Reading and Reading Comprehension

A.    Reading

Learning to read is an important educational goal. For both children and adults, the ability to read opens up new worlds and opportunities. It enables us to gain new knowledge, enjoy literature, and do everyday things that are part and parcel of modern life, such as, reading the newspapers, job listings, instruction manuals, maps and so on. According to Carell (1970:1) reading is by far the most important of the four skills in second language, particularly in English as a second or foreign language. Absolutely, if we assume the study of English as a foreign language around the world the situation in which most English learners learn.  

Also in (Pang. EPS 12) Reading is about understanding written texts. It is a complex activity that involves both perception and thought. Reading consists of two related processes: word recognition and comprehension. Word recognition refers to the process of perceiving how written symbols correspond to one’s spoken language. Comprehension is the process of making sense of words, sentences and connected text. Readers typically make use of background knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, experience with text and other strategies to help them understand written text.

According to Nuttal (199:11) reading is in interactive process, as conversation between reader and writer. Reading is a result of the interaction between the perception of graphic symbols that present language and the readers, language skill, cognitive skills, and knowledge of the words. There are many kinds of reading such as reading comprehension, skimming, and scanning, in this chapter I will draw and explanation about six genres text and clipping.

B.     Reading Comprehension

The first point in reading process is reading comprehension. Knowledge is a basic element for comprehension. It means that it is related to what we do not know the information provided in the passage. In this case, intelligent plays an important role besides concentration, motivation, interest, and background knowledge

Even in the 1960s, reading began to be referred to by psycholinguists as most active psycholinguistic guessing game a process whereby readers predicted what would come next on the basis of what they had already sampled from the text and then confirmed or corrected their hunches about the predicted meaning of the text, based on what the sampling provided Cohen (1994:211)

For at least a decade now, expert in  native and second language reading assessment have recommended that reading comprehension be measured in less traditional ways, the basic argument is that assessment has been too limited in scope. For example Johnston (1983:216) called for a series of new direction in the assessment of a reading comprehension in a native language

Gunning in Putra (2005:6) says that comprehension is constructive, interactive process involving the three factors, they are; the readers, the text, and the context in which the text is read. Eskey in Putra (2005:6) says that reading comprehension means knowing what one does not know or adding new information to what one already known. It can be understood that reading comprehension is the process in which a reader use his or her background knowledge to make sense of what she or he is reading. 

Taken From Sahri Ramdona Thesis, Unpublished