Helping students develop their literary ability in English through selected reading materials

Helping students develop their literacy ability in English is dominated by the materials. Selected reading materials are very helpful for the students in acquiring literacy because the materials will support them in either comprehending or expressing the ideas of a reading text both orally and written in English. Literacy in general can be classified into three broad categories: functional, cultural, and critical. Besides that, there is a literacy ability in which EFL learners are expected to get. It is the ability to go beyond simply getting the main ideas from the text, to understand and explain the implicit information of a text, to talk and write about language, and to speak and write for many purposes in appropriate forms. In this study, the focus of EFL learners' literacy is the ability to read and write. To enhance the EFL students' literacy, teacher has an important role in selecting appropriate reading materials. Teacher should be able to select and modify the materials according to the situation. The selection of reading materials is a big decision because it determines the vocabulary frequency, prior knowledge of the students, structure of the text, and the simplification of the text. Talking about selected reading materials, there are two kinds of materials that can be used to support students' literacy, they are "real world" print and books. Besides these materials, there are three ways to get "selected reading materials", they are native-speaker text, input modified text, and structure modified text. In this thesis, the writer has selected reading texts that are suitable for the intermediate level of English course students. The texts are modified into input modified version and structure modified version. To teach those selected reading materials, she suggests Alfredo Schifini's technique. Finally, the writer hopes this thesis could be useful for the teacher in using selected reading materials to help students develop their literacy ability in English