Background of the Study

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Reading is an important way for a person to master a certain language. Grabe 2009:4 states that reading is something that many people take for granted. He claims that as a part of citizen of modern societies, a person must be a good reader to be successful because reading in English can provide advantages for a person to develop his or her abilities in English. When someone becomes a skilled reader in English, he or she can use his or her reading skills to engage in advanced studies, get a good job, travel, gain access to information, become more cross culturally aware, and communicate with other. In English as foreign language EFL classroom, reading is a kind of crucial activity since it has a role to improve the students’ general language skills in English. Reading can enlarge the students’ vocabulary mastery, improve writing and speaking skills, and reading is a source for student to know new knowledge about language. Furthermore, reading appears in many kinds of exams such as school exam, national exam, and any other exams, so that it is a must for students to have good reading skills to pass the exams. A reading activity is closely related to reading comprehension which is one of the main purposes of EFL teaching-learning. The reader’s ability to use their background knowledge or often called as prior knowledge or “schema” and relate it with the information from the text will affect their comprehension in 1 reading. As Nunan 2003 says, reading is a fluent process of readers combining information from a text and their own background knowledge to build reading. However, building meaning of an English text by EFL learners cannot be considered as an easy task. Since English is a foreign language, most learners faced difficulties dealing with comprehending the text. As the result, students’ ability in reading comprehension still needs improvement. This problem also happens to be the case among students in eighth grade of SMP Negeri 9 Yogyakarta. Most of the students find it difficult to construct the meaning of an English text or to comprehend a text. Problems in reading comprehension may be caused by several factors. Firstly, the students’ linguistic knowledge such as vocabulary mastery and grammar mastery could be categorized low. Secondly, the students lack interest in reading. Thirdly, the teacher has not yet taught the students a particular reading strategy. The students faced difficulties in reading comprehension since they do not use a certain reading strategy which is useful to help them to read. Based on the problems stated above, the teacher needs to apply an appropriate strategy that can solve the problems, that is, a method that can activate students’ background knowledge to facilitate students in reading comprehension. Carrell and Floyd in Ajideh 2003 argue that the teacher must provide the students with appropriate schemata they are lacking, and must also teach the students how to build bridges between existing knowledge and new knowledge. Considering the issues, there are several reading strategies that can facilitate reading through activation of background knowledge. Carrel in Stott 2001 lists numerous ways in which relevant schemata may be constructed, including lectures, visual aids, demonstrations, real-life experiences, discussion, role-play, text previewing, introduction and discussion of key vocabulary, and key-word or key-concept association activities. Among the numerous schema-building strategies, the experience-text- relationship ETR is chosen to be the method to improve students’ reading comprehension. ETR is a method developed by Au 1979 in teaching reading comprehension in EFL for Hawaiian children to stimulate students’ prior knowledge. ETR method consists of three stages including experience E stage, text T stage, and relationship R stage. ETR method is chosen based on its benefits. As stated in International Reading Association, Inc. 2004, using a method that can involve students’ experience in reading provides some advantages. Firstly, in most cases, language experience is best used to introduce students to some of the basic concepts of reading. Moreover, students’ experience will contribute to reading achievement when the school uses a text containing stories directly related to the students’ own world. In addition, these stories can be also sensitive explorations of aspects of the students’ daily life. Related to the facts above, the researcher is interested in implementing this method to improve the reading comprehension of the eighth grade students at SMP Negeri 9 Yogyakarta by conducting Classroom Action Research.

B. Identification of the Problems