CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the
Study
People
live in what the so called social life, which always need companion. In this case,
in order to facilitate their efforts to provide themselves with the necessities
of life, human beings have to cooperate with one another which can only be carried
out in a community. In doing so, they need a means of communication which is
called language. With language they can
interact with other people to establish and maintain relations between them and
to express their ideas or view points on things in the world. Halliday in Feez
and Joyce (1998:5) mentions “language
arises in the life of the individual
through an ongoing exchange of meanings with significant others”.
Languages
are found among counties and English is
one of the foreign languages that play an important role for the international
relationship between English and non-English speaking countries. Harmer (2002:1) argues, English as a lingua franca. He adds “it is a language widely
adopted for communication between two speakers whose native language is
different from each other’s and where one or both speakers are using it as a
second language”. English itself has
been taught in Indonesia as a first foreign language since the proclamation of
Indonesia on 17th of August 1945 (Ramelan 1992:1). The teaching of English is
aimed to develop listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Today,
reading appears to be an essential skill for people. It is intended to get them
always keep up with the development of sciences and technologies. Besides, it
is indeed, useful for students for the sake of literacy mastery. Wong (1974:186)
argues the importance of reading in his article ‘The Educational Role and
Cultural Orientation of English Reading Materials’ by writing: “if young is to grow
up viable in literacy society, they should be taught how to read. Reading is the
infrastructure on which rest much of the knowledge made commonly available today”.
Students
of foreign language should be prepared to read to have them deeply internalise
the English they learn (Paul,2003:83). Furthermore, reading text can be used to
improve and build up reading skill.
Having a good reading skill benefits student
to be able to speak well. Scott and Itreberg (1990:49) propose that the printed
words become the main source of expanding and strengthening the language.
Reading is also the language skill, which is easiest to keep up.
It
is true that reading is essential for learners of foreign language as well as other
sbject of learning. Mikulecky (1986:1) makes the point that “reading may be the
only way for us to use English if we live in non-English speaking country”. He
adds why reading is more important when you are learning a new language in???????????
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