CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

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. Reading

1. 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 know 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 that the author is

assumed to have intended, based on data from the text and from the reader‟s prior

knowledge (Mikulecky, 2011 : 5).

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

active process of understanding print and graphic texts. 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 consists 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 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.

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2. 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 posses.

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 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.

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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 purposes. 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.

3. Models of Reading

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

of reading as follows:

a. Bottom up theory

The readers construct the text from 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.

b. Top down theory

Readers bring a great deal of knowledge, expectations,

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

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of vocabularies, they continue to read as long as the text confirms their

expectations (Goodman in Aebersold and Field, 1997:18).

c. 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 prediction about the data they will find

in the text, they apply topdown (knowledge based or conceptually driven)

information processing.

4. 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).

a. 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

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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.

b. 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 in a text, (c) following a

sequence, (d) inferring from the text, and (e) recognizing the discourse

patterns.

c. 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.
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5. 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:

a. 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 last time

he saw her was when Bob was teaching her to drive. A few days

afterword she had suddenly become ill. Tom was surprised when............

A. Ann went away

B. He met Ann at the party

C. Bob was teaching Ann to drive

D. Ann suddenly become ill

b. 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.
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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

c. Completion

The students are required to complete a sentence with a single

word.

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

d. Short answer

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

briefly.

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

show about people‟s expectations of marriage?

e. 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.

f. 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.

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B. Reading Comprehension

1. 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 events in the text and form 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
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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 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.

2. 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 (Deni Basaraba, 2013: 349). There

are:

1. Literal comprehension

Answers the questions Who, What, When, and Where with

information found directly in the text.

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 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.

3. 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:

a. Identify the purpose in reading

Efficient reading consists of clearly identifying the purpose in

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

for. Whenever teaching a reading technique, make sure students know

their purpose in reading something.

b. Use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding (for

beginning level learners)

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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.

c. 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 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.

d. Skimming

Skimming is reading the text as a whole to get the 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 the developing or supporting ideas.

e. 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

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English, scanning is important in dealing with genres like schedules,

manuals, forms, etc.

f. 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 students collectively induce order

and hierarchy to a passage.

g. 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.

h. Analysising 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:

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

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

part of speech it is.

3. Look for grammatical contexts that may signal information

i. 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
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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: He

is taking a bath. This sentence may function „informing‟ in the context of

a questions: where is John? but it may serve also to express an apology

in the context of a responses to a call inquiry: May I speak to John,

Please?

j. 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.

C. Genres 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.

In this study, the researcher used narrative text. Narrative 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
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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 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 contents 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 verbs

2) Using temporal conjunction

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3) Using Simple Past Tense

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

(RAP) Strategy

1. 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 a three-step strategy: Read a paragraph; ask yourself, “What are

the main idea and two details?” and Put it into your own words. RAP is a 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:

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5) also states that the purpose of the RAP strategy is to aid 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 (LD) 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.

2. The Benefit 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

3. 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:

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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.

E. Previous Study

There are some previous studies of the use of RAP strategy. 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
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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 than

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.

The second thesis written by student of State Islamic University of Sultan

Syarif Kasim Riau entitled “The Effect of Using Read, Ask Questions, and Put

into your own Words (RAP) Strategy toward Reading Comprehension of The

Second Year Students at Senior High School YLPI Pekanbaru” by Dahlia. Based

on the data presentation and data analysis explained in chapter IV, finally the

writer gives a conclusion of the research about the effect of using RAP strategy

towards reading comprehension of the Second Year Students at Senior High

School Yayasan Lembaga Pendidikan Islam (YLPI) Pekanbaru as follows: (1)

The mean pre-test of students‟ reading comprehension of experimental class was

63.09, which was categorized into enough level, and the mean of post-test after

being taught by using Read, Ask Question, and Put into Your Own Words

Strategy was 73.71 which was categorized into good level. (2) The mean pre-test

of students‟ reading comprehension of control class was 57.26, which was

categorized into enough level, and the mean of post-test of control class was 59.77

which were categorized into enough level. (3) There is significant effect of using
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RAP strategy towards students‟ reading comprehension at the Second Year of of

Senior High School Yayasan Lembaga Pendidikan Islam (YLPI) Pekanbaru. It

can be seen from the result of data calculation (2.00<7.180>2.65). So, it can be

concluded that Read, Ask questions, and Put into your own words (RAP) strategy

has a positive effect on reading comprehension of the second year students at

Senior High School Yayasan Lembaga Pendidikan Islam (YLPI) Pekanbaru.

Based on the two previous studies above on the use of RAP strategy, here,

the researcher will conduct a research in teaching reading comprehension by using

RAP strategy as well. So, it is the same on the use of RAP strategy.

Although it is the same on the use of RAP strategy, but it also has the

difference. The first previous study written by Dewi Bernike Tampubolon, the

design is experimental using experimental group and control group. It is to

compare the scholastic achievement of experimental group and control group after

the experiment and compare the scholastic achievement of high achievers and low

achievers of experimental group and control group after the treatment. The second

one is thesis written by Dahlia. It is an experimental research using quasi

experimental research design. Meanwhile, in this research the researcher uses

experimental research design using one group pre-test and post-test, and describes

the effectiveness of using RAP strategy in teaching reading comprehension ability

by comparing the students‟ score before taught by using RAP strategy and taught

by using RAP strategy.