Composed to Fulfill One of the Requirements to Obtain S1 Degree at the English Language Education Study Program of the Language and Arts Education Department Faculty of the Teacher Training and Education The University of Jember

Abstract

Reading is one of the language skills that must be mastered by the students because by reading, students are able to relate or connect every kind of learning skill. The main purpose of reading is to understand the whole content of the text. In order to understand the whole content of the text, the readers need comprehension skill to be the fundamental goal of reading. According to Grellet (1996) reading comprehension is the process of understanding, guessing, predicting, checking, and asking some specific information from the content. In fact, most students do not like reading, because they do not understand the reading text well. Based on the preliminary study at SMPN 2 Siliragung by doing the interview with the eighth grade of the English teacher, the teacher explained that he only uses picture series in teaching reading comprehension. However the use of picture series still cannot facilitate the students in comprehending the reading text. It was found out that the students got difficulties to find the appropriate pictures with sentences in the text. That is why, the students easily got bored in comprehending the reading text. In this case the alternative media that can be used by the teacher in teaching reading comprehension is comic strips. Comic strips are useful for teaching and emphasizing the meaning of words by looking at the pictures with some unique characters that describe the exact plot of the story. Thus, the researcher was interested in conducting an experimental research in order to know whether or not the use of comic strips had a significant effect in teaching reading comprehension. The purpose of this research was to investigate whether or not there was a significant effect of using comic strips on the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 2 Siliragung. The researcher used Quasi experimental research with post-test only design. The population of this research xv were all the eighth grade students of SMPN 2 Siliragung in the 2020/2021 academic year. Before selecting the participants of the research, the researcher conducted the homogeneity test in order to know whether the population was homogeneous or heterogeneous, and the result of homogeneity test showed that the population was heterogeneous because the significant level was 0.001 which was less than 0.05 (Psig < 0.05). Therefore, the researcher chose two classes that had the closest mean scores as the experimental and the control classes. Thus, VIII B was chosen as the experimental class and VIII E was chosen as the control class by lottery. In this case, the experimental class received the treatment that was taught reading comprehension by using comic strips, while the control class did not received the treatment but it was taught reading comprehension by using picture series usually used by the English teacher. There were two kinds of data used in this research, they are, primary data and the supporting data. The primary data gained from the students’ reading comprehension scores on the post-test, while the supporting data were collected from the results of interview and documentation. In order to collect the primary data, the researcher administered the post test, and analyzed the results by using independent sample T-test on SPSS to find the significant difference of the experimental and the control classes. The t-test formula analysis showed that the value of the significant (2-tailed) was 0.021, which means that it was less than significant degree 0.05. Therefore, the null hypothesis (Ho) indicated that “there was no significant effect on the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 2 Siliragung” was rejected and the alternative hypothesis (Ha) formulated “there was a significant effect on the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 2 Siliragung” was accepted. Based on the result of this research, hopefully the research result will be useful for the following people. For the English teacher, it is suggested for the English teacher of SMPN 2 Siliragung to build the students’ reading comprehension achievement by using comic strips as the teaching media. Therefore, it is hoped that comic strips can be used by the English teacher because comic strips are effective xvi to attract the students’ attention due to its unique characters. For the students, it is suggested that they can use comic strips in learning reading comprehension because they can help them comprehend the concept of the reading text easily. For the future researchers, it is suggested to conduct the research in one full semester. It is also expected that the result of this research can be used as a consideration to conduct a research dealing with the similar topic but using different research design, such as CAR on increasing the students’ reading comprehension achievement using comic strips.