CHAPTER II

LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter presents the result of reviewing of some theories that are relevant to

the problem. These reviews are expected to serve important background

information to support the study and the discussion of findings. The literature

review consists about reading, reading comprehension, genres of the text, RAP

strategy, and previous study.

A. Theoretical Review

1. Reading

a. The Nature of Reading

There are four skills in English language known by common people

such as speaking, listening, reading and writing. All of those skills

exactly have tight relation and all of them are very important to be

mastered. Absolutely, each skill has purpose and function in English.

The term of reading may not strange in our life; everywhere we can

get information from reading, even less in school every day we can’t

separate with these activities. Teacher always asks the student to read

and understand the text. Rarely, most of them do not kn ow what

reading means.

Reading is a complex conscious and unconscious mental process in

which the reader uses a variety of strategies to reconstruct the meaning

8
 9

that the author is assumed to have intended, based on data from the

text and from the reader’s prior knowledge (Mikulecky, 2011 : 5).

Based on Ontario Ministry of Education (2008:3) states reading is

the active process of understanding print and graphic text. Reading is a

thinking process. Effective readers know that when they read, what

they read is supposed to make sense. They monitor their

understanding, and when they lose the meaning of what they are

reading, they often unconsciously select and use a reading strategy

(such as rereading or asking questions) that will help them reconnect

with the meaning of the text. In addition, Cahyono (2011:57) said that

reading is a means of communicating information between the writer

and the reader. The reader tries to understand ideas that the writer has

put in print.

Harmer (2007:99) states that reading is useful for language

acquisition. Provided that students more or less understand what they

read, the more they read. Reading also has a positive effect on

student’s vocabulary knowledge, on their spelling or on their writing.

Reading consist two related processes: word recognition and

comprehension. Word recognition refers to the process of perceiving

how written symbols correspond to one’s spoken language.

Meanwhile, comprehension is the process of making sense words,

sentences and connected texts. According to Nunan (2003:68) reading

is a fluent process of readers combining information from a text and

 10

their own background knowledge to build meaning. The goal of

reading is comprehension.

It could be inferred that reading is a way in interpreting the

authors’ point of view in the form of text. The mechanical skills and

comprehension skills are required in interpreting the information.

b. Types of Reading Skills

According Andrew Wright (1999:159) there are four easily identifiable

skills reading; skimming, scanning, intensive reading, and extensive

reading.

1) Skimming

Skimming is glancing rapidly through a text to determine it is

general content example: quickly glancing through an article to see

if it interest or not. Being able to look over material rapidly for

given purposes without reading every phrase is great asset for a

reader to possess. Skimming enables people to select content that

they want to read and to discard, which is inconsequential for their

purposes. Skimming permits people to again a general idea about

material when that is their purposes rather to read all material in

detail.

2) Scanning

Scanning is reading to locate specific information, example:

locating telephone number in directory. Being able to research

through material rapidly with given purpose in mind, in orders to

 11

find a specific fact or an answer to particular question plays a large

role in much of a youngster’s reading. Scanning enables people to

locate specific information without reading all material around it.

3) Intensive reading

In intensive reading, the reader tries to absorb all the information

given by the author. Example: reading dosage instruction for

medicine.

4) Extensive reading

The reader deals with longer text as a whole, which requires the

ability to understand the component parts and their contribution to

overall meaning.

Example: reading a newspaper article, short story, or novel.

Each kind of reading skills that has been explained above is used

for certain purpose. Each also requires different approach and

technique to achieve its goal. For example, skimming and scanning

techniques are usually used by readers when they read a reading

selection when take a reading test. By using techniques, they may

be able find the information they need without have to read the

reading passage and save their time.

 12

c. Models of reading

Barnett in Aebersold and Field (1997:1719) provides three main

models of reading as follows:

1) Bottom up theory

The readers construct the text form the smallest unit (letters to

words to phrases to sentences, etc.) and that process of constructing

the text from that small unit becomes so automatic that readers are

not aware of how it operates. Decoding is an earlier term for this

process.

2) Top down theory

Readers bring a great deal of knowledge, expectations,

assumptions, and questions to the text, and given a basic

understanding of vocabularies, they continue to read as long as the

text confirms their expectations (Goodman in Aebersold and Field,

1997:18)

3) The interactive school of theories

This process moves both bottomup and topdown, depending on the

type of text as well as on the reader’s background knowledge,

language proficiency level, motivation, strategy uses, and

culturally shaped beliefs about reading.

Text comprehension requires the simultaneous interaction of two

modes of information processing, bottomup and topdown. Silberstain

(1994: 7) states that when reader uses prior knowledge to make

 13

prediction about the data they will find in the text, they apply topdown

(knowledge based or conceptually driven) information processing.

d. Techniques in teaching Reading

Reading is viewed as an interactive process between language and

thought. There are three kinds of activities involved in relation to the

reading class activities: pre-reading activities, during/whilst reading

activities, and post-test reading activities (Cahyono, 2011:68).

