A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY ON THE USE OF FOLKLORE ON THE EIGHTH YEAR STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT AND THEIR READING INTEREST THEIR READING INTEREST AT SMPN 1 BALUNG JEMBER

Abstract

This research was intended to describe the eighth year students’s Reading Comprehension Achievement by using folklore and students’ interest in reading. It was conducted at SMPN 1 Balung Jember which was chosen by purposive method. The subjects of the research were the eighth year students of SMPN 1 Balung Jember in the 2011/2012 academic year. They were divided into 6 classes and each class consisted of 37 or 36 students. Thus the total number of the students was 218 students. In this research, the researcher used proportional random sampling method to determine the respondents, because the number of the respondents was more than 100 respondents. The sample was taken approximately 20% from each class by using lottery. Thus the number of sample was 42 students. The main data were collected by using reading comprehension test and questionnaire while the interview and documentation were used to collect the supporting data. The researcher described the use of Folklore on students’ reading achievement and students’ interest in reading. Folklore is oral tradition including myths, legends, folktales and jokes. It is rich of vocabularies that will help the students understand about English text. It is so short and memorable that the students easy to understand and comprehend the English text. Further, using folklore as educational material helps the students to develop their reading achievement and interest. It also helps students to appreciate their society and themselves since folklores are full of moral values. Based on the results of the data analysis, 14.2% of the students were excellent, 57.1% of the students were good, 19% of the students were categorized fair and 9.5% were categorized as poor in reading comprehension achievement by using folklore as reading materials. Based on the results of the data analysis, it was found that among 5 indicators, the highest achievement on the students’ reading comprehension by using folklore as reading was on sentence comprehension (84.9%), it was fell in excellent category. Then, it was followed by paragraph comprehension (70.8%), it was lied on good category. Next, it was followed by word comprehension (66.7%) and text comprehension (66.7%), they were classified in fair category. This happened because the English teacher often used folklore as reading materials in teaching reading comprehension. In contrast, the lowest achievement among the indicators was phrase comprehension (65.9%), it was fell in fair category. This happened because the English teacher only gave a few of practice in doing exercises dealing with phrase comprehension. For that reason, it was very important for the teacher to give more exercises in comprehending phrase. Related to the students’ interest in reading, it was known from the results of questionnaire that 61.9% students interested in reading folklore. In detail, there were 50% of the students or 21 students chose Legend and there were 28.6% of the students or 11 students chose Fairytale as their favorite reading. There were also 6 students or 14.2% of the 42 students chose Fable and there were only 4 students or 9.5% of the students chose Myth as their favorite reading. In conclusion, folklore was interesting for students’ and it could help them to understand the reading text well. In general, most of the students have good achievement in reading comprehension through folklore. Therefore, the English teacher should keep continuing to teach reading comprehension trough folklore. Besides, the English teacher could increase students’ reading comprehension by giving more exercises in comprehending phrase trough folklore.