Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

This chapter is divided into seven subsections. They are background of the study, reasons for choosing the topic, statements of the problem, purposes of the study, hypothesis, significances of the study, and outline of the report.

1.1 Background of the Study

Language as an important tool for communicate has great developing in the world. Language as a means of communication is used among human being in order to establish social relationship. There are many languages in the world, one of them is English. English is an important language and becomes the international communication language. It has been spread all over the world and plays an important role in the global communication. English is also used in many sectors of international affairs such as economy, education, politics, science, etc. English as a language has four basic skills which are listening, speaking, reading and writing. People learn English because they have their own motivation that depends on their needs, interest and sense values. “Students must be trained adequately in all basic language skills, understanding, speaking, reading and writing” Alexander 1975:vii. In order to master English, people should sharpen those four basic skills. One of those skills that hard to master is reading skill. It is not simply identifying and translating written words but also understanding and acquiring. 2 The reading skill plays a central role in the teaching and learning success at all educational stages. Having any difficulties in this skill will give variety of consequences in all subjects of study, since reading includes a variety of sub-skills such as: discrimination of linguistic symbols, coordination between the symbol and a suitable meaning, the usage of context to recognize the lexical meaning, the ability of visual analysis of words to recognize their ingredients, the ability of sound discrimination, coordination between the symbols seen by the readers and the corresponding sound, the good comprehension of a reading text, and understanding further meanings implicitly included within the lines. Comprehension of a reading text is something that hardly to do. Anderson 1984:34 states that comprehension is also influenced by the ability to connect prior knowledge with new knowledge in order to create meaning. Students who succeed in comprehending text are actively involved in the reading processes that require the ability to make predictions, to confirm or disaffirm those predictions, to ask questions, to infer and visualise, and to monitor understanding as they read. Nowadays, both teachers and students have difficulties in reading comprehension. It is not easy for teachers to find an effective way to teach reading comprehension while it is hard for students to acquire information and knowledge about reading comprehension given by their teachers. It is worse because students have less vocabulary which is very useful to comprehend a passage. In order to make students have a better understanding of reading comprehension, an effective way is needed to teach read ing. “Reading as a field of teaching is considered as one of the important areas of teachi ng” Carnine et al 3 1990:23. TPRC, a strategy that makes people think and predict before they read a passage, can be useful in reading comprehension. TPRC strategy will help readers have a better way to comprehend a passage, so the result of reading will be more effective. By designing this research, the writer hopes that by using the TPRC strategy, students‟ reading comprehension can be achieved and the result of this investigation will give the answer to the problem above.

1.2 Reasons for Choosing Topic