knowledge, concept, skills, and understanding they need to become happy and contributing members of the society.
5. Scanning
Particular reading techniques are needed not only to overcome student difficulties, but also to improve their reading abilities. Those
techniques are skimming and scanning. Scanning is the technique for quickly finding specific information in a text while ignoring its broader
meaning, it searches for keywords or ideas in a written text Brown, 2001 : 308. Meanwhile, skimming is a technique in looking over a text to get a
quick idea of the gist of a text Harmer, 2001. By encouraging the students to glance their eyes and take a short look at a text and searching
for specific piece of information, it will help them get the general understanding and detail information of the text itself Harmer, 2001.
Moreover, Anderson et al. 1969: 62 states that scanning skills is using when we want to collect the main ideas from a text quickly, and
efficiently. By using scanning skills, the efficiency is occurred. Its aim are getting the work and doing it with minimum wastage of resources 1969:
4. On the other words, by scanning skills, students can answer the questions in the shortest period of time and will not wasting time.
Students only read and take a piece of information that needed. Scanning skills can also define as a technique to locate specific
items of information, as Lunzer and Gardner cited in Davis, 1995: 137
believes that scanning ―is a kind of skimming to see if a particular points is present in the text or to locate it‖. This theory indicates that scanning
and skimming have the same purposes; both of them only take the specific information of text.
From the definition above, scanning and reading purpose have a relation. Reading by scanning the local text can be save the time, because
it only needs a shortest period of time to take the specific information from the local text. On the other words, reading purpose will be
accomplished. So, the purpose of scanning is to extract specific information without reading the whole local text.
Based on that explanation, therefore, scanning technique is required in helping students in comprehending a text, getting detailed
information and other reading tasks. Scanning technique is also intended to help students in overcome the junior high school curriculum task in
Indonesia, which is to understand the meaning of short functional text and simple essay in the form of report, narrative and descriptive text in the
context of everyday situation and also to access knowledge KTSP, 2005.
Learning Reading Using Scanning
The main purpose for reading is to comprehend the ideas in the materials. Without comprehension, reading would be empty and
meaningless Casper et all: 1988. Students are usually capable to
read the words, but face much difficulty in expressing their comprehension.
In addition, Davis 1995: 133 defines reading into five purposes, which are reading for pleasure, for general impression, for
organizing reading and study, for learning content or procedures, and the last for language learning. Reading for general impression is
meant to gain an idea of t he writer‘ point of view and overall
impression of the ‗tone‘ of a text. Reading for organizing reading and study is to identify the important content of a text, answer the specific
questions, and decide which section of a text to start studying. Reading for learning content or procedures means that it is aimed to
gain an understanding of new concepts, to learn certain facts from a text and to follow instructions. Reading for language learning means
that it is aimed to ‗translate‘ the text, literally, to learn new vocabulary, to identify ‗useful‘ structures, to use the text as a model
for writing, and to practice pronunciation.
B. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
