IMPROVING
THE STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION THROUGH CONTEXTUAL REDEFINITION STRATEGY
(A classroom action research)
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A.
Background
Learning English as a foreign language covers four skills; they are
listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Reading is the process
of getting meaning from text. Platt and Platt (1992:306-307) state that reading
is perceiving a written text in order to understand its contents. The
understanding that results is called reading comprehension. Different types of
reading comprehension are often distinguished according to the reader’s
purposes in reading and the type of reading used.
In reading comprehension, the message to
be imposed in the written form is the most important element that the students
must recognize, because the primary purpose of reading is to know the thoughts
expressed in the printed material. Therefore, reading with comprehension is only a way for the
students to arrive at what they want to know from the reading material.
However, the problem is how to make them comprehend.
Reading comprehension is not just
reading with a loud voice but reading is established to understand the meaning
of word, sentences, and paragraph sense relationship among ideas as it is (Simanjuntak 1988:4). If a student just
reads loudly but can’t understand the content of the text, it means that he
fails in comprehending ???
