| dc.description.abstract | SUMMARY
Using Authentic Reading Materials to Improve the Seventh Grade
Students’ Active Participation and Their Reading Comprehension Achievement
at SMP Negeri 2 Puger in the 2012/2013 Academic Year; Hasanah Arista Devi,
080210401026; 2013; 69 pages; English Education Program of Language and Arts
Education Department of the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education of Jember
University.
This Classroom Action Research was intended to improve the seventh grade
students’ active participation and their reading comprehension achievement by using
authentic reading materials at SMP Negeri 2 Puger in the 2012/2013 academic year.
This research subjects were the students of class VII-G that was determined
purposively, because their reading comprehension achievement score was low (their
mean score was 57.2) which was below the standard mastery of English of the school
(65). It was known from the result of interview with the English teacher in the
preliminary study. Besides, they also still faced difficulties in comprehending English
texts, especially in descriptive text. They had problems in comprehending words,
sentences, paragraphs, and the whole text. Finally, both the researcher and the
English teacher agreed to apply authentic reading materials from internet as the
reading materials in teaching reading because they were expected to be beneficial for
the students to overcome their problems in reading comprehension.
This research was carried out in two Cycles. Each cycle covered the stages
that include planning the action, implementing the action, observing and evaluating,
and reflecting the action. These activities were conducted in each Cycle. The first
cycle was conducted in three meetings including the reading test. The data about the
students’ reading comprehension achievement were collected through the reading
comprehension test. Meanwhile, observation was used to monitor the teaching and
learning process of reading by using observation guide in the form of checklist.
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The results of the students’ reading comprehension achievement in the first
cycle showed that the percentage of the students who got score 65 or more was
67.4%. In addition, the results of observation in cycle I revealed that only 63.95% of
43 students actively participated in the teaching and learning process of reading by
using authentic reading materials from internet. The rest of the subjects (36.05% of
43 students) were passive in joining the lesson. They were reluctant to ask questions
and answer the researcher’s oral questions. Besides, some students did not make
some note about the lesson. Based on those results, it could be concluded that the
action given in the first cycle was not successful yet. Therefore, the actions were
continued to the second cycle by revising the lesson plans in the first cycle by
considering the students’ weaknesses in the first cycle. In Cycle 2, the researcher used
English and Indonesian language in the teaching and learning process. Besides, she
gave clear instruction to the students to find the difficult words in the texts by writing
them on the whiteboard and finding the meaning of the difficult words together with
the whole class. The results of the students’ active participation in the teaching and
learning process of reading by using authentic reading materials from internet
improved from 63.9% in Cycle 1 to 80.2% in Cycle 2. Moreover, there was also an
improvement on the percentage of the students’ reading comprehension achievement
test. It improved from 67.4%, in Cycle 1 to 82.5% in Cycle 2. It means that both the
students’ active participation and their reading comprehension test improved in the
second cycle and achieved the successful criteria of this research. Thus, the action
research was stopped.
Based on the results above, it could be concluded that the use of authentic
reading materials in the teaching and learning process of reading could improve the
students’ active participation and their reading comprehension achievement in two
cycles. Then, it is suggested to the English teacher and the students to use authentic
reading materials from internet as an alternative source of reading materials in
teaching reading. It is due to the fact that authentic reading materials from internet
could improve the students’ active participation and their reading comprehension
achievement. At last, for the future researcher, this research could be used as
references to conduct further research dealing with different research design or
research method to improve the quality of reading achievement | en_US |
