Thus, to teach and improve students’ need in reading of narrative text, a teacher has
to motivate and introduce the learners with some methods or techniques and make the students desire to learn more. The right method or technique in teaching is very
important to students because it determines the result of reading comprehension. In other words, the teacher should introduce the right and also interesting
technique to help students improve their comprehension on reading of narrative text. Although there are so many techniques
to improve students’ comprehension in reading, the tecnique used is story mapping technique to solve the problems
above. In teaching narrative text by using story mapping technique, the teacher asks students to read the text first and make the conclusion by drawing a graphic and
filling it with anything related to the story. It hopefully will be useful for students to acquire important details from the text and understand more text. Therefore, the
writer desires to prove it by conducting the research with the title: The Effectiveness of
using Story Mapping on Students’ Reading Achievement of Narrative Text.
B. Identification of the problems
Based on the background of the study about teaching reading, the problems can be identifed as follows:
1. Students are lack of interest in reading. 2. Students feel difficult to understand the content of text especially in narrative
text. 3. Students do not set their purpose while reading
4. Students do not know if there is a technique in learning reading which make students enjoy and entirely understand the content of texts.
C. Limitation of the problem
Based on the identification of the problems above, the problems will be limited to the effectiveness of using story mapping technique
on students’ reading comprehension at the 8th grade students of SMPN 127 Jakarta.
D. Formulation of the problem
The formulation of the problems in this study is : “Is using using story
mapping technique effective for st udents’ reading comprehension in the eighth
grade students of SMPN 127 Jakarta ?”
E. Objective of the study
The objective of this study is to find out the effectiveness of using story mapping technique
on students’ reading comprehension at the eighth grade students of SMPN 127 Jakarta.
F. Significance of the study
Hopefully, this research can give contribution to the English as Foreign Language EFL technique as an interesting and fun technique in teaching.
Moreover, the result of this research is expected to help students understanding and increase their motivation in reading narrative text.
6
CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
A. Reading
1. Theory of Reading
In learning language, there are four basic abilities that should be mastered such as listening, speaking, writing and reading. Reading is one of the basic abilities
that has important role in learning language. Besides, reading is an activity that readers decode each word in text and then automatically comprehend the meaning
of words, as they do with they everyday spoken language. In addition, readers who are not engaged in reading activity, they will miss new information. Therefore,
reading is not only the activity of using eyes to read and comprehend the meaning of words but also interpret and draw a conclusion from the text.
Based on Anderson, reading is also crucial for individual as well as for the society, where the opportunities for personal fulfillment and job success inevitably
will be lost without the ability to read well.
1
As Alyousef stated, reading is a process where the readers with the knowledge they have and the text they read interact
dynamically and finally construct the meaning.
2
So, to interpret the idea of the text, the readers need something more than just a text and ability to read. Moreover,
according to Farris et. al in their book of Teaching Reading a Balanced Approach for Today’s Classroom as cited in Zemelman, Daniels and Hyde stated that:
Reading means getting meaning from print. Reading is not phonics, vocabulary, syllabication, or other skills
” as useful as these activities may be. The essence of reading is in a transaction between the words of an author and
the mind of reader, during which meaning is constructed. This means that the
1
Richard C. Anderson, et al., Becoming a Nation of Reader: The Report of the Commission on Reading. Washington D.C: The National Institute of Education, US Department of Education,
1984 p. 1
2
Hesham Suleiman Alyousef, Teaching Reading Comprehension to ESLEFL Learners. The Reading Matrix Vol. 5, No. 2, 2005. P. 144
main goal of reading instruction must be comprehension, students understand what is on a page.
3
Similarly, Anderson stated that reading is the process of constructing the meaning from text and also a complex skill requiring the coordination of a number
of interrelated sources of information.
4
From some definition above, it can be concluded that reading is a process in getting the general meaning from written text which requires collaboration between
information from the text, general knowledge from the reader and also reader’s ability to interpret the meaning in the text.
2. The purpose of reading
Everyone has a purpose for every action that they take. Even something like reading is an action that someone has willfully chosen. The purposes of reading are
various from one to another. The purpose of reading is also to help the readers achieve some clear information and also for communicating. When people decide
to read, they may have some purposes in their head. For example, they read magazine and start to read the head line of the news, they will look for what they
interested in. Unconsciously, people do skimming and scanning to find what they require to read. Moreover, when people read a book that they love, they would read
it from the beginning until the end of story because they find it interesting. Those are several examples of purpose in reading.
According to Grabe and Stoller, there are some purposes of reading which are explained as follow:
5
a. Reading to search simple information This is the purpose that people usually find when they need to read. Reading
to search for information is a process aimed to have specific information by
3
Pamela J. Farris, et al., Teaching Reading a Balanced Approach for Today’s Classrooms.
Mc Graw-Hill, 2004 p. 324
4
Richard C. Anderson, et al., op. cit., p. 7
5
William Grabe and Federicka L. Stoller, Teaching and Researching Reading. Second Edition. England: Pearson Education, 2002 p. 6-10
