The Effect of Using Semantic Mapping Strategy on the Senior High School Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement

Abstract

Reading comprehension can be regarded as an important skill to discover new information or expand knowledge. The more people read, the more knowledge they will gain. It is in line with Hansen (2016) who states that reading is the basic to all learning, learning general things and learning languages. Reading is also able to create a communication in the form of interaction between the learners as the readers with the text which is being read. Furthermore, the researcher believes that appropriate strategies can be applied in teaching reading in order to help students to get infomation from the text as much as possible and comprehend it well. Through good strategies, the actions of the students in reading can be monitored or directed by the teacher, so that they can achieve the learning goals or objectives. Sabouri (2016) also states that reading is an interactive process in which readers construct a meaningful representation of text using effective reading strategies. One of the best strategies which is commonly used in teaching reading is semantic mapping strategy, so the researcher tried to use it in teaching reading comprehension. Semantic mapping is a simple strategy of structuring information in a graphic form, therefore it is seen as an appropriate strategy to teach reading. Heimlich & Pittelman (1986:86) state that semantic mapping strategy helps learners to focus on relevant concepts and ideas so as prepare them to comprehend, assimilate and evaluate the information in the material which is read. Furthermore, according to Zaid (1995), semantic mapping is a helpful and interactive teaching strategy that can attract students’ attention and interest. This experimental study was conducted in order to investigate the effect of using semantic mapping strategy on senior high school students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMAN 2 Tanggul. The population of the research was five classes of the tenth grade students at SMAN 2 Tanggul, especially from the Natural Science classes X-1 up to X-5. From the result of homogeneity test by using ANOVA, it was known that the population was homogeneous. Thus, the researcher chose two classes as the research participants randomly by using lottery. Class X MIPA 3 as the control class and was taught reading comprehension by using question and answer technique, while X MIPA 4 as the experimental class which was taught reading by semantic mapping strategy. The total number of the research participants was 72 students, because each class consisted of 36 students. The primary data of the research was collected from the students’ scores of reading comprehension achievement test, while the supporting data were gained through interview and documentation. The reading comprehension achievement test was collected from the post-test which was done to compare both the experimental and the control classes after the treatment. Then, the scores were analyzed by using Independent sample t-test in SPSS computing system. Based on the result of the analysis, the value of significance was 0.032 which was lower than 0,05 with the significance interval 95%. Thus, it can be concluded that the use of semantic mapping strategy affected the students’ reading comprehension achievement. Therefore, the alternative hypothesis formulated: “there is a significant effect of using semantic mapping strategy on Senior High School students’ reading comprehension achievement” was accepted. The research result proved that there was an effect of using semantic mapping strategy on senior high school students’ reading comprehension achievement. Therefore, it is recommended for the English teachers at SMAN 2 Tanggul to use semantic mapping strategy as an effective strategy in teaching reading comprehension. The researcher also hopes that the result of this research will be useful as information and empirical data to conduct a further research with different research design, such as classroom action research to improve the students’ reading comprehension achievement by using semantic mapping strategy, or use the same research design on investigating the effect of using semantic mapping but on different kinds of text genre, such as: descriptive, procedure, exposition, or recount texts.