(ABSTRAK) THE USE OF ILLUSTRATED FOLKTALE “THE CARELESS JAKA TARUB” TO IMPROVE THE STUDENTS’ ABILITY IN UNDERSTANDING NARRATIVE READING TEXT (An Experimental Research at the Eighth Year Students of MTs Abadiyah Gabus-Pati in the Academic Year of 200

ABSTRACT
Mustikarini, Rahma. 2009. The Use of Illustrated Folktale “The Careless Jaka
Tarub” to Improve the Students’ Ability in Understanding Narrative
Reading Text (An Experimental Research at the Eighth Year Students of
MTs Abadiyah Gabus-Pati in the Academic Year of 2009/2010). Final
Project, English Department. Languages and Arts Faculty. Semarang State
University. First Advisor: Prof. Dr. Mursid Saleh, M.A, Second Advisor:
Dra. Indrawati, M.Hum.
Keywords: Illustrated Folktale, Understanding Narrative
The topic of this study is the use of illustrated folktale “The Careless
Jaka Tarub” to improve the students’ ability in understanding narrative reading
text – an experimental research at the eighth year students of MTs Abadiyah
Gabus-Pati in the academic year of 2009/2010. In this study, I presented two
problems: 1) how effective is the illustrated folktale “The Careless Jaka Tarub” in
improving students’ understanding of narrative texts? and 2) in what ways are the
illustrated folktale “The Careless Jaka Tarub” effective to teach narrative reading?
The objectives of this study were: 1) to know the effectiveness of using the
illustrated folktale “The Careless Jaka Tarub” in improving students’
understanding of narrative texts and 2) to find out the ways the illustrated folktale
“The Careless Jaka Tarub” are effective to teach narrative reading.
This study was conducted by using experimental research to the eighth

year students of MTs Abadiyah Gabus-Pati as the population. The population
consists of five classes. Two classes were chosen as the sample, they were 8A as
the experimental group and 8B as the control group. These two groups got four
meetings. The first meeting was for giving pre-test. At the second and third
meetings, the experimental group was taught by using illustrated folktale “The
Careless Jaka Tarub” and the control group was taught by using folktale “The
Careless Jaka Tarub”. For the last meeting, the post-test was given to these two
groups. The result of the pre-test and post-test showed that the average score of
pre-test for the experimental group was 61.02, and the average score of pre-test
for the control group was 59.76. After the treatment, the average score of post-test
for the experimental group was 78.00, and the average score of post-test for the
control group was 64.93. After the test of significance, the t-test number (4.359)
was higher than t-table (1.66). It means that the experimental group’s
understanding of narrative texts was better than the control group. Besides using
test, this study was also using questionnaire. From the result of the questionnaire,
it can be seen that the use of illustrated folktale “The Careless Jaka Tarub” was
effective to teach narrative reading because of some reasons: 1) the students like
to read English story books, 2) the students were interested in the illustrated
pictures of the story “The Careless Jaka Tarub”, 3) the students could understand
the story easily from the illustrated pictures, 4) the students knew the meaning of

the words in the story from the illustrated pictures, 5) the students enjoyed reading
the story “The Careless Jaka Tarub” more than the story from other countries.