Chapter II

This will serve as a guide for the researchers in developing the

study. Moreover, the information included in this chapter, will help in

familiarizing details that are opposite and or similar to the past studies.

Reading Engagement. It is an activity that can broaden the reader's

knowledge. The process of deriving meaning from a group of written

symbols by looking at them. According to Burnes (1991:45), reading is

necessary to understand written speech. Through the text, the reader and

author connect in a thought-exchange process.

Reading engagement refers to an individual’s actual involvement in

reading, as reflected in behavior, affect, or cognition (Guthrie, Wigfield, &

You, 2012), in accord with domain-general conceptualizations of academic

engagement (e.g., Reeve, 2012). Identified as being totally absorbed in a

text—both intellectually and emotionally. It is a concepts that is frequently

brought up in educational contexts, but whose significance is sometimes

taken for granted and which is easily overshadowed by the numerous

other demands on teachers' time and attention.

Reading engagement is crucial to reading enjoyment, and at least a

certain level of reading enjoyment is part and parcel to reading success.

Readers who are able to select texts they will read, engage in higher-order

thinking as they read, move from stage of just summarizing or retelling of a

text to the stage of construction and critical reflection on a text. Research

on the motivational aspects of reading has reached that there is a strong

and positive correlation between reading engagement, keeping students

attentive and involved for extended periods of time, and higher student

achievement in reading comprehension (Connor, Jakobsons, Crowe, &

Meadows, 2009;Klauda& Guthrie, 2015). According to V. Vaish (2016) and

Wigfield et al. (2008) the term ‘engagement’ as a goal of teaching reading

is consistent with a multi-dimensional approach in that it includes

behavioral, emotional/motivational, and cognitive aspects. Thus, the

engaged reader is assumed to be behaviorally active (reading frequently),

internally motivated (liking to read), and cognitively active (uses strategies

in reading). In the present study, reading engagement will be

operationalized as “a meta-construct subsuming all aspects of reading: not

just motivation but a balance of interests, attitudes, motivation, self-

regulation, and the ability to use cognitive abilities while reading to become

deeply involved with a text.”

In a longitudinal study, Klauda and Guthrie (2015) examined the

development of reading motivation, engagement, and achievement in early

adolescence by comparing interrelations of these variables in struggling

and advanced readers. Findings showed that advanced readers showed

stronger relations of motivation and engagement with achievement than

struggling readers. However, motivation predicted concurrent engagement

and growth in engagement similarly for struggling and advanced readers.

These results supported the hypothesis that cognitive challenges limit the

relations of motivation and engagement to achievement for struggling

readers. According to Trowler (2010), students’ engagement is the

interaction between time, effort, and other related resources and it intends

not only to optimize the students’ experiences but also to enhance learning

outcomes and development oft students. More broadly, Guthrie and his

colleagues describe students engaged in reading as knowledgeable in

cognitive and motivational processes, and socially interactive (Guthrie et

al., 1996; Guthrie and Wigfield, 2000; Guthrie et al., 2004; Baker et al.,

2000). The students who engaged in reading: have intrinsic motivations;

read for reaching their own goals; enjoy reading for their own benefits;

read for pleasure and knowledge; achieve to read fluently; are eager to

read; and on their reading skills. Accordingly, four main factors ensuring

to reach the reading engagement are motivation, strategy use, conceptual

knowledge, and social interactions, of which motivation refers to

possessing intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to achieve reading.

Different scholars hold different views on the connotation of reading

engagement, and so far, there is no unified standard. Csikszentmihalyi

(1990) believes that reading engagement is a state of concentration.

