wants to do the experiment with crossword puzzle.