Improving The Junior High School Students' Reading Comprehension by Using Mind Mapping Technique

Abstract

This research was intended to improve the junior high school students’ reading comprehension by using mind mapping technique at SMPN 11 Jember especially the VIII B students. Based on the result of preliminary study at SMPN 11 Jember, the English teacher said that most of the eighth grade students in that school relatively experienced difficulties in comprehending the recount text especially VIII-B grade students. She also said that VIII-B grade students had 0% for the percentage in reading comprehension since the passing grade was 75. Further, the students felt lazy in taking note while they were got reading exercise. To overcome those students’ problems, the researcher chose mind mapping as a technique to improve the students’ reading comprehension. Mind mapping technique is a technique to help the students to comprehend the recount text. Mind mapping was a taking – note that made the students easier in comprehend the recount text. Therefore, mind mapping could make the students more motivated in learning English because it consists of colors and pictures. The objective of this research was to improve the junior high school students’ reading comprehension by using mind mapping technique. The design of this research was Classroom Action Research which covered four stages of activities namely: (1) planning of the action, (2) implementation of the action, (3) class observation, and (4) reflection of the action. SMPN 11 Jember was chosen purposively as the research area because the students on this school still had difficulties in learning reading comprehension. Among the eighth grade students in this school, VIII B students were chosen as the subjects of the research since they had the lowest mean score for the previous score of reading comprehension. There were 35 students as the respondents of this research. The data collection method used in this research was reading comprehension achievement test and observation in the form of field note. The reading comprehension achievement test was conducted at the end of the Cycle (after implementing the action) to get the students’ score. Meanwhile, the observation was conducted during the implementation of the action to get the detail description of the students’ reading comprehension process through mind mapping. This classroom action research was conducted in two Cycles because the result in Cycle 1 showed that the percentage of the students who got ≥75 was 45.71% or 16 of 35 students. Then, the researcher and the English teacher revised some aspects that made the Cycle 1 failed. As the result, Cycle 2 was successful. The result of the Cycle 2 showed that there were 28 of 35 students got score ≥75 or 80%. The conclusion of this research was the number of the students whose comprehension originally under the target improved into 45.71% into 80%. Moreover, the result of the observation by using field notes showed that the teaching and learning process by using mind mapping technique could give some good effects for the students in learning reading comprehension. They were: (1) mind mapping as a taking – note for the students’ understanding of the concept; (2) mind mapping could encourage the students to solve the problem; and (3) mind mapping made a good atmosphere for the students during teaching learning process. Based on the research results above, it could be concluded that the use of mind mapping technique could improve the junior high school students’ reading comprehension.