5 Distinguishing between literal and implied meanings 6 Detecting culturally specific references and interpreting them in a context of
the appropriate cultural schemata 7 Developing and using a battery of reading strategies such as scanning and
skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning of words from context, and activating schemata for the interpretation of texts
In brief, it is difficult for a reader to read, know, and comprehend an English text if he or she does not master those micro-skills and macro-skills of reading. Although they
may be able to know words and their meanings, it does not guarantee that they comprehend the texts well. Therefore, related to the teaching and learning reading in a
classroom, a teacher should be able to guide and help the students to acquire those micro- skills and macro-skills by applying appropriate techniques. By acquiring those sub-skills
of reading, they will be able to understand texts given by their teacher easily.
d. The importance of Reading
As stated before in the background of the study, reading is one of the fundamental skills of English. It is because reading has an important role for people in their daily life.
People need to elevate their knowledge by taking any information they can get from any resources around them. It can be done through reading; and consciously or not, people do
reading everyday. Grabe 2009:5 presents two types of settings why reading cannot be separated from people’s daily life and why it becomes important. The first is informal
setting that is related to informal situations such as when people are having spare time to spend. They read magazines, newspapers, job information, or even shopping brochures.
Though they may read those kinds of written languages just for fun, they still get information to develop their knowledge. This setting implies the importance of reading
for seeking pleasure. The second is formal setting in which it is related to academic contexts. In the academic contexts, people do reading in order to make them become
educated people. They need to deal with much more serious texts in which they need to develop the higher-order of thinking in reading or it can be called reading comprehension
ability.
According to Harmer 2001:200, there are two reasons why reading is important. He divides the reasons into two categories: instrumental and pleasurable. The pleasurable
reason is similar to Grabe’s opinion in which a reading activity is seen as something that can give pleasures to the readers. The instrumental reason is related to the readers’ aim or
purpose. He states that by reading, the readers can achieve their goals. For instance, they read science books in order to be able to pass a test or an exam. In other words, reading
can be a stepping stone for them to reach what they want to achieve. In brief, it can be stated that reading becomes important for people in the modern
era and students in the academic contexts. There are two main reasons why reading cannot be separated in life. The first, by reading people can find pleasures. They will be
able to enjoy the content of the texts and they do not need to think deeply. The second, by reading they can develop, improve their life skills and elevate their knowledge. By having
well knowledge of reading, they can achieve their goals or aims such as passing an
examination.
e. Types of Reading
According to Brown 2004:189, in the case of reading, variety of performance is derived more from the multiplicity of types of texts than from the variety of overt types of
performance. Several types of reading performance are typically identified, and these will serve as organizers of various assessment tasks.
1. Perceptive: In keeping with the set of categories specified for listening comprehension, similar specifications are offered here, except with some differing
terminology to capture the uniqueness of reading. Perceptive reading tasks involve attending to the component of larger stretches of discourse: letters, words,
punctuation, and other graph emic symbols. Bottom-up 2.
Selective: In order to ascertain one’s reading recognition of lexical, grammatical or discourse features of language within a very short stretch of language, certain typical
