text to their knowledge of the world when they are reading Spratt, Pulverness, and Williams, 2005: 21. Then, reading is an interaction
between the writer and the reader by using text which increases the readers’ knowledge to make sense of text Ruddle, 2005: 30. In
addition, reading is a complex, interactive process. Reading involves a text, a reader and a social context in which reading takes place Celce-
Murcia, 2001: 154. Moreover, reading is the process of receiving and interpreting information represented in language form using the text
Urquhart Weir, 1988, in Grabe, 2009:14.
c. Definition of Reading Skills
Reading skills represent linguistic processing abilities that are relatively automatic in their use and their combinations e.g., word
recognition, syntactic processing Grabe and Stoller, 2002: 15.
d. Reading Prosesses
Grabe and Stoller 2002: 20 propose a list of reading processes, they are as shown in the table below:
Table 2.2. Reading Processes Grabe and Stoller, 2002
Lower-level prosesses Higher-level prosesses
Lexical access Text model of comprehension
Syntactic parsing Situation model of reader
interpretation Semantic proposition formation Background knowledge use
and inferencing Working memory activation
Executive control process
Grabe and Stoller 2002: 20 state: The lower-level processes represent the more automatic linguistic
processes and are typically viewed as more skills orientated. The higher-level processes generally represent comprehension
processes that make much more use of readers’ background knowledge and inferencing skills.
e. Reading Subskills
As the other three language skills, reading also has subskills. Spratt, et.al 2005: 22 proposes three subskills in reading, they are shown as
follows: 1.
Reading for specific information or scanning: in this subskill we only read the text to find a specific piece of information that we
need. We do not need to read the whole text. 2.
Reading for gist or skimming: in this subskill we read the text quickly to get the general idea of what it is about.
3. Reading for detail: in this subskill we read the whole text to get the
meaning and information of all the words.
f. Intensive and Extensive Reading
Reading can be divided into intensive and extensive reading Brown, 2007: 371, they are described as below:
1. Intensive reading is usually a classroom-oriented activity in which
students focus on the linguistic or semantic details of a passage. It focuses on the grammatical forms, discourse markers, and other
structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning, implications, rethorical relationships, etc.
2. Extensive reading is carried out to achieve a general understanding
of longer text book, long article, essay, etc.. Most extensive reading is performed outside of class time.
g. Principles for Teaching Reading Skills
