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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The first chapter of this research presents background of the study, reasons for choosing the topic, statement of the problem, objective of the study, significance
of the study, limitation of the study and the last is outline of the study.
1.1 Background of the Study
Reading is one of the important basic skills in learning English. Heaton 1974:24 stated that four skills in communicating through language are often broadly
defined as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In order to help the students improve their communicative competence in learning English, the teachers need
to help the students to improve those four basics skills in communicating. Reading comprehension skills are important for English language
learners, especially for students who learn English as a foreign language. Reading comprehension is a process that involves the
orchestration of the readers‘ prior knowledge about the world and about language. It involves such as predicting, questioning,
summarizing, determining meaning of vocabulary in context,
monitoring one‘s own comprehension, and reflecting Weaver, 1994:44.
During reading process students are trying to gain information from the text, when they can not get the information from text it means that they fail
comprehending the text. Students‘ achievement in reading comprehension is
considered being success if the students can answer the questions given relate to the text, which means they can comprehend the text and show the
development of their reading comprehension through answering some questions relate to the text correctly.
Furthermore, for beginning learners, reading English text is not an easy task. They need some extra efforts to be success in comprehending English texts.
Comprehending English text also becomes a problem for Junior High School students, the writer found this case when she observed the teaching learning
process at SMP Negeri 1 Tonjong. During the reading class, the students were unable to answer the questions given by the teacher after they read a Narrative
text. In addition, the writer also saw that most of the students of eight grades in SMP Negeri 1 Tonjong were not enthusiastic during the learning activity. This
happened due to lack of the learning activity variation during the learning process. Moreover, in reading text, there are many kinds of genre texts which have
to be learned by the students. Those texts are Descriptive, Narrative, Procedure, Explanation, Report, Recount, etc. in this research the writer wants to choose
narrative text as the object research. All of those texts are given for Junior High School students; it is also included in the National Examination. Therefore, we as
an English teacher should give optimal effort to help our students in learning those texts, so they can pass the National examination with great score.
Students of Junior High School feel so hard to learn all the components of each text if the teacher can not provide appropriate medium and teaching strategy.
As what the writer has discussed above, it was stated that each text has its
characteristics, so the teacher should be creative in providing teaching strategy and medium in teaching those texts to the students. Game and group discussion
can be an easy medium for our students to learn actively in the learning process. Therefore, the subject teachers need to prepare more alternative strategies to
help the students improving their enthusiasm during the reading class. Wallace 1992: 57 states that a reading strategy is a unitary process which cannot be
subdivided into part skills. This means as a process, a reading strategy involves ways of processing text which will vary with the
nature of the text, the reader‘s purpose, and the context of situation. Those ways will meet the core goal in
reading which is usually called comprehension. Students of Junior High School begin their teenage phase. It is
started with fast physically progress as the progress of sexual function of their body. They also start to critically use their mind
both in formal and informal field. They response their environment law and norm, and able to judge right or wrong and predicts its
impact Depdiknas 2009: 5-8. Teaching Junior High school students is different when we teach senior
high school students, because they are in the transfer phase from children to teenag
er, most of them still love to play and won‘t involve in serious atmosphere. The Junior High School students usually love to have game or group discussion in
the learning process, in contrast they tend to get bored when the teacher only uses the usual strategy in the classroom. As the effort to avoid those problems, active
learning strategies are needed to warming up the class and having the enjoy learning process.
Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in class listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged
assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences, apply it
to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.Chickering and Gamson, 1987, p. 3
Learning is a long process of understanding something. In the learning process,
the teachers need some teaching strategies to arouse students‘ attention. A good teaching strategy is strategy which is able to involve the students directly
in the learning process. Learning strategy determines whether the students enjoy the class or not in during the learning process, it is one of the most crucial factors
toward students‘ achievement in the learning process. Therefore, the teacher needs to prepare many alternative activities as the teaching strategy to be applied in the
classroom to impr ove students‘ enthusiasm during learning process.
Strategies are ―conscious actions that readers take to improve their reading
skills‖ Anderson, 2003:10. According to Anderson 2003, to make students become active and get involved in reading activities, it is necessary to teach them
various reading strategies because reading with various strategies will create students to be critical and creative readers. Using some fun activities usually can
aid the students to learn language in more enjoyable way. Teachers usually use game, work discussion, songs, movies etc. For the learning strategy to arouse
students‘ interest and improve their creativity in the learning process and also make them pay attention to the materials. In this research, the writer wants to
show the effectiveness of ―picture matching game‖ to improve students‘ reading comprehension. In this game the writer uses pictures as the media of the game; the
pictures are provided in order to help the students to understand the text, so they can simplify their understanding about the content of the text through the pictures.
Games and puzzles can be designed which require pupils to match cards with words or sentences on them, or cards which link
pictures with written label or caption. Pupils will sight problems may need pictures or words enlarged or perhaps, as a teacher in a
PH school suggested, on different colored paper Ann Swabrick: 2002.
Hopefully by using picture matching game, it can help the students to be active and directly involve in the learning activity. So that, they can improve their
reading comprehension in enjoy and interesting way through interactive strategy.
1.2 Reason for Choosing the Topic
