A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY ON THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT OF RECOUNT TEXTS AT SMPN 1 BANYUWANGI 2014/2015 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

Reading is one of important skills for the human life, especially to the students in learning English. Beside that, The students are able to comprehend what they read. They are able to comprehend the text to get the ideas and make a conclusion about the information from the text as intended by the writer. The design of this research was descriptive qualitative research. The purpose of this research was to describe the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement of recount texts at SMPN 1 Banyuwangi. More specifically, this research to measure students’ reading comprehension achievement covering comprehending word, comprehending sentence, comprehending paragraph, and comprehending text. The area of this research, SMPN 1 Banyuwangi, was chosen purposively because the reading comprehension of descriptive texts has been applied in teaching learning process reading comprehension in this school. This research was conducted to Grade VIII of SMPN 1 Banyuwangi, as the research subject In collecting data, the data of this research were collected from the students’ score of reading comprehension comprehension test and the data were consisted of documentation and interview. Interview was used to know the teaching reading taught in the eighth grade students at SMPN 1 Banyuwangi. Based of the interview the researcher got some information about the teaching English activity especially in teaching reading comprehension. The materials to the students from textbook and workbook. Beside, the documentation was used to get the data that were related with the topic research. From the documentation the researcher got the teachers’ lesson plan, the lists of mid-term score class VIII to xiv get the research classes, the English curriculum that used in SMPN 1 Banyuwangi and the names of research respondents. Reading comprehension achievement test purposed to measure the students’ reading comprehension achievement about recount text. But before the reading test, the researcher conducted the try out. That purposed to measured the reliability of the test, to know the difficulty level of the test items, the instruction was clear or not and the time allocation was enough or not. The try out test given in another class who did not belong to the research respondents. There were seven classes of the eighth grade in the school. It consisted of class 8A, 8B, 8C, 8D, 8E, 8F, and 8G. The total population of those classes is 228 students. In this research, the research respondents were determined by using cluster random sampling with lottery because that seven classes already homogenous based on midterm score of English test obtained from the teacher. The primary data of this research were collected from the students’ reading comprehension test and the supporting data were collected by using interview, observation, and documentation. From the data analysis result, it was found that there were only 2 students or 6.06% of the eighth grade students were categorized as poor and there was no student (0%) who was classified as very poor category in their reading comprehension achievement. There were 20 students (60,61%) who got “excellent” category. There were 6 students (18.18%) got “good” category and there were 5 students (15.15%) who got “fair” category. In other words, there were about 39% of the students had category from fair to good and about 61% got excellent in their reading comprehension achievement. It means that the students’ reading comprehension achievement of recount text belong to excellent because most of them categorize as excellent. In conclusion, it can be concluded that the teaching English in reading comprehension achievement of recount text needs to be hold out because most of the students categorize as excellent, but the lowest indicator still needs to developed that was text comprehension. It can be suggested to give the students more various materials and using the interesting media that purposed to help the xv students understand about the materials. For the future researchers, this research results is needed to be a useful reference to do a further research with the same topic in different designs.