Purpose of Reading Reading Competence

commit to user 17 reader to anticipate text information, select key information, organize and mentally summarize information, monitor comprehension, repair comprehension breakdowns, and match comprehension output to reader goals Grabe, 2009: 15. The complex processes of reading which defined as the reading itself are summarized by William Grabe in ten kinds of processes. Grabe 2009: 14 stated that reading is understood as a complex combination of processes. These processes those are represented the definition of reading as follows: 1 A rapid process, 2 An efficient process, 3 A comprehending process, 4 An interactive process, 5 A strategic process, 6 A flexible process, 7 A purposeful process, 8 An evaluative process, 9 A learning process, and 10 A linguistic process.

2. Purpose of Reading

In reading, a reader must have a purpose or a goal. Grabe and Stoller 2002: 11 state, “We read partly for information, but we also read with a goal ….” Even though the purpose can be varied from one reader to another which differ the reader’s skill and strategy of one reader to another in reading the same reading text, it can commonly be predicted into some purposes of reading. According to Grabe and Stoller 2002: 9, “A reader has several possible purposes for reading, and each purpose emphasizes a somewhat different combination of skills and strategies.” The following are the purposes of reading according to Grabe and Stoller 2002: 13-14. commit to user 18 1 Reading to search for simple information 2 Reading to skim quickly 3 Reading to learn from texts 4 Reading to integrate information 5 Reading to write or search for information needed for writing 6 Reading to critique texts 7 Reading for general comprehension It is used so often in reading tasks that it is probably best seen as a type of reading ability. In reading to search, we typically scan the text for a specific piece of information or a specific word. Similarly, reading to skim i.e. sampling segments of the text for a general understanding is a common part of many reading tasks and a useful skill in its own right. It involves, in essence, a combination of strategies for guessing where important information might be in the text, and then using basic reading comprehension skills on those segments of the text until a general idea is formed. Reading to learn from text requires abilities to: 1 remember main ideas as well as a number of details that elaborate the main and supporting ideas in the text 2 recognize and build rhetorical frames that organize the information in the text 3 link the text to the reader’s knowledge base Both reading to write and reading to critique texts may be task variants of reading to integrate information. Both require abilities to compose, select and critique information from a text. Both purposes represent common academic tasks commit to user 19 that call upon the reading abilities needed to integrate information Enright, et al., 2000; Perfetti, Rouet and Britt, 1999 Reading for general comprehension, when accomplished by a skilled fluent reader, requires very rapid and automatic processing of words, strong skills in forming a general meaning representation of main ideas, and efficient coordination of many process under very limited time constraints.

3. Skills for Reading Competence