Word Comprehension Reading Comprehension Achievement

2.2.1 Word Comprehension

Word comprehension is an ability to comprehend a word as the smallest unit of a text. It is very important for the students to understand the meaning of a word in order to get a main idea of a sentence in a text. In line with this idea, Wood 1991:125 argues that the essential result of reading is to get meaning of the whole text by understanding the smallest units of meaning. It can be said that if the students do not know the meaning of the words they are reading, they will get nothing from the text. The same opinion is also declared by Grellet 1996:15 in his book that the inability to comprehend the meaning of unfamiliar words often causes hopelessness in students when they are faced with a new text. Thus, it will become a problem if the students cannot understand the word meaning of a text. Doff 1988:68 in Paran 1996 notes that when we read for meaning, we do not need to read every letter of every word, nor even every word in each sentence. In fact, it might be very difficult for the students to comprehend words, especially for some unfamiliar words. However, by looking at the other words or the context of the words in the sentence of a text, the students can guess the meaning of the unfamiliar words without looking them up in a dictionary. The examples of reading comprehension components, namely word, sentence, paragraph, and text comprehension will be taken from a text entitled “The Hermit”. The whole text is showed in the part under subtopic text comprehension. Here, for the example of word comprehension, the researcher only takes one paragraph paragraph 4 of the text. In this paragraph, there is a word that will be used to be analyzed. The example is as follows: ………. Before the boatman went away, he said, “These seeds will grow and give you everlasting harvest if you work very hard. If you are tired of the work, the “paddy” plants will turn into weeds.” Adapted from http:bos-sulap.blogspot.co.id201009contoh-narrative-text- hermit.html Question : the word “harvest” is similar to… a. rise b. start c. origin d. begin e. crop Answer : e. crop The word “harvest” might be an unfamiliar word for the students, since the word “harvest” is used in agriculture field. However, by looking at the context of the text, the students can imagine what is meant by the word “harvest”. Furthermore, by looking at the words stated before and after the word “harvest“, such as paddy, seeds, plants, and grow, the students will get the meaning of the word easier. In this case, the suitable synonym for the word “harvest” is crop.

2.2.2 Sentence Comprehension