CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background
The goals of
teaching English in Indonesia are mainly to enable the students to use English
for communication and to read books and references written in English. The
students are expected to have skills of the English language such as reading,
writing, listening, speaking, and other elements of language that must be
taught to the students through the chosen themes.
Among the four
skills above, reading get greater attention than three others, because reading
is one of the important skills. Reading can be defined as an active
cognitive process of interacting with the print and monitoring
comprehension to establish meaning and through reading we can get much
knowledge, study new words, comprehend ideas, study the word are used, how to
implement the grammatical rules, and gain the information.
Problem mostly
occurs to the students when reading book. Sometimes students were facing a book
but do not read at all. They just can mention symbol word without getting any
idea from the book. The researcher her self experienced when reading a book
without any comprehension tends to feel sleepy.
As
the explanation above, the data from observation indicates that the students of
SMA Muhammadiyah Wilayah Makassar and also
face the same problems. Most of them are not competent to comprehend English
text well. Many students can read the word in passage perfectly but are unable
to answer the questions. They can say the words, but unable to gain the meaning
from words. They find hard to comprehend reading materials. The writer also
observed that the teacher only asked the students to read, and then they must
answer the question without giving explanation about the text first. So the
students who did not understand what they read. As a result, they could not
answer the whole questions correctly. Based on the result of students’
achievement in reading are still underneath, it is about 5.5 mean score and the
target score is 7.5. In
this case, the students have to read critically, and the teacher must select
the suitable technique or strategy to teach it.
What a teacher has
to consider as a prime important task is how to design the reading course with
strategies and techniques to facilitate the students to comprehend to concept
from the author’s mind in the text. There have been a lot of techniques and
strategies discussed by many experts dealing with reading comprehension. One of
the techniques to be offered here is Sustained Silent Reading. In which the
students are learning how to interact with the text they read.
By using SSR
method, the students read silently for a given period of time. But, it does not
mean they read without sound. A reader may sound in respond words. SSR does not
need to say out each word. A reader is silent reading only says the word in
mind, those any references to pronunciation stress or intonation. In addition,
they can choose books, magazines, etc, that they are interested in, and they
are shown how to create time for reading then they will read more.
Good readers use
what they know about language and the word to interact with what they are
reading. This helps them create meaning from the words on the page.
Because the
important comprehending text, the researcher offers the use of SSR in teaching
reading, because it can motivate students to read more and it can bring the
students to interact with text.
Based on the
explanation above, the researcher is interested in carrying a research entitled
“Improving the Students’ Reading
Comprehension through
Sustained
Silent Reading (SSR) Method at the XI class of SMA Muhammadiyah Wilayah
Makassar”.
B. Problem Statement
Based on the
background above the problem statement as follows:
1. How is the improvement of the students’ literal
comprehension through Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) Method?
2. How is the improvement of the students’ interpretive
comprehension through Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) Method?
C. The Objective of
the Study
The
objectives of the study are as follows:
1.
To explain how
the improvement of the students literal comprehension through Sustained Silent Reading (SSR)
Method.
2.
To explain how
the improvement of the students interpretive comprehension through Sustained Silent Reading
(SSR) Method.
D. Significance of
the Study
The result of the
research is expected to be meaningful and very useful information for the
teachers in teaching reading particularly to improve reading comprehension of
the students.
E. Scope of the Study
The research is
limited to improve the Students’ Reading Comprehension through Sustained Silent
Reading (SSR) Method focus on literal comprehension (the main Ideas and
sequence of details) and interpretive comprehension (conclusion and prediction of
outcomes) of the text at the XI class of SMA Muhammadiyah Wilayah Makassar.
