such as interpretation, application to other contexts, criticism, or evaluation.
30
From the definitions given by linguists above, the writer concluded that reading is a process of getting meaning. Reading is not just process of decoding,
deciphering, identifying the words but it is a process of getting meaning from the messages or written text and it is a process of transferring the meaning from the
writer to the reader.
2. The Purposes of Reading
In the real life, people read and listen to the language because they want to know and grasp the information in written text and because they have a purpose
for doing so. According to Rivers and Tempely, they list the following examples of the reason that students may need or want to read because they need:
To obtain information for some purposes or because we are curious about some topic, to obtain instruction on how to perform some
task for our work or daily life, to keep in touch with friends by correspondence or to understand business letters, to know when o
where something will take place or what is available, to know what is happening or has happened as reported in newspaper, magazine,
reports, and for enjoyment or excitement.
31
From the explanation above, reading has some purposes to look for the information in many kinds of printed materials. In addition, reading for pleasure is
considered as for enjoyment activities. In this sense, the readers read the text to get the knowledge. It means that they learn something from a text. Actually, it
needs abilities to remember the main idea, recognize and build rhetorical in the text, and correlate the prior knowledge to the text that has been read.
Another linguist such as Jeremy Harmer, he divided the reasons why people like to read and to listen. Those are categorized into two broad areas: First
is, Instrumental; where people want to get some clear aim.
32
It means that a large amount of the reader integrate all the information that be found in the text to get
30
Penny Ur, A Course in Language Teaching; Practice and Theory, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 150.
31
Jo McDonough and Christopher Shaw, Material and Method in ELT; Teacher’s Guide, Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1993, pp. 102 —103.
32
Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching, 1990 p. 200.
the reader‟s goal, it is to get the information or the pleasure. Meanwhile, reading to write and reading to critique texts is the ability to build and critique information
from text, and they represent common academic tasks that call upon the reading abilities needed to integrate information.
Second, as a pleasurable; thus people read magazines or spend hours buried in the Sunday paper.
33
Its assumption is in line with Francoise who also stated that, “there are two main reasons of reading: reading for pleasure and
reading for information in order to find out something or in order to do something with information you got”.
34
Meanwhile Larry A. Harris figured out the purposes of reading as follows: Just as the reader must adapt his reading to meet various purposes,
he must also adjust his reading rate. The answer to a specific question concerning supporting detail will require the reader to
skim for the right section and then read that section carefully for the correct answer. Following directions calls for slow, careful
reading, as does reading an account of a scientific experiment. Recreational reading and newspaper reading often call for a rapid
rate, but usually not as fast as skimming.
35
Based on that, it is a common reading that usually held by the reader, they usually use scanning technique in reading to search for simple information such as
looking for the time, name, place, etc. Not only scanning, but also skimming is used to search the information for instance, getting the writ
er‟s purpose of the passage. Shortly, 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. In addition, it is essential that reading for general comprehension
is the main goal of reading where most of the reader read the text to get general comprehension of it. They do not need to analyze the structure or to know the
exact meaning of the words only get what the message of the writer. Moreover, the different purposes of reading are also mentioned by William
Grabe and Federicka L. Stoller divided into seven purposes those are: reading to
33
Ibid. p. 201.33
34
Francoise Grellet, Developing Reading Skill: A Practical Guide to Reading Comprehension Exercise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 4.
35
Larry A. Harris, Reading Instruction; Diagnostic Teaching in the Classroom, New York: Richard C. Owen Publishers, 1990, p. 251.