The General Concept of Reading

e. To know when or where something will take place or what is available. f. To know what is happening or has happened as reported in newspapers, magazines, reports. g. For enjoyment or excitement”. 9 In real life, our reading purposes constantly vary and therefore, when devising exercises, we should vary the questions and the activities according to the type of text studied and purpose in reading it. And it prevents students to develop their reading strategies adapted to the true purposes of reading. There are some purposes of reading which is declared by Francoise Grellet who stated that ” there are two main reason for reading; reading for pleasure and reading for informationin order to find out something or in order to do something with the information you get ”. 10 People read for many purposes. Some of them read for pleasure and some read for getting information in which different purposes gain different technique used. Christine Nuttall stated that” whatever your reasons for reading excluding any reading for language learning, it is not very likely that you were interested in the pronunciation of what you read, and even less likely that you were interested in the grammatical structures used. You read because you wanted to get something from the writing”. 11 This statement also emphasizes on no matter the reader’s technique used in reading, it aims to convey the message of the text. According to William Grabe and Frederica L. Stoller ,” the purposes of reading are: a. Reading to search for simple information. b. Reading to learn from texts. c. Reading to integrate information, write and critique texts. d. Reading for general comprehension”. 12 9 David Nunan, Designing Task for The Communicative Classroom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. P.34. 10 Francoise Grellet, Developing reading Skills: A Practical Guide to Reading Comprehension Exercises, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986,p.4. 11 Christine Nuttall, Loc Cit. 12 Nida Husna, Step by Step to Reading Skills, Jakarta: UIN Jakarta, 2005,p. 9-10. Another statement from Jeremy Harmer.” the purposes of reading divided into some areas: a. Predictive skills b. Extracting specific information c. Getting the general picture d. Extracting detailed information e. Recognizing function and discourse patterns f. Deducing meaning from context”. 13 Generally, based on the purposes above is to understand or to comprehend the reading passage from the printed text. Whether there is an action or not after reading a text. Related to the purpose of reading itself, it embraces a wide variety of tasks, skills, activities, and mental process. For example, when reading to get specific information, a reader needs to consider the accuracy of words meaning in order to comprehend the information of the text. Based on all statements above, the general purposes of reading is to be able to use any techniques of reading activity and to reach the meaning or message toward kind of reading. According to the purpose of reading classified by Francoise Grellet , “there are main ways of reading are as follows: a. Skimming Skimming is reading quickly running one’s eyes over a text to get the gisit of it. b. Scanning Scanning is reading quickly going through a text to find a particular piece of information. c. Extensive reading Extensive reading is reading using longer texts, usually for one’s own pleasure. This is a fluency activity, mainly involving global understanding. d. Intensive reading 13 Jeremy harmer, The Practice of English language Teaching,New York: Longman, 1983, p.183-184.