A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY OF THE SEVENTH YEAR STUDENTS' READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT THROUGH READING ALOUD TECHNIQUE AT SMPN 1 PADANG LUMAJANG IN THE 2007/2008

Abstract

In teaching English at junior high schools in Indonesia, reading is one of the English skills that should be learned by the students besides listening, speaking and writing. Grellet (1996: 3) states that reading is the process of understanding a reading text. It means that when students read a reading material, they have to get the message from the text. Reading becomes important to be mastered because reading is a bridge to understand the scientific books students have to read. Carrel, et.al ( 1995: 1) state that for many students, reading is the most important of the four language skills in a second language. Moreover, reading is a receptive language process. It is a psycholinguistic process in that it starts with a linguistic surface representation encoded by a writer and ends with meaning which the reader constructs (Goodman in Carrel, 1995: 12).