Wednesday, March 25, 2015

The Effectiveness of Digtal Library as Media in Improving Reading Comprehension

By Dinar Vincy Yunitaka Bahrudin

Reading is one skill from the fourth skill of language learning which also plays a very important role in transferring information. Realizing the importance of reading for English foreign language students, it is then very crucial for English foreign language students to have good reading proficiency.
Being good in reading, the readers must be good in constructing the meaning to gain the message well. It means that the reader having the ability to understand written statements or any type of written text accurately and efficiently. If there are some problems happened in reading process such as vocabulary difficulty and learners knowledge, it can make reading process especially for the readers difficult. They will have problem in understanding the information from the text which they read. It is in line with Martha (2005, p. 30) statement that reading is the act of constructing meaning while transacting with text. While Louis (2005, p. 30) argued that the notion of transaction:
Based on the description above, to understand the meaning, it focuses on the reader, rather than on the text or the author as the central element of the process and how it emphasizes individual construction of meaning while accounting for socially negotiated meaning construction and the constantly envolving discourse of the reading content and event. To get the meaning, the reader as a creator rather than receiver of meaning. The reader makes meaning through the combination of prior knowledge and their previous experience or information in the text. He or she takes in relationship of the text and immediate, remembered or anticipated social interaction and communication.
In addition, reading process especially for foreign language, there will often be gap in understanding the message which happened to the reader. In some cases, the gaps will be just small parts of what they read, in some text which include several difficult words or vocabulary, but in other cases the gaps will from a significant proportion of their knowledge, and in more extreme cases, the reader have no idea and have big misunderstanding about the content of the text. Those problems of course give an impact on the reading process.
The process of constructing meaning while transacting with text can run well if the reader have a good skill. In this situation means that the reader rich of vocabulary have good background knowledge, have a lot of information and experience. As a result, the reader also needs to develop their skill. It is important for reader to help them to understand what the message of the text is and also to get the meaning.
In delivering the message or information is need media. The used of media especially in reading comprehension in order to delivered message or information is still used since many years before. It is use in order to make students easier in reading or to make reading not become a frightening class anymore. The media used by the school between old school and modern school are different. Media used in old school was an ancient media or old media which is rarely used now. Recently, many schools use media to train their learners’ skill in foreign language teaching. For example the used of multimedia room or library to support their teaching learning process. The newest media used in teaching learning process is Digital Library (DL).
The increasing of high technology in this global era gives an impact for humans life. Not only in humans’ life but that condition happened in education too. Education for better life is very important to produce students with good quality. The use of high technology that explained before can support teaching learning process such as computer which can help students more easy to get information related with their study. Nowadays, there are many library try to use digital library as part of newest service system in anticipating global information. Moving from a hands-on, real-life learning experience of substance to a digital version of it presents many interesting challenges. Depending on what the goals are, several models are possible. For example, one goal might be to replicate the learning process with the aid of technology, recreating the learning experience using a computer. A very different goal might deal with capturing knowledge about the experience itself, so that it can be replicated either in its real-life form or using technology. In both cases, the suggestion is that there are ways of moving knowledge, experience, information and content from conceptual and physical forms to digital representations.


No comments:

Post a Comment