Improving the Eighth Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement by Using Semantic Mapping Technique

Abstract

Reading is one of the language skills that must be taught to English language learners. Through reading, readers can gain many kinds of information. It can be said that reading is the process of understanding or comprehending information from the text. Since English is a foreign language (EFL) especially for Indonesian students, reading is a very important skill to master. However, many students still get difficulties to comprehend the texts that they read. One of the problems is because they still find many unfamiliar words in the text. Due to those conditions, the use of the appropriate technique is expected to help students in teaching reading comprehension. By using Semantic Mapping technique, it could help students to explain how to categorize the word meanings. Semantic Mapping technique also helps students develop their reading comprehension by connecting words/phrases and also concepts to make it related to one another. Thus, in this research, the researcher used Semantic Mapping Technique to teach reading comprehension in the classroom. This research was a classroom action research that focused on the implementation of Semantic Mapping technique to solve the students’ problem dealing with the reading comprehension of the eighth-grade students at SMPN 8 Jember. This school was purposively chosen because the eighth-grade students had a common problem in reading comprehension. The students were found to have difficulty in understanding the material of reading comprehension.