Activating Junior High School Students’ Background Knowledge to Help Them Comprehend Narrative Text

Abstract

This classroom action research was intended to improve the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement by activating students’ background knowledge. The subjects of this research were class VIII F students of SMPN 1 Arjasa that were determined purposively. Based on the result of classroom observation in the pleminary study, it was found that many students of class VIII F experineced difficulties in doing reading. This finding was supported by the English teacher’s admission and the result of reading test. The result of reading test from the English teacher’s showed that only 11 students achieved the standard requirement score of English which was 70, while 14 students have score below 70. It could be concluded that only 44 % students had achieved the standard requirement score of English. This classroom action research was conducted collaboratively with class VIII English teacher of SMPN 1 Arjasa. There were four stages of activities in this research, namely; planning of the action, implementation of the action, observation and evaluation, and data analysis and reflection. The data collection methodsused in this research were observation, reading test, interview, and documentation. This classroom action research was carried out in one cyclewith three meetings. The first and the second meetings were used to do the actions and the third meeting was used to conduct the reading achievement test. In the firs cycle,the percentage of the students who got ≥70 in reading test was 84%. It means that the minimum requirement percentage of the students (75%) who got ≥70 had been acvieved in Cycle 1. Since all research target had been successfuly achieved in the second cycle, the action was stopped. Based on the result from cycle1, it could be concluded that teacing reading by activating students’ background knowledge could improve the studnets’ reading comprehension achievement. Thus, the English teacher was suggested to activate students’ background knowledge to the students to improve their academic performance like english reading since it could improve the students’ reading achievement.