2.1.1 Word Comprehension
It is basically important in reading comprehension to understand word meaning. If we know what the individual word means and how they are put together
in our language, we know what the sentence means Fairbairn, 1996:9. Similarly, Grellet 1996:15 confirms that
“inability to understand the meaning of unknown elements, whether these are ideas or simple words, often causes discouragement and
apprehension to students when they are faced with reading text ”. It means that, to
understand a reading text successfully, students should know all the elements of the text such as words meaning included in the text while they are reading.
In comprehending the word meaning, the reader should also know that some functions of the word can be the basic building of sentences. Langan 2004:90 states
that the basic building blocks of English sentence are subjects and verbs. It is important to train the students as early as possible to look first
for the „core’ of the sentence that is subjects and verbs Grellet, 1996:15. It means that word meaning is
very important to be learned to know the parts of speech of a sentence. The examples of parts of speech are noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and
interjection. In word comprehension, the most important matter is the ability to identify verbs and nouns because a sentence at least contains of subjects can be noun
or pronoun and verbs that explain the sentence’s idea.
In brief, it can be said that word comprehension deals with understanding of word meaning in a context or in a sentence.
The ability to identify “parts of speech” is also important for comprehending the word meaning. In this research, a test
containing word comprehension level used to measure the students’ ability in
comprehending word meaning. For example:
The sports announcer talked nonstop during the game.
Langan, 2004
Based on the example above, the underlined phrase is the subject, word in bolder letter is a verb, and italic words indicate noun other than subject. The example
of question from this sentence is “Who is the sentence about?”
2.1.2 Sentence Comprehension
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