THE STUDY OF THE NINTH GRADE STUDENTS’ REPORT TEXT READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT AT SMPN 1 JEMBER

Abstract

Reading is one of the important skills to acquire especially for students. It is important for students to have good reading ability because there are many activities related with reading such as reading the written materials from the text books, solving some problems in the examinations, getting knowledge from internet media, and so forth. In addition, the students’ ability and interest in reading affect their broad knowledge about everything in their life. This research was intended to describe the ninth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 1 Jember. Report text was used as the material to conduct the test in measuring the students’ reading comprehension achievement based on the aspects of reading namely: word, sentence, paragraph, and text meaning. The area of this research was determined by using purposive method and the researcher used proportional random sampling to choose the subjects of this research. Moreover, the data were collected from the students’ reading comprehension achievement test score as the primary data, interview, and documentation as the supporting data. According to the data analysis, the researcher found that the ninth grade students reading comprehension covering the four indicators namely word, sentence, paragraph, and text comprehension were categorized as “Good”. The students’ in average got 83,33 up to 93,33 in the reading comprehension test, with the mean score was 84.00. The students got the highest score in comprehending the word which reached the percentage of 88.75%. It was followed by the sentence comprehension which was 86.25%. Then, the students’ paragraph comprehension was 81.42%. The lowest score was the students’ text comprehension which was 78.57%. In conclusion, the ninth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMP N 1 Jember was categorized as “Good”. This means that the students in this grade could comprehend the report text well covering the word, sentence, paragraph, and text comprehension. Although the students in average reached good score, there were some students who still have problems in comprehending the reading text. The English teacher is suggested to give the students more exercises dealing with the text comprehension. Moreover, before the students do the reading comprehension, it would be better if the teachers build their background knowledge.