STIMULATING LITERACY AWARENESS THROUGH CONTEXT-BASED READING TASKS

Abstract

The presence of authentic learning resources in EFL setting is a strategic way of nurturing  contextual learning. The use of context-based reading incorporated with authentic reading text is believed as an alternative way to promote students’ literacy awareness. The current study is aimed at investigating how context-based reading tasks are used to stimulate students’ literacy awareness in Intensive Reading course. Through observation and authentic assessment, this case study discovered that the use of context-based reading tasks conducted through task based learning and cooperative learning stragtegies can stimulate student’s literacy awareness through their efforts to complete their reading course’s tasks on authentic reading texts taken from an online newspaper “The Jakarata Post” provided in https://www.thejakartapost.com. The presence of literacy awareness is indicated by several learning performances of the students, among others are (a) autonomous exploration on preferrable topics of reading, (b) exchange of the result of individual reading task in group discussion, (c) presentation of the group discussion’s resume in classroom forum, and (d) students’ inferential level of reading comprehension. In conclusion, context-based reading tasks is another alternative way to raise students’ literacy awareness by incorporating the use of authentic reading texts in a contextual learning setting in reading comprehension practices. This study can be further developed into a quantitative research by adding more participants and additional intensive treatment of reading instructions.