have only a limited time to read or in the situation that makes them should understand the text. Next purpose is reading to learn. In this purpose of reading,
kind of information is really important for the reader to complete his task. The fourth purpose is to integrate information. This kind of purpose of reading is for
high level in education because it needs the reader to integrate the information from any text. The fifth purpose is reading to evaluate, critique, and use
information. It is needed by high level of reader as same as reading to integrate information. And the last is reading for general comprehension. This purpose is
the most common purpose for reading among fluent reader.
8
From those objective mentioned above, it means that reading is really important in daily life. People need to read to get any information that they need.
By reading, people can get information from any sources such as book, newspaper, magazine, journals, and articles. Reading can also be an interesting
activity, it could loss stress by reading a nice story or some jokes. In reading, people should also know how they read, what skill needed in reading based on the
situation people read. So, people should be able to read.
B. English Reading Text 1. Definition of Text
Text related to the language that people say in every day, either spoken or written. People always produce text to communicate with other people in any
situation. In other words, text has a meaning in order to be coded as a message for the readers or listeners. As Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan stated that
“text is any instance of living language that is playing some part in a context of situation.
”
9
It means that text always related to its context in getting the meaning or
interpretation. They also mentioned text as a product and a process, “the text is a
product in the sense that it is an output, something that can be recorded and studied, having a certain construction that can be represented in systematic terms.
8
William Grabe Fredricka L. Stoller, Teaching and Researching Reading, Essex: Pearson Education, 2002, p. 10-13
9
M. A. K. Halliday Ruqaiya Hasan, Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social Semiotic Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 10
And it is a process in the sense of continuous process of semantic choice, a movement through the network of meaning potential, with each set of choices
constituting the environment for a further set .”
10
So, text has a wide definition in the context that it is used. It is an important part of language in which text is used
to derive a meaning. Many reading theorists, linguists, and specialists analysis defined text on
their own way. Text can be defined as a verbal or non-verbal record of communication. A
s Brown Yule stated in their book, “a text is a verbal record of communicative event
.”
11
It means that text is restricted only for verbal form. In contrast, Wallace in Hedgcock and Ferris
’s book mentioned that “a text is the physical manifestations of language which include not only orthographic symbols
such as letters of the alphabet or characters but also non verbal elements such as capitalization, punctuation, paragraphing, and format.”
12
It shows that text is not only verbal form of language, it is also a form of symbols in a language such as
letters or characters which can construct a meaning to convey. From the definition above, it can be concluded that text is a record of
verbal or non- verbal in communication. In other words, it is not only in the form of written, but also it can be in the spoken form.
2. Genre of Reading Text
There are some definitions proposed by some linguists about the term of genre. And all of those definitions related to the text which have different
characteristic. According to Anne Freadman, First, genre is an organizing concept for our cultural practices; second, any
field of genres constitutes a network of contrasts according to a variety of parameters; third, genre is place occasion, function, behavior and interactional
structures: it is very rarely useful to think of it as a kind of ’text’; fourth,
10
Ibid ,…
11
Gillian Brown George Yule, Discourse Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p.190
12
John S. Hedgcock Diana R. Ferris, Teaching Readers of English, New York: Routledge, 2009, p.79
cultural competence involves knowing the appropriateness principle for any genre, knowing the kind of margin you have with it, being able to vary it,
knowing how to shift from one to another and how many factors would be involved in any such shift.
13
Genre is really important in reading skill. It will affect the student’s
comprehension in reading skill because it provides the feature of a text to help the student identify a text. Understanding genre means that the student is easier to
interpret a text because each genre has different social function, generic structure, and linguistic feature. This characteristic is really useful for a reader to
understanding a text because it explains how text is organized. According to Alderson that having knowledge about organized text is as same as having
knowledge about how the information is signaled and how changes of content might be marked, and it facilitates the reader to read.
14
In the School-Based Curriculum of Junior High School, there are some genres are mentioned here, those are: procedure, descriptive, recount, narrative,
and report.
15
Those genres are taught at different level at Junior High School. Students in every level learn only three kinds of genre. For instance, the third
grade of Junior High School must learn three genres such as procedure, report, and narrative.
Here are the explanation about those genres which are learned in Junior High School, those genres are procedure, descriptive, recount, narrative, and
report. a. Procedure text
Procedure text is a text that tells the reader or listener how to do something. The social function of this text could be to provide instructions for
making something, doing something or getting somewhere. The structure that
13
Peter Knapp Megan Watkins, Genre, Text, Grammar: Technologies for Teaching and Assessing Writing, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005, p. 21
14
J. Charles Alderson, Assessing Reading, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.39-40
15
BSNP, Standar Kompetensi dan Kompetensi Dasar SMPMTS, Jakarta: Puskur, 2006, p. 291-296
