CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1	Background of the Research
Reading is one thing that can be done easily by every person. According to Cullinan as cited in Clark & Rumbold (2006), reading is an important thing to know the students’ success. In fact, although reading is an important and an interesting activity, not every person is interested in reading and love reading, especially students. Some students love reading depends on the certain topic or title. If the topic or title is interesting for them, the students will read. Whereas some other students will read just when it is a duty from their teacher like to find the answer to certain questions, test, exercises or examination, and it is hard to find students who make reading as their hobby nowadays (Clark and Douglas, 2011), especially reading a book or text using foreign languages.
One of foreign languages in Indonesia is English, and it is known that English is used at formal education as a compulsory subject starting from junior high school until university. It means that the language has to be mastered by students in Indonesia. As an international language, English will be very useful to communicate each other in this era. That is why English reading will become one of the ways for students to learn. In addition, through English reading, the students can learn a lot of things like how to write something in English and how to speak utterances in English. By English reading, students can increase their English vocabulary and knowledge about world’s view which written in English from the English reading text. (Pitts,White & Krashen, 1989).
For the researcher, most people assume that reading will be identic to book. This because people will usually read something from a book. However, this will be different to what happened now. Since there are a lot of sophisticated technology in this era, there are two ways of reading. First reading online. Second is reading offline. The development era and the advanced technology have create a lot of gadgets and internet to attract people especially students to do something easier such as reading. Students can choose various English readings by using their gadgets (computer, laptop, smartphone). This is also the reason why most students are hard to find in a library anymore, where it is known that reading in a library or reading a book is the example of reading that does not use internet connection.
From the explanation above, it is shown that English reading habit is very important especially for students. Through reading habit, the students can improve their academic performances too. Considering the previous description, the researcher is interested in conducting a research at PGMIPA-U (Pendidikan Guru Matematika dan Ilmu Pengetahuan Alam Unggulan) where it is one of the programs in the researcher's university whom the students was study about science mostly in English. In addition, PGMIPA-U has four majors. They are mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. Those who graduated from PGMIPA-U can be a science teacher at international school. Then, from all the four majors of PGMIPA-U, the researcher is focus on the biology students because it is known that in biology the students are needed to read more to get some knowledge about the lesson than the other three major which mostly are use formulas. This situation is also one of the reasons why the students have to read a lot, especially for the English reading. That is why the researcher is interested in conducting a research entitled: "The Purpose of Reading English of Fifth Semester Students of PGMIPA-U (Pendidikan Guru Matematika dan Ilmu Pengetahuan Alam - Unggulan) Biology in Jambi University".
1.2	Research Question
	Based on the background mentioned above, the research questions of this research is “What is the purpose of reading English of fifth semester students of PGMIPA-U (Pendidikan Guru Matematika dan Ilmu Pengetahuan Alam-Unggulan) Biology in Jambi University?”
1.3	Purpose of the Research
	The purpose of this research is to know the purpose of reading English of fifth semester students of PGMIPA-U (Pendidikan Guru Matematika dan Ilmu Pengetahuan Alam - Unggulan) Biology in Jambi University.
1.4 Limitation of the Research
This research design of this research was qualitative with a case study approach. It focused on the purpose of reading English of fifth semester students of PGMIPA-U (Pendidikan Guru Matematika dan Ilmu Pengetahuan Alam - Unggulan) Biology in Jambi University because there was no research done before about this topic in this department. The participants of this research were 6 students because according to Morse in Mason (2010), a researcher is better to have at least six participants to do an interview in qualitative research. The data of this research were got from the interview and demographic questionnaire that adapted from Al – Nafisah (2011) and Iftanti (2012) which consisted of 16 questions.
1.5 Significances of the Research
This research is expected to provide some information about the purpose of reading English. For the students, it is expected that it can help them know more about their purpose of reading English and motivate them to read English more. Then, for the researcher, it is expected it can be new motivation to learn English especially through reading English.
1.6 Definition of the Key Terms
In order to clarify what variables are involved in the research some definition are put forwards:
1.	Reading is the ability to understand words which are in a document or text and it is useful to add the knowledge for personal growth and development (Dadzie as cited in Owusu & Larson, 2014).