not only sort and summarize the most important ideas from within single texts, but also between texts in order to synthesize ideas
e. Monitoring On difficult parts of the text, strong readers tend to be cautious in their
reading and use more time. Then, during and after reading in monitoring their process of making meaning, these readers possess the metacognitive
ability to mentally summarize chunks of the text. They are more conscious of their level of understanding or lack of understanding and can maneuver
between skimming, scanning, and slow, careful reading skillfully. Skillfully readers are not only can adjust their reading rate, but also adjust their use of
reading strategies in order to better understand a text. f. Repairing
When discovering that the meaning has been lost, good readers know what to do. Based on Garner who was stated by Maya and Elizabeth on their
book, skilled readers select an appropriate mental tool or strategy to repair confusion
by using what are called “fix-up” strategies –such as rereading, skipping ahead, or searching for context clues. Furthermore, they are also
more flexible in their use of strategies, displaying an ability to change strategies in order to meet different reading situations.
15
C. Grammar Mastery and Reading Comprehension
Grammar is a set of rules of a language. Every language has its own grammar. Based on Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, grammar deals with
the sentences’ form and the smaller units, such as clauses, phrases, and words.
16
It means, by mastering grammar it will ease understanding a new word, phrase, clause,
or even a sentence due to the form of sentence and the smaller units are based on the
15
Maya B. Eagleton and Elizabeth Dobler, Reading the Web: Strategies for Internet Inquiry, New York: The Guilford Press, 2007, p. 36-40.
16
Huddleston and Pullum, op. cit., p. 1.
grammar rules. By mastering grammar of target language, especially English, it will be helpful in supporting the language student process in which in spoken or written
language, in this case is reading comprehension. In addition, in order to
understanding information or story, the reader should have knowledge about the sentence structure. In this case, in English, the readers who have mastered many
vocabularies and have knowledge about English sentence structure, they will get the idea of the information or story easily due to they know the meaning of vocabulary
based on the sentence structure. Furthermore, English vocabulary have many meaning based on the function of the word in a sentence. Moreover, it is important
having knowledge of sentence structure or grammar.
In second language reading research, Alderson points to the significance of a particular syntactic structures knowledge or the ability to process them to some
aspects of second-language reading and the ability to parse sentences into their accurate syntactic structure emerges to be an important element in understanding text
for him.
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Following Nassaji, any understanding of reading texts and knowing the utterance need close attention to a numeral of factors; one fundamental factor of
which is the knowledge of grammar.
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It can be concluded that grammar mastery has been the important part in getting the understanding of a text due to its knowledge
about the sentence structure which is essential in comprehending a text.
D. The Relevant Study
There are three studies that are related to this study. Those are the relationship between grammatical knowledge and the ability to guess word meaning:
the case of Iranian EFL students with upper intermediate level of proficiency written by Ranjbar, a correlation between grammar achievement and reading comprehension
17
Dongbo Zhang, Vocabulary and Grammar Knowledge in Second Language Reading Comprehension: A Structural Equation Modeling Study, The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 96, No.
4, 2012, p. 560.
18
Mehnoosh Ranjbar, The Relationship between Grammatical Knowledge and the Ability to Guess Word Meaning: The Case of Iranian EFL Learners with Upper Intermediate Level of Proficiency,
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 2, No. 6, 2012, p. 1305.
