A Descriptive Study of the Grade XI Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement Taught by Using Authentic Material at SMAN Tempeh in the 2013/2014 Academic Year.

Abstract

This research was conducted to describe the grade XI students’ reading comprehension achievement taught by using authentic material at SMAN Tempeh Lumajang in the 2013/2014 academic year. The research problem of this research was “How is the grade XI students’ reading comprehension achievement taught by using authentic material at SMAN Tempeh in the 2013/2014 academic year?”. There were seven classes of the grade XI in the school. It consisted of IPA class and IPS class. There were 3 classes of IPA and 4 classes of IPS. In the IPA class, each class consisted of 25 students. Further, in the IPS class, each class consisted of 31 students. So, the total number of the respondents were 199 students. In this research, the research respondents were determined by using proportional random sampling by lottery, because the number of the respondents was more than 100 students, so it was better for the researcher to take 15% by lottery from both class IPA and IPS randomly. The primary data of this research were collected from the students’ reading comprehension test while the supporting data were collected by using interview, observation, and documentation. From the data analysis result, it was found that there were 3 students or 9.4% of the students categorized as poor and 1student or 3.1% of the student classified as failed in their reading comprehension achievement. In other words, there were 87.5% of the students had category from fair to good and excellent in their reading comprehension achievement. It means that, the students’ reading comprehension achievement taught by using authentic material was fair or more. xii In addition, the highest achievement and the lowest achievement of the students’ reading comprehension achievement taught by using authentic material from magazine of four indicators were as follows. The highest achievement was in comprehending word meaning and sentence meaning. There were 43.7% or 14 students in the range of 75%-89% or in good category in their comprehending word meaning and comprehending sentence meaning. That case might be caused by the teacher usually asked the students to find the main idea of each paragraph and let them to practice making sentences in the reading class. Based on the result above, it could be concluded that authentic materials can give a positive contribution in developing students’ reading comprehension achievement, especially for the grade XI students at SMA N Tempeh.