Improving the Seventh Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement by Using Mind Mapping Technique at Itisam Wittaya Foundation School
Abstract
This research was intended to Improving the seventh grade students’ reading
comprehension achievement by using mind mapping technique at itisam wittaya
foundation school especially the VII/1 students. Based on the result of preliminary
study at Itisam wittaya foundation school, the English teacher said that most of the
seventh grade students in that school relatively experienced difficulties in
comprehending the recount text especially VII/1 grade students. She also said that
VII/1 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. Itisam wittaya foundation school was
chosen purposively as the research area because the students on this school still had
difficulties in learning reading comprehension. Among the seventh grade students in
this school, VII/1 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 275 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.