Pearson et al. (2016) believed that reading engagement is the interaction

between students’ motivation and strategies. Different scholars have

different views on the dimensions of reading engagement. PISA2009

divides reading engagement into personal reading engagement and

school reading engagement. Personal reading engagement includes four

dimensions: love of reading, diversity of reading, online reading activities

and reading time. The school reading engagement specifically includes

four dimensions: text interpretation, use of non-consecutive texts, reading

activities of traditional literary works, and instrumental text use. Zhang et

al. (2014) drew on the PISA2009 definition of reading engagement, and

divided reading engagement into reading time, reading quantity and

reading interest. Wen et al. (2016) studied reading engagement from three

dimensions: length of reading time, amount of reading, and diversity of

reading content. Research by Guthrie and Wigfield found that learning

opportunities generated by engaged readers themselves were roughly

equal to several years of education at school (Guthrie J.T. & Wigfield A.

(2000). Engagement and Motivation in Reading. Handbook of Reading

Research. Eds. Kamil, M.L., Mosenthal, P., Pearson, P.D., & Barr, R.

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey). For example,

behavioral engagement may appear in a child’s sustained attention while

reading, affective engagement may be apparent from facial expression

and body language in discussing a book, and cognitive engagement may

be evident from their thoughtful responses to teacher questions (Lutz et

al., 2006; Taboada Barber, Gallagher, et al., 2015). Reading engagement,

as such, is understood as a socially-mediated event (Arzubiaga, Rueda, &

Monzó, 2002). Sivan (1986) and Ames (1992) as cited in Arzubiaga,

Rueda, and Monzó (2002) have begun to examine connections between

social contexts and differential motivation. Access to books also implies

that teachers should invite children to read by raising interest and curiosity

about books and other materials (Gambrell, 2011). The daily family

practices in which children participate may affect their access to school-

based literacy activities; their notions of engagement and the organization

of literacy practices; their appreciation of and interest in reading; and their

idea of what counts as meaningful literacy (Arzubiaga, Rueda, & Monzó,

2002).

It is much more likely that students who have grown emotionally

and intellectually attached to a text will contribute significantly to class

discussions and activities, increasing their effectiveness and making them

more pleasurable for the entire class. When reading advanced or

challenging literature, students who are invested in the material are

considerably more motivated to put in the effort. Csikszentmihalyi (1991)

describes reading engagement as a state of complete absorption called

flow. Flow is characterized by a student so lost in a passage that he or she

is oblivious to his or her surroundings. In addition to the word flow, terms

like mental presence, absorption, and thoughtfulness are also common

elements in definitions of reading engagement. Guthrie (2001) defined

reading engagement as “a merger of motivation and thoughtfulness” (p. 1).

Relationships between student engagement and achievement have

important implications for students and their teachers, and research along

these lines has given school administrators and teachers information

about students’ likelihood of school drop-out. To understand the nuances

of individual students’ reading engagement, and to have a chance of

affecting these students’ school success at a young age, it is critical that

engagement be investigated in specific domains. Engagement has a

strong positive correlation to achievement in particular domains, as

measured by a variety of indicators. In reading, several key dimensions of

Martin’s Motivation and Engagement Scale are positively correlated with

literacy, GPA, and English achievement (Martin & Marsh, 2003; Martin,
Marsh, & Debus, 2001). As the collective conception of engagement is

refined, teachers and researchers will be able to better understand

domain-specific effects of engagement and apply their understanding to

help students. Students’ beliefs, attitudes, and emotions about reading

help demonstrate how students engage in the act of reading. These

personal characteristics illuminate the underpinnings of reading

engagement from a social-cognitive perspective (Bandura, 1986; Bandura,

2001). In social-cognitive theories of learning, personal characteristics

interact reciprocally with other characteristics of a student’s environment.

These other characteristics might include the presence or absence of

books or the temperament of a student’s teacher. Reading engagement

was once considered an easily quantifiable aspect. It was measured by

observing a student’s time-on-task, as demonstrated by overt behaviors

like looking at the intended page. However, when reading engagement is

viewed as a metaconstruct, covert measurements are necessary. It is not

possible to accurately assess a student’s reading engagement by

observation, nor is it reasonable to ask “are you an engaged reader?”

