Limitation of the Problems

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CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

A. Theoretical Description 1. Reading

a. Nature of Reading and Comprehension

Among the four macro-skills of English namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing, reading comes in the third order and is included as one of the receptive skills besides listening. Reading is concerned with an activity responding to a text by understanding the meaning of the sentences composing the text. Although it is considered as a receptive skill, reading involves brain activeness of the readers in the process of understanding a text. Because of that, reading is definitely cannot be separated with what is called as comprehension. Richards and Schmidt 2002 assume that reading is an activity of perceiving a written text in order to understand its contents that can be done silently silent reading. Understanding its contents leads to having a full comprehension about the text. Moreover, comprehending a text involves not only understanding the language of the text at a word level, a sentence level and a whole-text level. In reading, as readers read a text, they also manage to comprehend it by understanding word by word meaning and constructing it 10 into a whole sentence or text meaning. Brown 2007 adds that readers construct meaning by bringing information, knowledge, emotion, experience, and culture to the printed word. It is widely known as schema theory where in an attempt to comprehend a text, readers use a set of schemata or their current knowledge about the world while they are reading. Those schemata are a compilation of information, knowledge, emotion, experience, and culture that readers already have. Moreover, Johnson 2008 states that reading is the practice of using texts to create meaning. He marks the two keywords: creating and meaning. According to him, reading takes place when there is meaning being created. Reading is also a constantly developing skill as it will get better by practicing a lot. Reading in fact cannot be separated from visual and nonvisual aspects on the grounds that reading integrates visual and nonvisual information. During the act of reading, the visual information found on the page is combined with the nonvisual information contained in one’s insights to create meaning. Furthermore, Johnson 2008 gives an addition that reading is also the act of linking one idea to another because the most important part of reading is connecting ideas together to create a sensible whole. Grabe 2009 states that reading is not merely a common activity, it is rather a skill with various purposes. The purposes of reading accordingly vary.