genuine interaction, whether it is inside or outside the classroom. Researchers claim that when authentic materials are used with the purpose of students’
learning, students will have a sense that the real language for communication is being learnt, as opposed to classroom language itself. In contrast to the design of
the text books, authentic materials are intrinsically more active, interesting and stimulating Lee, 1995; Little, Devitt Singleton, 1988; Peacock, 1997; Shei,
2001. Richards 2001, p. 253 points out that alongside with these advantages, authentic materials often contain difficult language, unneeded vocabulary items
and complex language structures, which causes a burden for the teacher in lower- level classes. Martinez 2002 mentions that authentic materials may be too
culturally biased and too many structures are mixed, causing lower levels have a hard time decoding the texts.
Different from authentic materials, the language of non-authentic material has
usually been modified and adjusted according to the learning objectives and level of learners and their ability. The main difference between authentic and non-
authentic material lies on the naturalness of language used. Authentic materials have more natural language and reflect real life. The use of non-authentic material
in teaching has both advantages and disadvantage. The advantages of non- authentic materials are:
1. The language is easier and understandable
2. Get clear objectives to develop
3. It is adapted for a particular aspect
4. Materials are relevant, useful and focused on what students are learning at the
point
Since non-authentic material always follows learning objective and curriculum so it has some weaknesses, they are:
1. Non-authentic material is not real and may be not interesting.
2. It does not provide real information that happens around the world.
3. The topics are too common that make students get bored.
In short, these materials are considered as an applicable material for teaching reading comprehension. Therefore, this research is proposed to find out the effect
of both materials on students’ reading comprehension achievement at 8
th
grade SMPN 1 Metro in academic year 20142015 and which one is better.
1.2. Research Questions
Based on the background of study above, the problem of the study is as follow: Which type of materials gave better effect on students
’ reading achievement?
1.3. Objectives
Based on the research question, this particular study aimed at finding out: The material that give better effect on students reading achievement.
1.4. Uses
The result of the study is expected to be used theoretically and practically: 1.
Theoretically, the result of this research is expected to verify the previous theories dealing with theories in this research.
2. Practically, the result of this research hopefully can be used as a consideration
for English teachers to choose the best and the most appropriate materials for teaching reading comprehension in their classroom.
1.5. Scope
This research was conducted at SMP N 1 Metro and the materials used in this research were authentic and non-authentic reading comprehension materials. Both
authentic and non-authentic materials were specified on narrative text. The subject of the research was 8
th
grade students in academic year 20142015 in the even semester in which a class consists of 26 students. Hence, this study was focused
on the effect of using authentic and non-authentic reading materials also to find out which one is the best both of them for teaching reading comprehension. The
students must understand the text by knowing the main idea of the text, meaning of the text and purpose of the text through both of that materials. The types of
teaching reading comprehension provided responsive in treatment and for pretest and posttest the researcher used written text in authentic and non-authentic forms.
There was pretest before treatments and posttest after giving treatments in this research.
1.6. Definition of Key Terms
In this research, there are several definitions of terms that should be considered well as follows:
a Reading Comprehension is a process of understanding text. It is not only about
reading the word but also how a reader constructs or derives the text meaning. So, in this process, there is interaction required between what the reader knows
as his knowledge and experience. b
Authentic Materials is any material that has not been specifically produced for the purpose of language teaching and learning and made by native speaker in
their own culture.
c Non-Authentic Materials is materials that specially designed for learning
purpose and the language used in them is artificial with well formed sentence all the time which is useful for teaching grammar.
This chapter consists of an introduction which provides the information on background of the problem, research question, objectives of the research, uses of
the research, scopes of the research, and definition of term.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter discusses certain points related to the theories used in this study, such as, reading comprehension, teaching reading, authentic materials, non-authentic
materials, procedure of teaching reading comprehension, advantages and disadvantages of authentic and non-authentic materials, by referring the concepts
theoretical assumption and hypothesis are constructed.
2.1. Reading Comprehension
Reading is a process done by the readers to get the messages expressed by the writer through the written language Hogden in Karyani, 2000: 20. But
reading is not a simple process as what Harris and Sipay in Kariani, 2000: 21 note that
“Reading is a very complex process in which the recognition and comprehension written symbols are influenced by the perceptual skills, the
decoding skills, the experience, the language background, the mind sets, and as reasoning ability of the readers, and the basis what they read”.
While, Burn in Karyani, 2000: 23 states that reading is thinking process. In this case, the readers must be able to use the information to make reinforcement
and read critically and creatively to understand the figurative language, determine the author’s purposes, evaluate the idea presented and apply the ideas to the actual
situation.