Instead, a self-report technique of data collection can be used to try to

understand a student’s perspective. A self-report method was chosen over

parental or teacher reports because a student’s own belief system about

reading is closely related to his or her reading engagement (Schraw &

Bruning, 1999). Self-report assessments offer a glance into the way a

student feels about reading, in a way that questionnaires completed by an

adult teacher or parent can not.

 Reading Comprehension. Reading comprehension is an active

cognitive process which involves reasoning to construct meaning from a

written text and understanding it effectively and comprehensively

(Nakamoto, Lindsey, & Manis, 2008). Enabling EFL learners to deeply and

adequately understand the written language, necessitate teaching them

the reading comprehension skills that comprises reading proficiency.

Grabe (2009, cited in Hamidreza & Hashemi, 2016) stresses the

importance of reading comprehension strategies clearly: "Acquisition of

better reading strategies is apparently needed to crack the illusion of

comprehension in readers who are settling for low standards of

comprehension; They need to acquire and implement strategies to

facilitate deeper levels of comprehension" (p. 449). Thus, support

students’ reading comprehension through training on appropriate reading

strategies has been a main focus for language instructors. It has often

been argued in reading literature that due to the complex and complicated

factors involved in reading comprehension in general and in EFL reading

in particular i.e., linguistic, cognitive and socio-cultural variables, designing

an effective reading instructional strategy is not an easy task (Hudson,

2007). When it comes to reading comprehension, Moore and Hall (2012)

state that when used intentionally, HoM help students interact with texts in

active and purposeful ways. Therefore, Billmeyer (2004) stresses that a

major goal of reading instruction must be to support students in developing

and habituating these HoM in their reading practices until they become

one interdependent unit.

 Scholars have made attempts to classify these skills incorporating

various parameters for their classification. An analysis of the various

taxonomies tackling reading comprehension skills (Koda, 2005; Hudson,

2007) reveals three underlying categories: Literal comprehension,

Inferential/ interpretive comprehension and Critical comprehension.

According to these taxonomies, while literal comprehension focus on

decoding explicit information from the text through recognition or recall of

its details, interpretive/inferential skills include the use of these details for

the analysis, synthesis and classification of the text-based information,

enabling the reader to access additional information by mapping the text.

At the higher levels of cognitive processes (critical comprehension),

anticipations and hypotheses are inferred by the reader beyond the explicit

meaning, opinions are formed about the quality and accuracy of the text

(Ismail, Yusof, Abdul Rashid & Lin, 2015). Guthrie and Wigfield (2000 as

cited in Mete, 2016) state the students who engage in reading with high

motivation and read by using strategies have a good level of

comprehension and achievement. Cazden (1988) frames reading

comprehension as an “active construction by each student of ‘contexts in

the mind’” and claims that teachers are in a position to help students

through this process “in the molar form of the entire curriculum, [and] in the

molecular form of what is said in the E slot” (Cazden, p. 116). Nystrand

also emphasizes the importance of the “E slot” in teacher-student

discourse. Advanced Reading Comprehension is the final reading class

that students need to pass. The focus of this course is on techniques and

strategies to comprehend the text like previewing, scanning and skimming.

Mickulecky and Jeffries (2004) cleared that students can use previewing,

scanning, and skimming to help them when they face difficulty in reading

comprehension. In reading comprehension especially in facing the test,

students have difficulty in creating good sentence to make it coherent and

relevant according to the specific text (Haryanto, n.d.). It is believed that if

students have adequate vocabulary and good grammar comprehension,

the length of the text will not be a problem and they will be able to

comprehend and answer the test easily. Atikah (2009) also analyzed the

students’ linguistic problems in reading comprehension, the result is

students get difficulties in vocabulary, structure and spelling. In another

research, Sasmita (2012) conducted a research to find out the students’

problems in comprehending English reading text. The finding shows the

factors that make students have difficulties in understanding English

reading text is grammar knowledge and lack of vocabulary.