REVIEWED WORK

English Study Skill for Freshmen

Adopted from

More Reading Power. Beatrice S. Mikulecky, & Linda Jeffries. New York: Addison-
Weley Longman, 1996.
Reviewed by
Zulhilmi Barsah
D51116322
Architecture Engineering
Hasanuddin University

English Study Skill for Freshman (ESSF) is a textbook which is adopted from famous book
More Reading Power (MRP). I’ve got from several sources that More Reading Power has
a lot to offer teachers and students in academic situations. My teacher used it in teaching
academic for Architecture students (my class) at Hasanuddin University.

More Reading Power provides a variety of exercises to improve student’s reading. It’s
based on what Mikulecky and Jeffries define as a process approach in which students are
always encouraged to pay attention to their reading processes and promote their
metalinguistic awareness by giving them many opportunities to work on exercise.

This textbook (ESSF) consists of an introduction and four main parts. In the introduction,
the authors present their justifications for why they think reading in English is important
as well as a brief descriptions about each part in the textbook.

Part One focuses on pleasure reading. The aim is to introduce students how to reading
extensively and encourage them to develop the habit of reading for pleasure. The
authors also note that the more you read, the better you will read.

Part Two ‘Reading Comprehension Skill’, this section is used to be the main content that
given in ESSF. It gives the guide to learn some esseential reading skills and how to use
them. From this part, Mikulecky and Jeffries point out that student’s reading dificulties
are often based on how they approach a text. They claim that students can improve their
comprehension by understanding how information is presented in English and by an

BOOK REVIEW | ENGLISH STUDY SKILLS FOR FRESHMAN « MORE READING POWER
awareness of the cognitive processes involved in reading. It forms the foundation for six
sections:
∞ Scanning
∞ Previewing and Predicting
∞ Skimming
∞ Main Ideas
∞ Patterns of Organization
∞ Making Inferences

Each section begins with a rationale, followed by exercise sequenced from easy to
difficult. MRP has two additional units, identifying main ideas and summarizing.

Part three, Thinking Skills, may appear to be unrelated to the aim of this textbook to
improves student’s reading skills. However, the authors claim “learning to read well in
English means learning to think in English”. So, reading is not just understanding
words/the grammar. Is not just translating. And Part two gives us practice in following
ideas in English.

It is Part Four that makes this textbook unique and different from other reading
textbooks, as it provides exercises for increasing reading rates. I think this is good and
very necessary to learn because students in academic contexts usually face large number
of assignments. Students can improve their reading comprehension by learning to read
faster, so they will save time on reading assignments, and reading will become more
enjoyable.

Actually, in my opinion and my capacity as a student, a real strength of this textbook lays
in Part Four ‘Reading Faster’. Students tend to take a much longer time to complete the
reading to learn than their native English speaking counterparts, so that there is a little
time left for them to absorb what they are suposed to learn from the readings. But Part
Two is important too consdering we still need to learn more basic things in English.

Another unique aspect of this textbook is that Mikulecky and Jeffries introduce extensive
reading in Part One, and that students are carefully instructed to choose books to read
for fun on their own.

BOOK REVIEW | ENGLISH STUDY SKILLS FOR FRESHMAN « MORE READING POWER
As previouslu mentioned, the exercise provided by Mikuklecky & Jeffreis in Part Two
‘Reading Comprehension Skills’ is based on “a Process approach”, in which student are
encouraged to pay attention to their reading processes. I think this part can also promote
student’s metalinguistic awareness very effectively. For example, students have many
opporunities to work in pairs or small groups, which helps them to think about their
processes of reading particular answer. To verbalizwe their throughts and reasons, and
to be aware of how they approach readingtexts. In some of scanning exercise sucu as
reviewing a book or retell the passages, students are given opportunities to make their
own question for their classmates, which helps them learn to ask questions as they read.

Finally, the reading passages in MRP come from a variety sources such as book review
articles, newspaper articles, advertisements, excerpts from an encyclopedia and
autobiography. This variety allow students to have valuable experiences in reading
different kinds of texts in different ways.

Over all, the stregths of this textbook outweighs it’s drawbacks. I really recommend this
textbook for an English class which focusses on reading comprehension. It will be useful
textbook for your English class. ESSF that is adopted from MRP can makes a powerful
impact on english learning class. So, for you who need to learn how to read in English,
you suppose to use English Study Skill for Freshman based on a great book More Reading
Power.

BOOK REVIEW | ENGLISH STUDY SKILLS FOR FRESHMAN « MORE READING POWER