Purwokerto – A team of lecturers from Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Universitas Jenderal Soedirman (FIB Unsoed) once again conducted Community Service activities at SMAN 2 Purwokerto through a program titled “Training Academic Writing Literacy Using English at SMAN 2 Purwokerto through an Essay Writing Project (Second Year)”. This second-year activity is a continuation of the first-year program, which focused on strengthening students’ ability to write academic essays in English. The activity took place over four days, namely:
📅 Tuesday, 1 September 2026
📅 Tuesday, 8 September 2026
📅 Tuesday, 15 September 2026
📅 Tuesday, 22 September 2026
While in the first year students received guidance in developing ideas, formulating thesis statements, constructing paragraphs, and organizing essays systematically, the second-year program was directed toward strengthening reading skills. This focus was selected because good reading ability is an essential foundation for producing richer, more focused academic writing supported by relevant information.
This service activity was led by Mia Fitria Agustina with team members Ririn Kurnia Trisnawati, Eka Dyah Puspita Sari, and Dian Adiarti. The team emphasized that reading and writing are two interconnected skills in academic literacy. Students not only need to be able to express ideas in writing, but also need the ability to comprehend, select, and process information from various reading sources.
To support these goals, students were introduced to various English reading strategies that can be used according to their reading purpose. These strategies include scanning, previewing and predicting, vocabulary comprehension, recognition of topics and topics in paragraphs, identification of main ideas, understanding of patterns of organization, skimming, making inferences, and summarizing.
Through the previewing and predicting strategy, students were trained to observe titles, images, subheadings, and other elements before reading the text as a whole. From these clues, students attempted to predict the content of the reading and activate their prior knowledge. This strategy helps students approach a text with a clearer reading purpose.
Understanding vocabulary was also a key part of the activity. Students were guided not to always rely on word-for-word translation, but to learn to interpret the meaning of words based on sentence context and the relationships between ideas in the text. Thus, limited vocabulary does not necessarily become a major barrier to understanding English reading materials.
Students were then trained to recognize topics or the general topic of a reading, as well as determine topics in paragraphs. This ability forms the basis for finding main ideas at both the paragraph level and across the text as a whole. By understanding topics and main ideas, students can distinguish genuinely important information from explanatory or supporting details.
The next material focused on patterns of organization. Students were introduced to various text development patterns, such as sequence, cause and effect, comparison, classification, as well as problem and solution. Understanding organizational patterns helps students see relationships between ideas in readings while providing them with a model when constructing their own paragraphs and essays.
Two fast-reading strategies, namely skimming and scanning, were also important parts of the training. Through skimming, students practiced obtaining a general overview and finding the main idea without having to read the entire text in detail. Meanwhile, scanning was used to locate specific information, such as names, dates, numbers, terms, or specific facts needed from a text.
At a deeper level of comprehension, students were also trained in making inferences. This strategy encourages students to understand information that is not always directly stated in the text by connecting textual clues with their existing knowledge. The ability to make inferences is vital for developing critical comprehension of readings.
This series of reading strategies was then directed toward the skill of summarizing. Students learned to select the most important information, identify main ideas, eliminate unnecessary details, and re-present the text content concisely in their own words. Summarizing skills serve as an essential bridge between reading and writing because they train students to comprehend sources while processing information to support ideas in writing.
The head of the service team, Mia Fitria Agustina, explained that the focus on reading strategies in the second year was designed to reinforce the writing skills developed in the previous year. When students are able to comprehend texts more effectively, find main ideas, analyze information structure, make inferences, and summarize reading content, they have a stronger source of ideas and information to develop into academic writing.
In this way, this series of community service programs builds academic literacy step by step. The first year provided a foundation on how students organize and convey ideas through writing, while the second year equips them with methods to acquire, comprehend, evaluate, and process information through reading activities.
Through this sustainable program, the service team hopes that students of SMAN 2 Purwokerto will become increasingly capable of integrating reading and writing skills in English. These abilities are not only beneficial for school learning, but also serve as important preparation when students face academic literacy demands at higher levels of education.
This activity also forms part of the implementation of the higher education tridharma (three pillars) and strengthens the partnership between FIB Unsoed and SMAN 2 Purwokerto in supporting the improvement of students’ literacy quality, English skills, and critical thinking abilities.