A STUDY ON THE SEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY OF DESCRIPTIVE TEXTS AT SMPN 6 JEMBER

Abstract

A Study on the Seventh Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Ability of Descriptive Texts at SMPN 6 Jember; Fanny Febriana Purwitasari Armadiani, 080210491024; 2014; 46 pages; English Language Education Study Program, Language and Arts Education Department, the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education Department, the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Jember University. Reading is one of important skills for the human life, especially to the students in learning English. Beside that, The students are able to comprehend what they read. They are able to comprehend the text to get the ideas and make a conclusion about the information from the text as intended by the writer. The design of this research was descriptive qualitative research. The purpose of this research was to describe the seventh grade students’ reading comprehension ability of descriptive texts at SMPN 6 Jember. More specifically, this research to measure students’ reading comprehension ability covering comprehending word, comprehending sentence, comprehending paragraph, and comprehending text. The area of this research, SMPN 6 Jember, was chosen purposively because the reading comprehension of descriptive texts has never been applied in teaching learning process reading comprehension in this school. This research was conducted to Grade VII of SMPN 6 Jember, as the research subject, which was determined by purposive method. The number of the respondents were 38 students in class A and 36 students in class B. In collecting data, the data of this research were collected from the students’ score of reading comprehension ability test and the data were consisted of documentation and interview. Interview was used to know the teaching reading taught in the seventh grade students at SMPN 6 Jember. Based of the interview the researcher got some information about the teaching English activity especially in teaching reading comprehension. The materials to the students from textbook and used LKS as workbook. Beside, the documentation was used to get the data that were related with the topic research. From the documentation the researcher got the teachers’ lesson plan, the lists of mid-term score class VII to get the research classes, the English curriculum that used in SMPN 6 Jember and the names of research respondents. Reading comprehension ability test purposed to measure the students’ reading comprehension ability about descriptive text. But before the reading test, the researcher conducted the try out. That purposed to measured the reliability of the test, to know the difficulty level of the test items, the instruction was clear or not and the time allocation was enough or not. The try out test given in another class who did not belong to the research respondents. Based on the result of the students’ test reading comprehension ability of descriptive texts covering word comprehension, sentence comprehension, paragraph comprehension and text comprehension. The data were in form of percentage score (reading comprehension ability) was analyzed by using descriptive scoring. The highest percentage of four indicators was word comprehension with the percentage 83.08% which belonged to the “very good” category. Then, the percentage of the sentence comprehension that was 74.21% which belonged to “good” category. The percentage of paragraph comprehension was 69.47% which classified as “fair” category. The lowest percentage of four indicators was the text comprehension with the percentage 57.89% that was classified as “poor” category. From the result above, it can be concluded that the students of grade VII in SMPN 6 Jember has ability in reading comprehension of descriptive text because the average was classified as “good” level with the percentage 73.94%. In conclusion, it can be concluded that the teaching English in reading comprehension ability of descriptive text needs to be developed especially in the lowest indicator, text comprehension. It can be suggested to give the students more various materials and using the interesting media that purposed to help the students understand about the materials. For the future researchers, this research results is needed to be a useful reference to do a further research with the same topic in different designs.