CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION
B. Some Pertinent Ideas
4. The Purpose of Reading
The main purpose in reading is to seek and acquire the information involving the contents of the reading and understanding the meaning of reading text. Tarigan (2008 : 9) said that there are some important things about the purpose , as follow :
16
a. The readers try to find or know the experience of someone what he has done or something that happens to him or the way how to solve his or her problems.
b. Reading for Main Idea
The readers try to know what the topic interest and the problem of the story.
c. Reading for Sequence or Organization
The readers try to know what happens in each part of stories, action, etc.
d. Reading for Inference
The readers try to find out the conclusion from the action or the idea in the text.
e. Reading to Classify
The readers try to classify some information or actions of the writer in the text or paragraph.
f. Reading for Evaluate
The reader try to evaluate what the writer has done or what he try to explain in his paragraph.
g. Reading to Compare or Contras
The reader compares the plot of the story or content, whether have similarity with him or even contrast.
17
5. Concept of Reading Comprehension a. Definition of Reading Comprehension
Comprehension has the same meaning as understanding. When the readers read a text, they need to comprehend what the writer tells about. Comprehension here was the capacity to grasp meaning from the writer’s idea in a text. There are some experts that had shared their own definition about reading comprehension, there were conclude:
Keith Lenz, Ph.D., University of Kansas, writes in the article “An Introduction to Reading Comprehension” at the Special Connections website that “the process of comprehending involves decoding the writer’s words and then using background knowledge to construct an approximate understanding of the writer’s message. “How the students interprets the words to make meaning of the words could be different for different students. Knowledge of the topic, language structures, text structures, genres, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, reasoning abilities, and motivation could all affect comprehension.
Mikulecky and Jeffries (2007: 74) state that comprehension is making sense of what someone reads and connecting the ideas in the text to what he already knows. It means readers could answer questions or explaining texts because they had comprehension with connecting each idea in the text.
Every human being has a different level of thought and insight. In English learning, especially in reading skills students need a lot of 18
ideas so that they could make a good reading and could be understood by the reader easily.
b. The Elements of Reading Comprehension
There are three elements of reading comprehension, there were:
1) The reader who is doing the comprehending
Two comprehend, the reader must had a wide range capacities and abilities. These include cognitive capacities, motivation, and various types of knowledge.
2) The text that is to be comprehended
The features of the text has a large effect on comprehension.
Comprehension does not occur by simply extracting meaning from text. During reading the reader constructs different presentation of the text that are important for comprehension (Catherin : 2002:14) 3) The activity in which comprehension is a part
A reading activity involves one or more purposes, some operation to processed the text at hand, and the consequences of performing the activity , all which occur within some specific context.
c. Kinds of Reading Comprehension Skills
There were kinds of reading comprehension in skilled readers for instance, include that :
1. Predicting what will happen next in a story.
2. Understanding the main idea and supporting detail of the text.
19
3. Understanding of the sequence, massage or structure of the text.
4. Understanding meaning of unknown words of the text.
5. Inferring the point of the reading material.
d. The Factors that influences Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension was a cognitive process that requires many skill and strategies. The readers are actively engaged with the text, they think about many things as they read to comprehend the text.
There were several factors that affect the reading comprehension such as linguistic factors and non-linguistics factors. Linguistics factors include the knowledge about vocabularies and Meta cognitive knowledge of the second language structure, grammar and syntax.
Meanwhile, non-linguistics include their prior knowledge and their experience.
e. The Importance of Reading Comprehension
Although many children could read, reading and reading comprehension are two different things. While reading involves translating and decoding text into sounds and spoken words, reading comprehension involves taking what was just read and deriving meaning from those words. In simpler terms, reading comprehension was the ability to read, understand, processed and recall what was just read.
20
Having excellent was one of the importance of reading comprehension. Reading comprehension skill was crucial, it was increases the enjoyment and effectiveness of reading and helps not only academically but also professionally and in a person’s personal life. Imagine being given a document or stories, you could read that but you can not understood what was fully asking, or maybe you are applying to jobs and do not understood the question that was being asked. Being able to understood the meaning behind the text helps the children develop intellectually, socially and professionally.
6. Definition of Main Idea and Conclusion