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people who have no experience about medical terms, it will be difficult for them to comprehend the book.
RRSG The Rand Reading Study Group in Snow 2002 defines reading comprehension as “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing
meaning through interaction and involvement with written language”. From this definition, it is known that the process of extracting and constructing meaning
comes simultaneously when the reader is reading. As a summary, it can be concluded that reading comprehension is a
process in which a reader is spontaneously able to retrieve information from text and relate the information to his own background knowledge to construct meaning
as the writer intends to convey.
c. The Process of Reading Comprehension
The arguments about comprehension process have been changing from time to time. There are three processes of comprehension stated by psychologists.
Those three processes can be elaborated as follows: 1
Bottom-up processing This process was invented by the psychologist in the 1970s. It is called
“bottom-up” because it starts with the text itself Johnson, 2001. In this process, the reader begin with decoding each individual letter, word, and sentence structure
of the text and then build up interpretation of meaning as a whole Johnson, 2001; Nuttall, 1996; McDonough Shaw, 2003. It is also called text-driven processing
Shrum Glisan, 2005; Day Bamford, 1998 or data-driven processing Johnson, 2001; Day Bamford, 1998.
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2 Top-down processing
This process was recognized by the psychologists after 1930s because bottom-up processing was considered inadequate to represent comprehension
Johnson, 2001. Bottom-up processing only sees thing in limited point of view Nuttall, 1996. In contrast to this processing, top-down processing deals with
what the reader brings to the text; those are knowledge, experience, expectations and intuition to make interpretations of the text Johnson, 2001; Brown, 2001;
Nuttal, 1996; McDonough Shaw, 2003; Lally in Shrum Glisan, 2005. It is called reader-driven processing Shrum Glisan, 2005 or concept-driven
processing Johnson, 2001. One important term in top-down processing is called schemata Johnson,
2001. When a reader is relating what he gets in the text with his background knowledge and experiences, he builds schemata in his mind. Schemata according
to Bartlett in Johnson 2001 are “mental frameworks we hold as individuals, and
which we bring with us when we read”. The theory underlying this process is
called „schema theory‟ which is defined by Gillet Temple 1986: 207 as “a model of reading comprehension that takes into account what readers may already
know and how they go about developing and adding to schemata as they read”. 3
Integrative processing In integrative processing, both bottom-up and top-down processing are
equipped Johnson, 2001; Anderson, 2003; Lynch, 1996. This processing occurs because there are many arguments said that both processing are needed although
in a certain situation, one of the processes will be needed more than the other
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Johnson, 2001. Murtagh in Anderson 2003 stresses that the best readers can “efficiently integrate” both processes.
d. Micro- and Macroskills in Reading Comprehension
