The Effect of Using Comic Strips on the Eighth Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement

Abstract

Reading is one of the most important skills in EFL (English Foreign Language). According to Wooley (2011), reading comprehension is the process where we try to understand the meaning of the text rather than to obtain sentence or word meaning. If we cannot understand the meaning of the text, it will give us a hard experience to find information from the text. Since reading comprehension is important in learning language, English teacher needs to be creative because most of the EFL students do not comprehend the text well. The use of media in teaching EFL in the classroom can be an alternative way to increase students’ motivation. One of the media that can be used in teaching reading comprehension is comic strips. Carry (2004) states that comic strips is interesting to be used in the classroom because they are flexible media for any level and easily obtained. In this research, comic strips were chosen as teaching media in reading comprehension learning. The design of this research was quasi-experimental design. The area of this research was SMPN 3 Lumajang in the 2018/2019 academic year. The population of this research was all of the eighth-grade students of SMPN 3 Lumajang in the 2018/2019 academic year. The participants of this research were determined by cluster random sampling through a lottery. VIII D was chosen as the experimental group and taught using comic strips. Whereas, VIII A was chosen as the control group and taught using printed text. The data of this research were in the form of scores collected from the reading comprehension achievement tests. The data was analyzed using independent sample t-test formula by using SPSS. The result showed that the significant value of the t-test was 0.00 that was lower than 0.05. It indicates there is a significant effect of using comic strips on the students’ reading comprehension achievement. The findings of the present study also have pedagogical and empirical implications. Pedagogically, English teachers could consider comic strips as media that give a positive impact during the learning process. Empirically, this finding will be useful for future researchers as a reference and information in conducting further research with a similar topic such as improving the students ‘reading comprehension achievement using comic strips.