CRITICAL READING 12

A CRITICAL READING OF STUDENTS’ READING PRACTICES AND ENVIRONMENTS

Aiza Johari

Amelia Alfred Tom

Affidah Morni

Siti Huzaimah Sahari

Academy of Language Studies, Universiti Teknologi Mara, Sarawak

Published by Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics

Vol. 3 No. 1, July 2013, pp. 17-28

Motivating student to practice reading everyday becomes challenging activity. Students have different interest in reading. They preferred to learn another activity that funnier to do. This problem is supported by poor literacy atmosphere in their home. Usually parents do not aware with their children activity in the home. The parents believe that in the school, their children have got much knowledge.

Nowadays, there are many studied conducted to reveal that problem. One of the studies was conducted by Johari et.al. (2013) about students’ reading practice and environment. The study aimed to resolve the issues of students who seem to find reading to be unbearable. They wanted to compile students’ reading reason and their home reading environment. The study placed in one of the urban schools in Sarawak, Malaysia consisted of 120 secondary school students.

The result of this study shows that reading is their last hobby. They actually know the importance and the role of reading activity in learning process but they have no sufficient time in practicing reading at home. In reading activity, they prefer to choose reading material such as comics, story books, magazines, etc. furthermore, their parents give the freedom to read book or not in their home. It means that the parents are not aware to their children literacy.

From the result above, we can learn that parents have big role in creating comfortable reading atmosphere in the home. Reading practice become funny activities if they place it as their hobby. It has implication to the parents and teachers.  Parents should be aware in supporting their children reading hobby. Moreover, teachers can provide reading log to control the student reading practice.