1) Pre-reading activities

In pre-reading activities, activations is concerned with students

background knowledge, objectives of reading class, learning

activities, and motivating the students. In this stage, teachers try to

activate students’ schemata related to the topic of the text by

representing key words, asking questions related to the topic or

explaining briefly the contents of the text. Pre-reading is to

motivate students. Motivation in reading attracts student’s attention

to the text. The activities of pre-reading are activities aiming at

facilitating the students’ understanding about the reading text.

2) During/whilst reading activities

During reading activities are the activities that a reader does while

reading take places. To maximize reader interactions to a text,

readers should be guided during reading activities. In whilst

reading includes: (a) identifying the main idea, (b) finding details
 14

in a text, (c) following a sequence, (d) inferring from the text, and

(e) recognizing the discourse patterns.

3) Post reading activities

Post reading activities are the activities conducted by a reader after

reading. The activities are used to recheck reader understands on

the text topic being read. The activity of post reading can also be in

the forms of discussion. Students are asked to discuss the writer’s

ideas. This discussion can be in a group or whole class discussion.

The discussion may depend on the class size. If the class is big, it

will be better to have group discussion. If the class is small, it will

be better to have whole class discussion.

e. Testing Reading

Reading skill is a receptive skill. The task of language tester is to set

reading tasks which will result in behavior that will demonstrate their

successful completion.

According Isnawati (2012: 41), the technique that might be used to

test reading skills are:

1) Multiple choices

The test takers provide evidence of successful reading by marking

mark against one out of a number of alternatives. Its strengths and

weaknesses have been presented earlier.

Example: Tom was surprised when he met Ann at the party. He

was under the impression she had gone away from the locality. The
 15

last time he saw her was when Bob was teaching her to drive. A

few days afterword she had suddenly become ill. Tom surprised

when…….

A. Ann went away

B. He met Ann at the party
C. Bob was teaching Ann to drive
D. Ann suddenly becomes ill.

2) True / false

The test-takers should respond to a statement by choosing one of

the two choices, true or false. Example: put a circle round the letter

T if the statement is true and put a circle round the letter F if the

statement is false.

The sun rises in the west T F

Fish can fly, but birds can’t fly T F

Lagos is a large as London T F

3) Completion

The students are required to complete a sentence with a single

word.

Example: ……….was the man responsible for the first steam

railway.

4) Short answer

It is in the form of questions and requires the students to answer

briefly.
 16

Example: according to the author, what does the increase in

divorce rates show about people’s expectations of marriage?

5) Guided short answer

This is the alternative of short answer in which students are guided

to have the intended answer. They have to complete sentences

presented to them.

6) Summary cloze

A reading passage is summarized by the tester, and then gaps are

left in the summary for completion by test-takers. This is really the

extension of the guided short answer.

2. Reading Comprehension

a. Definition of Reading Comprehension

Mikulecky and Jeffries (2007: 74) state that comprehension is making

sense of what someone reads and connecting the ideas in the text to

what he already knows. It means readers can answer questions or

explaining texts because they have comprehension with connecting

each idea in the text.

Comprehension is the purpose of reading. Readers read texts to

get opinions or ideas. They try to understand what the text tells about.

After getting opinions or ideas, they can answer questions or make

prediction. Trabasso (2007: 29) says that the core of comprehension is

an ability to mentally interconnect different event in the text and form

 17

a coherent representation of what the text tells about. Understanding

what texts tell about means that readers get ideas from texts. In

addition, Trabasso (2007) also adds that the whole text consists of

words, sentences and paragraphs. It means that to comprehend the

content of the text, readers should comprehend words, sentences and

paragraphs in the text. Meanwhile, the basic good comprehension of

the content of the text is to understand the manner in which words are

fused into meaningful phrases, phrases into sentences, and sentences

into paragraphs. To sum up, comprehending a text refers to

understanding the context of the whole text, not only comprehending

words, sentences, but also paragraphs and the whole text. For general,

reading comprehension is, in its most obvious sense, the ability to

understand information in a text and interpret it appropriately. Reading

comprehension refers to reading with understanding. The

understanding the written text means extracting the information from it

as efficient as possible. Usually, in reading comprehension workbook,

the questions include reader recalling what he has read without further

recourse to the text. Reading is also defined as the process of

understanding meaning from a piece of text.

From some definitions above can be simply that reading

comprehension relates to understanding and thinking process to get the

message from the reading materials. In other words, the reader is

understanding all or most of the thoughts the author intended to

 18

communicate. Thus, reading comprehension involves other skills such

recalling word meaning, finding answer to questions answered

explicitly or in paraphrase, drawing inference from the context, and

grabbing idea in the content.

b. The Levels of Comprehension

Learning to read requires many building-block skills such as

phonological awareness and alphabet understanding. What is not as

widely acknowledged is that reading comprehension, an even more

complex process, also requires different building-block skills.

