The Tenth Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement Tested by Using C-Test

Abstract

This research design was descriptive, and the objective of the research was to know how good the C-test in measuring reading comprehension achievement at SMAN 1 Kencong. The area of this research was SMAN 1 Kencong. This school was purposively chosen because this school have applied C-test as a measurement tool of reading comprehension achievement in teaching learning process. The population of the research was the tenth grade students of SMAN 1 Kencong in the 2017/2018 academic year. The respondents of the research were chosen by using cluster random sampling. Since the results of the try out test showed that the C-test as instrument fulfilled the condition of validity and reliability in X MIPA 2 class, then the researcher apllied it to X MIPA 1 class in order to get the main data. The total number of the respondents from X MIPA 1 was 36 students. Reading is one of four language skills besides listening, speaking, and writing. It becomes the center skill in teaching learning process because most of teaching learning process is associated with reading activity. Reading activity is a cognitive process in order to find some information that is stated in the text. It means that reading is a thinking process to comprehend the whole text. Thus, reading is not only seeing groups of letters that form words, sentences, paragraphs, and text, but also an activity to understand and interpret the meaning of symbols and text, in other words, the messages from the writer can be delivered to the reader. In teaching learning process, reading comprehension needs to be evaluated and measured in order to know how successful the students apply some reading comprehension skills to get the information from the text. The teacher can arrange a test as a tool to measure the students’ achievement in comprehending the skills of reading. The Achievement is related to test that is conducted to discover how successful students in achieving the objective of a course. C-test is a kind of test which emerged as a suggested alternative to cloze test. This kind of test was developed in Germany by Christine Klein Braley and Ulrich Raatz in 1981. They introduced a new deletion technique, “the rule of two”, adapt the characteristics and based on the same theoretical rational as cloze. As we see in the similarity of the name, C-test is an alternative to solve the problems that come out in cloze test. Basically the problem of cloze test is the difficulty level in doing the test is too high and it is so difficult for the test taker to achieve a high score. Usually the problem of cloze test is that there is no another clue beside the content of the text, even the native speaker cannot do this test without any problem and difficulty, especially if the test is using exact word scoring method. Then, C-test comes to offer an easier way to measure the students’ comprehension of the passage in similar technique as cloze test by predicting only some missing half words but not the full words. The purpose of this test is to test the ability of the students in defining some incomplete words based on the context of the text. The data of this research were collected from the students’ scores of C-test in reading, interview from the teacher, and documentation. The scores of C-test as try out in X MIPA 2 class used to know that the instrument of the reasearch was appropriate or not to measure the students’ reading comprehension achievement. Based on the findings from the try out test, it can be concluded that this test instrument had good validity and reliability. Good validity can be seen by matching the content of the test to the available curriculum in the school. Then, good reliability shown by the number 0.85 as the reliability ceofficient of the test, while the criteria of good reliability is above 0.70. The next step was the application of the research instrument to X MIPA 1 class and the scores of the C-test were used to know the students’ reading comprehension achievement. After that, the scores were analyzed by using percentage formula to find the classification of students’ score level. The result of percentage showed that the C-test is good enough to measure the students’ reading comprehension achievement because the amount of students or 50% of the whole X MIPA 1 class grouped into good category. It means that C-test was good enough to measure the tenth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMAN 1 Kencong in the 2017/2018 academic year.