THE EFFECT OF USING AUTHENTIC MATERIALS ON THE TENTH GRADE STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT AT SMAN 1 ARJASA JEMBER IN THE 2011/2012 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

Reading is one of the important skills that should be mastered by the students at any level of school. Reading helps the students to enrich their knowledge. As the proverb says ‘‘reading is the window of the world”. Reading is an important activity and becoming very important as science and technology-develop. All new information that we need spreads out through various media such as printed media like newspapers and magazines. To face this development, the teacher should provide not only materials from the text-books, but also the appropriate materials which have up to date information and used in the real communication, that is, authentic materials. Why should be authentic materials? Authentic materials are original (the materials provided are real original) and interesting since the materials provide the up to date information and it can attract the students’ interest and motivating (the up to date information from the authentic materials can motivate the students) and of course very useful since the materials provided are appropriate in teaching and learning process. The purpose of this research was to know whether or not there was a significant effect of using Authentic Materials on the Tenth Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement at SMAN 1 Arjasa Jember. The research hypothesis was formulated “The use of authentic materials has a significant effect on the tenth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMAN 1 Arjasa Jember in the 2011/2012 Academic Year.” The research design was quasi experiment. It began from conducting homogeneity test, deciding the experimental class and control class, giving activities to the control class using the common technique and material usually applied by the English teacher and treatments to the experimental class that was using authentic materials in teaching reading, then giving the same post-test to both classes, and the last analyzing the result of the post test by using t-test. The area of this research was SMAN 1 Arjasa jember which was chosen because authentic materials had never been used by the English teacher in teaching English especially for teaching Reading Comprehension. Based on the result of the homogeneity test, class X.5 and class X.4 were determined as the control class and the experimental class. The result of this research indicated that there was a significant effect of using authentic materials on the tenth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement. It was proved by the value of significant column of t-test table by using SPSS sofware, and the result was 0.027 which was lower than 0.05. Based on the explanation above, it was concluded that there is a significant effect of using authentic material on the tenth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMAN 1 Arjasa Jember.