One model of reading comprehension proposes that

understanding what we read is really the result of 3 levels of skills

(Basaraba, 2013: 349). There are:

1) Literal comprehension

Answers the question Who, What, When, And Where with

information found directly in the text.

 Who was the girl who lost the glass slipper?

 What happened when the clock struck twelve?

2) Inferential comprehension

Build on facts in the text: Predictions, sequence and settings. Make

a conclusion about the text.

3) Evaluative comprehension

Judgement of text based on: Fact or opinion, validity,

appropriateness, comparison, cause and effect.

 19

c. Strategies for Reading Comprehension

According to Brown (2001:291), for most second language learners

who are already literate in a previous language, reading comprehension

is primarily a matter of developing appropriate, efficient

comprehension strategies. Some strategies are related to bottom-up

procedures, and others to enhance the top-down processes. The

strategies for reading comprehension are:

1) Identify the purpose in reading

Efficient reading consists of clearly identifying the purpose in

reading something. By doing so, the student know what they are

looking for. Whenever teaching a reading technique, make sure

students know their purpose in reading something.

2) Use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding (for

beginning level learners).

At the beginning levels of learning English, one of the difficulties

students’ encounters in learning to read is making the

correspondences between spoken and written English. In many

cases, learners have become acquainted with oral language and

have some difficulty learning English spelling conventions.

3) Use efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid

comprehension (for intermediate to advanced levels).

In teaching beginning level students, this particular strategy will

not apply because they are still struggling with the control of a
 20

limited vocabulary and grammatical patterns. Intermediate to

advanced level students need not be speed readers, but you can

help them to increase efficiency by teaching a few silent reading.

4) Skimming

Skimming is reading the text as a whole to get gist. Normally it is

performed quickly. Skimming gives the readers the advantage of

being able to predict the purpose of the passage, the main topic or

message, and possibly some of developing or supporting ideas.

5) Scanning

The purpose of scanning is to extract certain specific information

without reading through the whole text. Scanning requires readers

to search for a particular piece of information in a text. For

academic English, scanning is absolutely essential. In vocational or

general English, scanning is important in dealing with genres like

schedules, manuals, forms, etc.

6) Using semantic mapping or clustering

The strategy of semantic mapping, grouping ideas into meaningful

clusters, helps the reader to provide some order to the chaos.

Making such semantic maps can be done individually, but they

make for a productive group work technique as a student’s

collectively induce order and hierarchy to a passage.

 21

7) Guessing

Guessing is a strategy in reading that needs to be practiced. But,

this guessing is certainly not blind guessing. To avoid this, a

procedure needs to be set up.

8) Analyzing Vocabulary

One way for learners to make guessing pay off when they don’t

immediately recognize a word is to analyze it in terms of what they

know about it. Several techniques are useful here:

a) Look for prefixes (co-, inter-, un-, etc.) that may give clues.

b) Look for suffixes (-tion, -tive, -ally, etc.) that may indicate what

part of speech it is.

c) Look for grammatical contexts that may signal information

9) Distinguish between literal and implied meanings

This strategy requires the application of sophisticated topdown

processing skills. The fact that not all language can be interpreted

appropriately by attending to its literal, syntactic surface structure

makes special demands on readers. Implied meaning usually has to

be derived from processing pragmatic information, as in the

following examples: she is taking bath. This sentence may function

‘informing’ in the context of a questions: where is Merry? But it

may serve also to express an apology in the context of a responses

to a call inquiry: May I speak to Merry, Please.

 22

10) Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationship

Discourse markers are small words. There are many discourse

markers in English that signal relationship among ideas as

expresses through phrases, clauses, and sentences. A clear

comprehension of such markers can greatly enhance learners

reading efficiency. Example of discourse markers are firstly, next,

in addition, etc.

3. Kind of the text

According to Setiadi et al (2008:23), there are many genres of the text.

The genres of the text are: descriptive, recount, report, procedure, spoof,

news item, explanation, analytical exposition, hortatory exposition,

reviews, discussion and narrative text. Each the text above has different

meaning and function based each purpose of the text.

a. Narrative text

In this study, the researcher used narrative text. Narrative text is a text

focusing on specific participants. Its social function is to tell stories or

past events and to entertain the readers. Narrative text tells about what

is happening or what has happened. Narration is usually written in

chronological sequence. A narrative text gives an account of one or

more experiences. A narrative typically contains action, dialogue,

elaborate details and humors. According to Syafi’I, narrative is story

telling whether tells a true story or fiction. A narrative text gives an

account of one or more experiences. It tells a story to make a point or

 23

explain an idea or event (Syafi’i:2007). According to Sudarwati

(2005:72), the purpose of narrative is to amuse, to entertain and to deal

with actual vicarious experiences in different ways. It is true because

narrative text always content various message for the reader that may

entertain or give education to the reader. The writer can conclude that

narrative texts have several purposes such as: to entertain and to

educate the readers. Examples of the narrative text are legend, fairy

tales, science fiction, myths, and adventure stories.

