Improving the students’ reading comprehension by using authentic materials

CHAPTER  I

                                                  INTRODUCTION                                     

A.   Background

In learning English, there are four skills. They are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The four skills mentioned are diveded into receptive and productive skills. Speaking and writing are productive skills, while listening and reading are receptive skills. Beside the four language skills above, reading is of great importance to students show mother tongue is not English, because they almost do not have opportunity to hear or to speak that language. Comprehending English is a difficult thing for students if they do not have basic knowledge , especially in comprehending reading text.

Reading is a process of recognition or interpretation of written materials. Widdowson (1979:213) stated that reading is a process of getting information via printed materials. It involves letters, words, phrases, and clauses. Through reading, we can imcreaese our experience, develop new concept, solve our

problem,study how the words are used, how to implement the grammatical rules, and get many knowledge.

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In teaching reading, teacher should introduce other materials as an alternative to give various situations to studentsin classroom process. These materials can be a media; it can be to stimulate the students’ motivation during the classroom process. In the other hand, most high motivation is needed to learn reading.

            Related to the statements above, the researcher did observation that was done at the first year students of SMK Muhammadiyah 2 Bontoala, the researcher faces many problems in teaching learning English. The crucial problems are the students’ problems in reading is the students’ comprehension. The problems are; first,the students are bored to read a text because it is not interesting. Second, the students have limited vocabulary so they are difficult to understand the reading text. Thirdly, the students do not know the structure of sentence, it makes the students to work hard to translate the word in sentence of the text

            Based on the result interview tothe English teacher at the first year students of SMK Muhammadiyah 2 Bontoala Makassar, he stated that the mean score of the students’ achievement in reading English is very low. It is about 5.7 but the standard of curriculum 6.5 and the target score is 7.5.

            From the problems above the researcher will apply one of teaching strategy. This is an interesting strategy and it can increase the student’s reading ability, namely authentic material. This strategy is designed to create the students’ reading comprehension.

Authentic material are interesting material taken from magazine, newspaper, brochure and other teacher  resources that are not specially prepared for pedagogical purpose. The material can be challenging and interesting for the students where it is inline nowdays, many studentsare keen authentic materials. Therefore, the English teachers can use it in teaching process.

According to Smith & Johnson (1994:157) authentic material is any kind of material that taken from the real world not especially created for the purpose of language teaching. This might include language based on reality such as magazine, advertisement, newspaper or graphics and visual sources such as maps, pictures, symbols and charts.

Relating to the case above, the writer conducted a research under  the title : ” Improving the students’ reading??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

DAPATKAN CONTOH PROPOSAL ATAU SKRIPSINYA DI SINI ATAU KLIK DI SINI

DAN DAPATKAN REFERENSINYA DI SINI

DAN UNTUK PASSWORDNYA KLIK DI SINI