A Descriptive Study on Reading Comprehension Achievement of the Second Year Students of SLTP Negeri 1 Arjasa Jember in the 2002 / 2003 Academic Year

Abstract

This research was intended to describe how the second year students' reading comprehension achievement at SLTP Negeri 1 Arjasa Jember in the 2002 / 2003 Academic Year is. The research design was descriptive. The respondent determination method was cluster random sampling by lottery. While the respondents itself is the second year students of SLTP Negeri l Arjasa Jember in the 2002 / 2003 academic year. The numbers of respondent were 42 students or one class taken randomly by taking 33.3 % of the three classes. The primary data were obtained from reading comprehension test. The test itself was a teacher made est in the form of multiple - choice test. The data collected were analyzed by using percentage. Then, they were analyzed descriptively to find out the students' achievement in reading comprehension, especially in word comprehension, sentence comprehension, paragraph comprehension, and the whole text comprehension. Documents and interview were used to collect the supporting data. The research results showed that the second year students' reading comprehension achievement was categorized as enough (58.51 %). The details are poor (50.99 %) for word comprehension, enough (56.15 %) for sentence comprehension, more than enough (70.75%) for paragraph comprehension, and enough (62.17 %) for the whole text comprehension. The most difficult comprehension was word comprehension, while the easiest comprehension was paragraph comprehension. This means that they still had problems with word comprehension, and a bit of sentence comprehension. Therefore these skills need to be improved, in order to improve the students' reading comprehension achievement.