Narrative also has the generic structure of the story. There are three

stages in narrative. They are as follows:

1) Orientation: the function of orientation is to set the scene,

creating a visual picture of the setting, atmosphere and time of

the story.

2) Complication: the function of complication is to revolve the

around the conflicts or problems that affect the setting, time or

characters.

3) Resolution: this part brings the series of events to a close and

revolves the main problem, challenge or situation.

Besides, the language features of narrative are:

1) Using process verb.

2) Using temporal conjunction.

3) Using simple past tense.

 24

4. The Concept of Read, Ask Question, and Put into Your Own Words

(RAP) Strategy

a. Definition of RAP Strategy

RAP is a strategy that can improve the reading comprehension of

students with and without disabilities and is extremely flexible. It can

be used for elementary, middle, and high school students across many

different content areas (Hagaman et al:2010). This strategy requires

students to engage in reading materials through questioning and

paraphrasing to increase their comprehension of the material. From the

questioning and paraphrasing, students process information for better

understanding of what they read.

RAP is strategy that can help the students how to understand and

remember what they have read. It means that this strategy is used to

help students understand and remember what they read and can help

learning process in the classroom. The RAP strategy is a reading

comprehension strategy that asks students to find main ideas and

details from each paragraph that is read and then to paraphrase orally

that information. Joseph Boyle and David Scanlon (2010: 207) state

that the purpose of this strategy is to help students become actively

engaged in reading through searching for main ideas and details in

paragraph and then transforming that information through

paraphrasing to make it personally meaningful. Courtney Blume

(2010:5) also states that the purpose of the RAP strategy is to aid
 25

reading comprehension by helping students find the most important

information in a given reading selection. Schumaker et al reported that

the students who were taught to use the RAP strategy increased their

recall of text from 48% to 84%. In addition, many researchers also

used the RAP strategy in teaching reading found that they get good

result of their research, for example: Ellis and Graves used the RAP

strategy with 47 middle school students with Learning Disabilities to

access its effects on students’ ability to find the main idea of stories.

Result of multiple-choice tests showed that compared to control

students, students given the RAP strategy could identify significantly

more main ideas from passages than control students.

b. The Advantages of RAP Strategy

1) Providing opportunity for individual work or collaborative effort.

2) Encouraging attention to detail and student engagement.

3) Taking little teacher preparation.

4) Being straight forward and easy to explain and understand.

c. The Disadvantages of RAP Strategy

RAP strategy also has disadvantages, as a good teacher we should to

minimize them, the disadvantages are:

1) Student difficult to conclude the main idea.

2) The teacher cannot give the student long text.

3) Student needs to stop after each paragraph to state the main ideas.
 26

d. The Procedure of RAP Strategy

RAP is a three-step strategy: Read a paragraph, ask yourself, “What

are the main idea and two details?” and Put it into your own words. In

teaching reading, this strategy has three steps. They are as follows:

1) Read a paragraph

Read the paragraph silently. As you read, be sure to think what the

words mean.

2) Ask yourself, “What were the main ideas and details of this

paragraph?”

After reading the paragraph, ask yourself, “What were the main

ideas and details?” This question helps you to think about what you

just read. You can also look quickly back over the paragraph to

help you find the main idea and the details related to the main idea.

3) Put the main idea and details in your own words

Now put the main idea and details into your own words. This will

help you remember the information. Try to give at least two details

related to the main idea. Based on the description above, the

students will be asked to read each word-processed passage and

they are allowed to ask for the teacher on unknown words, but the

students did not receive additional support or assistance from the

teacher. They can take notes while reading the passage to help

them remember what they have read.

 27

B. Previous Study

The first is thesis written by student of Medan State University entitled “The

Effect of Read, Ask, and Paraphrase (RAP) Strategy on Students’

Comprehension in Reading Narrative Text” by Dewi Bernike Tampubolon.

This research was done in the experimental group which taught by using RAP

strategy and the control group by using conventional strategy. So, the

conclusion can be described as follows: The student’s achievement which was

taught by using RAP strategy is higher that taught with conventional strategy.

And from the t-test calculation it was found that t-test was 3,04 while the t-

table is 2,00 with p = 0,05. It means that hypothesis alternative (Ha) is

accepted which shows that RAP strategy significantly improves the student’s

reading comprehension. So, it can be proved that the use of RAP strategy is

effective to be used.