THE STUDY OF THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT OF RECOUNT TEXT AT SMP NEGERI 1 BANGSALSARI JEMBER

Abstract

Reading is one of important skills for the people in the world, especially to the students in learning English because there are many literatures, books and technology written in English. Besides, students must be 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 eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement of recount text at SMPN 1 Bangsalsari. More specifically, this research measured students’ reading comprehension ability covering comprehending word, comprehending sentence, comprehending paragraph, and comprehending text. This research was conducted to Grade VIII of SMPN 1 Bangsalsari, as the research subject, which was determined by purposive method and the researcher used proportional random sampling. The number of the respondents were 42 students. The data of this research were in the form of the students’ score of reading comprehension ability test and the supporting data were obtained from documentation and interview. Interview was used to know the way of teaching reading taught in the eighth grade students at SMPN 1 Bangsalsari. Meanwhile, documentation was used to get the data about the teachers’ lesson plan, the lists of mid-term score class VIII to get the research classes, the English curriculum that used in SMPN 1 Bangsalsari Jember and the names of research respondents. . x Reading comprehension achievement test was aimed at measuring the students’ reading comprehension ability about recount text. Before giving the reading test, the researcher conducted the try out to measure the reliability of the test to know the difficulty level of the test items, wether the instruction was clear or not and the time allocation was enough or not. The try out test was given to another class who did not belong to the research respondents. The result of the students’ reading comprehension test of recount text covering word, sentence, paragraph and text comprehension was categorized as “good”. In average, the students got 75 up to 90 with the mean score 80.11. The highest percentage of four indicators was “word comprehension” with the percentage of 89.00% which belonged to “good” category. Then, the percentage of the sentence comprehension was 83.80% which belonged to “good” category. The percentage of paragraph comprehension was 80.95% which was classified as “good” category. The lowest percentage of the four indicators was “text comprehension” with the percentage 73.80% that was classified as “fair” category. In conclusion, it can be concluded that the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 1 Bangsalsari was categorized as “good”. It means that the students could comprehend the recount text well covering the word, sentence, paragraph, and text comprehension. There were only some students faced difficulty in text comprehension. Thus It can be suggested to give the students more exercise to increase their reading skill, especially in text comprehension. For future researchers, this research results is expected to be a useful reference to conduct a further research with the same topic in different designs.