The Understanding of Reading Comprehension

In general, Harmer divided purposes or reasons for reading, as receptive skill, in two general categories. They are instrumental and pleasurable categories. 10 1. Instrumental Category It means that reading and listening as receptive skill take place because the readers want to achieve a particular objective. For example, someone read a road sign to know where to go or read an instruction in a machine to know how to operate it. For students, reading is useful for language acquisition, the more they read the more they get at it. It gives the students positive effect on their vocabulary knowledge on spelling and on their writing. 11 Furthermore, Grabe and Stoller proposed some purpose of reading: to search for simple information, skim quickly, learn from texts, to get general information, and to integrate information, write and critique texts. 12 2. Pleasurable Category Another reason why people read is for pleasure. They want to entertain themselves by reading a novel or short story. Hence, some people read magazine or newspaper to spend their time. Others read poetry or a comic to get relaxed. It can be concluded that the general purposes of reading are for instrumental and pleasurable categories. Some people read because they want to get information or to learn something from the texts and some other want to entertain themselves by reading such as reading a novel, comic or newspaper. 10 Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching, Third Edition, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2001, p. 200. 11 Jeremy Harmer, How to Teach English New Addition, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2007, p. 99. 12 William Grabe and Fredricka L. Stoller, Teaching and Researching Reading, Edinburgh: Pearson Education, 2002, p. 13.

d. The Types of Reading

According to Harmer, the reader reads a text generally for pleasure and general understanding improvement. Based on the purpose above, there are two types of reading as intensive reading and extensive reading. 13 1. Intensive Reading Intensive reading is reading of shorter texts to get specific information. Intensive study of reading texts can be a means of increasing learners’ knowledge of language features and their control of reading strategies that can improve their comprehension skill. 14 The term intensive reading, on the other hand, refers to the detailed focus on the construction of reading texts which take place usually in classroom. 15 In order to get students reading in the class, intensive reading needs teacher’s role in the class. The teacher chooses the genre and topic of the text may be determined by the specific purpose that the students are studying for such as for business or science. 16 There are the roles when the teacher asking the students to read intensively: organize purpose of reading by giving clear instructions how to read, observe the students’ progress of reading, giving feedback organizer to check whether they have completed the task successfully, and prompt students to notice the language features in the text. 17 From the explanation above, intensive reading is reading activities that take place in the classroom. The genre of the text is chose by the teacher based on the learning purpose. 13 Harmer, op. cit., 2001, p. 210. 14 I. S. P. Nation, Teaching ESLEFL Reading and Writing, New York: Routledge, 2009, p. 25. 15 Harmer, op. cit., 2007, pp. 99-100. 16 Ibid. 17 Harmer, op. cit., 2001, p. 213.