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