A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY ON THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT ON RECOUNT TEXT BY USING LECTURING AND QUESTION-ANSWER TECHNIQUES

Abstract

In English language teaching (ELT) at Junior High School, reading is one of the English skills other than listening, speaking, and writing. In teaching learning activity, reading involves reading activity, such as reading short story, announcement and poster. Reading is important because by reading students will not only learn about the language but also get non linguistics information. This research was intended to describe the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement especially in reading recount texts at SMPN 9 Jember in the 2014/2015 academic year. In this study, recount text was used for reading comprehension achievement which also covered four reading indicators namely: word, sentence, paragraph, and text comprehension. The area of this research was determined by using purposive method and the researcher used cluster random sampling to choose the participants of this research. Moreover, the data were collected from the student’s reading achievement test score as a primary data and from the interview and documentation used as the supporting data. Based on the data analysis, the result showed that most of the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 9 Jember was categorized as “fair” with the mean score of their reading comprehension achievement was 72. In details, no students belonged to “excellent” category, and there were 16 students of 38 students got scores between 75- 89 (good) and 19 students of 38 students had scores between 60-74 (fair). Meanwhile, there were 3 students who were recorded to achieve poor score with the score between 45-59. Based on the analysis of each reading indicator, it was found that the highest score in reading comprehension achievement was word comprehension with the mean score 79,27 (good). The second

rank was sentence comprehension with the mean score 72.55 (fair). The score of paragraph comprehension was in the third rank with the mean score 68,42 (fair). The lowest score was on the text comprehension with the mean score 64.21 (fair). In conclusion, the eighth grade students still had problems in reading a recount text for some indicators of comprehension. The result showed that the students only achieved the standard minimum score in comprehending word meaning. Meanwhile, they still had difficulties in comprehending the meaning of the other three indicators i.e: sentence, paragraph and text comprehension. Therefore, it was suggested that the English teacher should pay more attention on practice based on their weaknesses to enable them to enhance their reading comprehension. Likewise, it is also suggested to the future researchers when doing a research on similar topic to concern on these weaknessess to help students have better skills.