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. This classroom action research was conducted in one cycle which consisted of three meetings. The first and the second meetings were done for implementing the action and the third meeting was done to administer the test. The success of this research was seen by the improvement of the students’ reading comprehension xiv scores and also the students’ active participation during the teaching and learning process. The result of the observation in Cycle 1 showed that the students’ active participation increased from 68.75% in Meeting 1 to 81.25% in Meeting 2. Then, the students’ average score in reading also showed a significant improvement. Before the students were taught by using Semantic Mapping technique, only 15.62% of them could achieve score ≥75 in their reading comprehension test. After the researcher implemented Semantic Mapping technique, the students who attain score ≥75 in their reading comprehension test improved to 75%. This research was conducted in one cycle. It was because the target of this research was already achieved in the first cycle, therefore, Cycle 2 was not conducted. Based on the results of the observation and reading comprehension test, it can be concluded that the implementation of Semantic Mapping technique could improve the eighth-grade students’ achievement in reading comprehension of descriptive text. Thus, it is expected for the English Teachers to use the Semantic Mapping technique as an alternative technique in teaching reading comprehension. It is because Semantic Mapping is easy to implement and has various shapes such as circle, triangle, rectangle, square and other shapes that can be drawn by students to improve their active participation in the teaching and learning process. For the students, it is expected by using Semantic Mapping technique they can keep practicing reading and they can organize the ideas or information stated in the reading text. For further researchers, it is expected that the result of this research can be a reference to conduct research that has a similar problem dealing with improving the students’ ability in reading comprehension by choosing a different school, different students’ level or different text type of genres, such as, Descriptive Text, Narrative Text, Report Text, etc.