The Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. The Background of the Study

Reading is one of the language skills which should be acquired by students who learn English. It is considered as a very important skill because students need to deal with texts from many sources such as books, internet, newspapers, magazines, and so forth in order to gain knowledge, to get new information, or other purposes. Besides, r eading is seen as a crucial building block of students‟ success at school, at work and in society Feiler, 2007; Gee, 2008; McCarty, 2005 in Hedgcock Ferris, 2009. That is why language teachers devote considerable time and effort to promote the reading skills among their students. In some schools in Indonesia which have not applied Curriculum 2013, the curriculum applied is called the Genre-Based Curriculum or the Competency- Based Curriculum which is known as Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan School-Based Curriculum in which the basic competences and the standards of competences are formed based on the text types. Junior high school students in Indonesia learn such texts as narrative, descriptive, report, recount and procedure as well as such short functional texts as memos, notices, shopping lists, greeting cards, announcements, etc. Each text type has its own generic structure and linguistic features that are different from one another Spratt et al., 2005; Brown, 2001; Lewis Hill, 2002. 2 Reading is not a simple skill that can be taken for granted Moreillon, 2007; Hedgcock Ferris, 2009. It is not easy to acquire for a short of time. Although it is called a receptive process, it is not a passive one Nuttall, 1996; Spratt et al., 2005. In other words, it is a complex process and it is not automatic in itself because it needs a great deal of precise knowledge to be acquired and strategies to be applied Spratt et al., 2005. Besides, reading needs the mastery of vocabulary that cannot be acquired without many practices of reading. Those reasons are why the reading skills need to be taught at school. Besides its role as a medium for students to get knowledge and new information , reading is also important as a tool for assessing students‟ language ability Brown, 2004. It is proven by the fact that the final examination for junior high school students is in the form of written texts most of which contain various text types. If students do not understand the texts, they may fail to do the test. In SMP N 3 Pakem, which still applied School-Based Curriculum, reading was also given emphasized compared with the other skills. It was because the students must be prepared as well as possible to face the final examination. Nevertheless, the objective of teaching reading in SMP N 3 Pakem was not yet fulfilled. Based on the observation, the students of SMP N 3 Pakem, especially Grade VIII C, still had problems related to reading. The first problem was related to the students‟ mastery of vocabulary. The students had lots of difficulties in reading because most of them did not know the meaning of many words found in the texts. Even, they found it difficult to understand the meaning of comprehension questions so that they could not answer the reading 3 comprehension questions correctly. The second problem was related to the students‟ reading comprehension of the text. Based on the interview with some students, they found it difficult to comprehend the content of the text. Therefore, they found it difficult to determine important information from the text such as a topic, stated and unstated details, and references. The third problem was related to reading strategies. The students did not understand the text because they did not know the way to read. Instead of trying to comprehend the text, the students chose to match the words in the multiple choice options with the words in the text as their strategy to answer comprehension questions. All of those problems needed to be solved because they gave impact on their reading achievement which was low. To solve the problems occurring in the teaching and learning process of reading, teaching reading strategies to students is considered valuable as a tool for solving the problems that the students may encounter in the text Moreillon, 2007. One of the reading strategies that is appropriate to solve the problems in reading is the Semantic Mapping Strategy. The Semantic Mapping Strategy is one of the reading strategies by which students learn to think about the relationship among concepts in the texts Antonacci in Mah, 2001. It can be a form of reading practice that students can apply in and outside the classroom. Besides it can help students comprehend the texts by understanding the connection between one concept and other concepts, it can enhance the s tudents‟ mastery of vocabulary Oxford, 1990. 4

B. Identification of the Problems