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CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
A. The General Concept of Reading
1. The Understanding of Reading
Reading is an important element of language that cannot be separated on language learning process. Since English become one of the international
languages, there are much information printed or written by using English. It could be seen from the authentic text such as magazine, newspaper, article etc.
that usually found by people. People have to get the idea or information from those texts by reading. As a result, reading is an element that is very important
for the language learner. Reading is an activity to get the information from the written text.
According to Daiek and Anter, “Reading is an active process that depends on
both an author’s ability to convey meaning using words and your ability to create meaning from them.”
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It means that the writer expresses the idea to the written form then the reader gets the idea from the text. Information and ideas
are exchanges between the writer and the reader in the act of communicating. Reading is the understanding of the text. If the reader does not
understand the meaning of the text, that is not reading. It cannot be called reading unless the reader understands what he reads. As Christine Nuttall
highlights that, “But of course one reason for reading is that we want to
understand other people’s idea; if we were all identical, there would be no point in most communication.”
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It means that the main reason of people reading is to understand the other idea, there is no other point on
communication unless to understand the idea and to get the meaning.
1
Deborah Daeik and Nancy Anter, Critical Reading for College and Beyond, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004, p. 5.
2
Christine Nuttall, Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language. Oxford: A division of Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1989, p. 9.
When people read, they try to find and comprehend the meaning in order to get the information based on their own perception because they want
to give. Alderson states that, “’Read’ implies that we know what it means to
read, to process text meaning through some process of interaction with print.”
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It means that on reading activity, people communicate through the text that has printed and typed. In this communication there are many various symbols
and language that written to transfer the information. In order to comprehend the text, people have to use a lot of skill in reading activity.
Richard Allington and Strange point out the definition of reading, “Reading is an active cognition process that does indeed require using graphic
letters and phonic sounds information; but for fluent readers particularly, the language-based cues-semantic meaning and syntactic grammar - seem
far away more important than graphic and phonic cues.”
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It means on reading, there are many skills that includes such as the letter and the sounds. Being the
fluent reader to get more comprehensible, people also should know the semantic and syntactic of the language. In other words, reading includes many
processing skills that are coordinated each other. Jeremy Harmer states
these specialist skills on reading process, “The specialist skills are predictive skills, extracting specific information, getting
the general picture, extracting detailed information, recognizing function and discourse patterns, and deducing meaning from context.”
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On the predictive skills mean the readers have to predict first what they are going to read and
could analyze the content to their prediction. While in the extracting specific information, the readers just have to find out the specific information that they
need. Not only that, they also have to be able to see a general idea, and detailed information. On reading, the readers must follow the plot and identify
3
J. Charles Alderson, Assessing Reading, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 3.
4
Richard Allington and Michael Strange, Learning Through Reading in the Content Areas, Lexington: D. C. Health and Company, 1980, p. 16.
5
Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching, New York: Longman, 1996, pp. 183- 4.