Nature of Reading and Comprehension
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passage with the reader’s own knowledge and values. Lastly, appreciative comprehension deals with reading in order to gain an emotional or other kinds
of valued responses from the passage. Grabe 2009 explains further regarding the types of reading.
According to him, there are six major purposes for reading. They are described as follows:
1. Reading to search for information scanning and skimming
People often locate some specific information. In the searching process, they inevitably engage in scanning and skimming. These
scanning and skimming make people speedy readers because these kinds of reading are conducted at a rapid speed. The speed means
words amount that can be read in a minute by the readers. Both scanning and skimming terms are usually used interchangeably
because both of them need a very high speed in reading. Scanning refers to identifying a specific fact or a piece of information lies in
some particular texts. Meanwhile skimming tends to an activity of getting the general overview or the main ideas of texts rapidly.
Thus, readers who do skimming catch the overview points of a text vast but not in detail.
2. Reading for quick understanding skimming
As explained previously, skimming is a high speed reading for locating the main ideas or the general overview of texts. It is
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simply used when readers want to catch a glimpse of a particular text’s content. There are some follow-up actions that are affected
by skimming. These follow-up actions are often called as superordinate purposes. Through skimming readers can decide to
continue reading or to let it go. Besides, readers sometimes encounter a difficult level text. Skimming helps readers predict
where the text will lead them and what they need to know to understand it. Readers also skim when dealing with many texts and
need to decide which text to focus more attention on. Moreover, readers skim when they are under intense time pressure and need
to reach some decision about the usefulness of information in a text Grabe, 2009.
3. Reading to learn
This type of reading is often implemented in academic and professional settings. Readers read to learn because they find the
information provided in some particular texts, often textbooks, is so important that it may be needed by them in the future. Reading
to learn involves more processing demands on the readers on the grounds that they have to remember the main ideas and the
supporting ideas of the texts. Furthermore, reading to learn expects the readers can recall the information they gain from the texts. In
contrast with skimming and scanning, high speed is not needed in
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reading to learn. It carries out at a slower speed that indicates readers’ seriousness when reading. Reading to learn usually takes
shorter text segments at any one time. Linderholm and van den Broek 2002 explain that the effective readers organize the
content within a frame that is coherent and accurate with respect to the information presented in the text. In addition, prior knowledge
of the readers influences the process of reading to learn due to they should connect the content of the texts to the information of their
prior knowledge. 4.
Reading to integrate information Reading to integrate information requires that the readers
synthesize and learn information from multiple texts or bring together information from different parts of a long text, such as a
long and complex chapter of a textbook. This type of reading is higher than reading to learn because it does not merely build an
organizing frame of information from a text, but also involves multiple texts in which readers have to decide, select, prioritize,
highlight, and create a coherent organizational information from those multiple texts. The key differences from reading to learn are
that the readers typically must evaluate information and create their own organizational structure rather than follow an
organizational structure provided by one of the texts.