The General Concept of Reading Comprehension

2.2 Review of the Theoretical Background

2.2.1 The General Concept of Reading Comprehension

Nunan 1989:33 says that it is important to bear in mind that reading is not an invariant skill, that there are different types of reading skills which correspond to the many different purposes we have for reading. So, in a classroom, in students’ reading activities, the writer is sure that they have many purposes, among others are to graduate from their studies whatever their purposes are. In order to achieve goals, the comprehension ability in reading is needed. The concept of analysis of reading comprehension could be bottom-up approach; reading is reviewed as a process of decoding written symbols, working from smaller units individual letters to large one words, clauses, and sentences. Nunan 1989:33 says that more recent research indicates that both bottom-up decoding strategies and top-down strategies may be used in learning to read, and that efficient reading may be require the integrative of bottom-up and top-down strategies. Nuttal 1983:3 says that we read because we want to get something from the writing faces, ideas, enjoyments, even feelings of family community from letter; whatever it is, we want to get messages that the writer has expressed. Comprehension is frequently mentioned in cognitive and educational psychology, as well as, of course, the pedagogical literature Weir and Urquart , 1998:84. Reading comprehension is the process of understanding and constructing meaning from a piece of text. Reading with comprehension means understanding what has been read. Reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of writing. Proficient reading depends on the ability to recognize words quickly and effortlessly. If word recognition is difficult, students use too much of their processing capacity to read individual words, which interferes with their ability to comprehend what is read. Reading comprehension, then, would be the capacity to perceive and understand the meanings communicated by texts. The ability to access information and use reading skills to learn more about a specific topic is a skill that people use each day. Whether readers are trying to form fact-based opinions or they are simply seeking to broaden their horizons, the ability to gather main ideas and comprehend written information is essential. Reading comprehension also has some techniques, there are: 1. Scanning Scanning is searching that requires a reader to float over the material until he finds what he needs. It may involve looking for specific wordsphrases, figurespercentages, names, dates of particular events or specific items in and index. 2. Skimming Skimming is a technique used to look for the “gist” of what the author said without a lot of detail reading skills for college students, p. 147. Skimming gives readers advantage of being able to predict the purpose of the passage, the main topic, or message, and possibly some of the developing or supporting ideas. 3. Extensive reading Extensive reading is reading longer text, usually for one’s own pleasure. It is used or obtains a general understanding of subject and includes reading longer texts for pleasure as well as business books. It is use extensive reading skills to improve your general knowledge of business procedures. 4. Intensive reading Intensive reading is reading short text to extract specific information. It is used on shorter text in order to extract specific information. It includes very close accurate reading for detail. It is use intensive reading skill to grasp the detail of the specific situation. Based on the explanation above, it could be stated that comprehension can be the part of communication between the reader and the author. The author must have the simple idea from his brain into the writer form, and the reader read the printed words and concludes the idea. The technique of reading used in this study is scanning and skimming. Both of are important technique which must be mastered by students of senior highschool. By mastering these techniques, they will be able to comprehend the text well.

2.2.2 The Concept of Language Testing