Pre-questioning

Pre-questioning

Based on Brown’s (2001) explanation of display questions, schema theory and students’ background knowledge explanation. He also defined pre-questioning implicitly as some questions which are provided before the students read the whole text, in order to build the students’ interest and motivation, also their cognitive factors and pre-questioning is very useful to activate the schemata, thus the students can predict what will be faced by them in the reading text.

Kinds of Pre-questioning

According to Harmer (1985:153), there are some kinds of pre-questioning, they are: Pre-questioning before reading to confirm expectations, pre-questioning before reading to extract specific information, pre-questioning before reading for general comprehension, and pre-questioning before reading for detail comprehension. The explanations are as following:

Pre-questioning before reading to confirm expectations

The use of pre-questioning as a tool for placing great emphasis on the lead-in stage (where students are encouraged to become interested in the subject matter of the text), encourages students to predict the content of the text, and gives them an interesting and motivating purpose for reading.

Pre-questioning before reading to extract specific information

Pre-questioning as a tool to force the students to extract specific information from the text. They are going to answer before reading the text. If they do this it will be possible for them to read in the required way, they should seen the text only to extract the information the questions demand. 

Pre-questioning before reading for general comprehension

In this case pre-questioning used to build up the students’ prior knowledge.

Pre-questioning before reading for detailed comprehension

This kind of pre-questioning intends to give the students some detailed information that should be found by them in the whole of the text.

Based on the explanation above, in this study the writer only concern two kinds of pre-questioning, they are: Pre-questioning before reading for general comprehension and the pre-questioning before reading to confirm expectations. In order to deal with students’ background knowledge and activating schemata.      Related to this study, the writer used pre-questioning with Indonesian version, because the form of pre-questioning is only to deal the students’ background knowledge. Thus, the students can predict easily what will be discussed on the text, after they read and answer the pre-questioning.