A Descriptive Study of Grade-7 Students’ Reading Comprehension Ability Tested by Using Authentic Reading Materials from Internet at SMP Islam Kunir Lumajang

Abstract

This research was intended to describe the grade-7 students’s Reading Comprehension ability tested by using authentic reading materials from Internet. It was conducted at SMP Islam Kunir Lumajang which was chosen by purposive method with the following considerations: (1) reading comprehension class by using authentic reading materials from Internet has been conducted at SMP Islam Kunir Lumajang since 2007, (2) there had been no researcher yet who had investigated the phenomena in this school, (3) the principal had given permission to the researcher to conduct the research, so that the data could be obtained from this school. The subject of the research were the grade-7 students of SMP Islam Kunir Lumajang in the 2010/2011 academic year. They were divided into 2 classes and each class consisted of 22 and 21 students. Thus the total number of the students was 43 students. In this research, the researcher used population method to determine the respondents, because the number of the respondents was less than 100 respondents. The main data were collected by using reading comprehension test while the interview, observation, and documentation were used to collect the supporting data. The problem of this research was” How is the grade 7 students’ reading comprehension ability tested by authentic reading materials from the internet at SMP Islam Kunir Lumajang in the 2010/2011 academic year?” Based on the results of the data analysis, 80,21% of the students were fine in reading comprehension ability tested by using authentic reading materials from Internet and 19,61% were failed in reading comprehension ability tested by using authentic reading materials from Internet. Based on the results of the data analysis, it was found that among 4 indicators, the highest achievement on the students’ reading comprehension trough authentic reading materials from Internet was on text comprehension (76,74%), it was lied on excellent category. Then, it was followed by sentences comprehension (58,13%), it was lied on excellent and good category. Next, it was followed by word comprehension (53,48%),it was lied on excellent and good category. This might happen because the English teacher often used the authentic reading materials from Internet in teaching reading comprehension. In contrast, the lowest achievement among the indicators was paragraph comprehension (44,18%), it was lied on poor category and failed category. This might be happen because the English teacher only gave a few of practice in doing exercises dealing with paragraph comprehension. For that reason, it was very important for the teacher to give more exercises in comprehending paragraph. However, to comprehend the meaning of a paragraph, we need to know the parts of a paragraph. A paragraph has three parts: a topic sentence, supporting details and a concluding sentence (Wingersky et al, 1999:31). Moreover, in getting the meaning of a paragraph, a reader needs to identify the topic sentence which states the main point of a paragraph, identifying the supporting details which support the topic sentence of a paragraph, then identifying the conclusion which restated and summarize the main point discussed in the paragraph. Related to the material, that was used authentic reading materials from Internet, it seems that authentic reading materials from Internet are potential materials and useful for language teaching. Authentic reading materials from Internet give a positive effect on the students, that is they can increase students’ interest in reading activity because they contain topics of interest to learners. By giving authentic reading materials from Internet, the teacher has brought the students to interact with the real use of language, which may familiarize them with the target language, because authentic reading materials expose the students to real discourse. Being exposed to the real language, the students will feel that they are learning to the real language. It give the awareness and necessary skills to the students to understand how the language is used. Moreover, authentic reading materials have value that is very useful for the students, because authentic reading materials keep the students informed about what is happening in the world, so they have an intrinsic educational value. In general, most of the respondents have enough ability in reading comprehension through authentic reading materials from Internet. Therefore, the English teacher should keep continuing to teach reading comprehension trough authentic reading materials from Internet. Besides, the English teacher could increase students’ reading comprehension by giving more exercises in comprehending paragraph trough authentic reading materials from Internet.