MAKING THE BEST USE OF A TEXTBOOK IN INDONESIAN TERTIARY EFL READING CLASSROOMS
Nowadays, EFL reading textbooks have adjusted their level of linguistic difficulties to their prospective users and provide texts about a variety of topics, detailed explanation of reading skills and practices, not to mention the smart lay-out and good quality of paper, all aiming at facilitating both students and teachers to successfully learn and teach reading, respectively. However, having qualified reading textbooks, teachers cannot take for granted that their students will directly appreciate reading and the textbook selected for the course because in some places extensive reading may not be part of the people's routine, and may not be considered to be very important by the authority. This article provides several useful techniques to take a full advantage of textbooks in A. M. Da Silva, Making the Best Use ofa Textbook 21 EFL reading classrooms in the aforementioned context.
The Effect of ESL Students' Perceptions of Their Cognitive Strategies on Reading Achievement
U Although a few studies have investigated the cognitive reading strategies used by Hispanic ESL students (Block, 1986; Knight, Padron, & Waxman, 1985), the effect of these students' use of strategies on reading achievement has not been specifically examined. Furthermore, most of these studies have used think-aloud procedures and verbal reports to identify reading strategies, a methodology that has been questioned because students sometimes have difficulty assessing metacognitive processes (Afflerbach & Johnston, 1984; Ericsson & Simon, 1984). On the other hand, a few studies have successfully used self-report instruments to identify the cognitive reading strategies used by students (Hahn, 1984; Paris & Myers, 1981). These instruments, however, have not been used with Hispanic ESL students, nor have they specifically examined the relationship between students' reported use of cognitive reading strategies and performance on measures of reading comprehension.
On the Use of Verbal Reports in Reading Research
In 1917, E. L. Thorndike focused attention on the processes, particularly the reasoning processes, involved in reading. More than 50 years later, following the hiatus imposed by behaviorism, Simons (1971) reemphasized that research should focus more on the reading process than on the product of reading if progress were to be made toward understanding the nature of comprehension. However, observing and understanding the comprehension process seems more easily proposed than actualized. We have generally inferred the process from products, such as differential performance on different comprehension questions, perhaps collected under different conditions. Researchers interested in studying the cognitive processes involved in reading have recently shown interest in the use of verbal reports to gather data on aspects of the reading process (Bridge & Winograd, 1982; Brown & Day, 1983; Garner, 1982; Johnston & Afflerbach, 1983; Kavale & Schreiner, 1979; Marr, 1983; Olshavsky, 1976-77). This interest is actually a continuation of the long, if sporadic, history of verbal report data in reading research (Huey, 1908; McCallister, 1930; Piekarz, 1954; Strang, 1964, 1970). Verbal reporting, especially introspection, had been an important component of psychological investigation, including reading research, prior to the rise of behaviorism