Abstract:
English is an international language. Almost all countries have
adaptedEnglish used as a compulsory subject at schools. Therefore, there are four
skills in learning English must be acquired by students. Those are reading,
speaking, writing and listening. Reading is one of the four language skills that are
very important in learning English, so the students’ must learn it. Teaching
reading in junior high school has not succeeded yet. Although students have
learned the language for many years, they still have many difficulties to
comprehend reading texts. One of the strategies in teaching reading is by using
REAP strategy. In this strategy, teachers guide the students to comprehend a
narrative text easily. REAP is an acronym for Read, Encode, Annotate,
andPonder.
The purpose of this research is to find out whether REAP strategy is
effective or not to improve reading comprehension ability in narrative text at the
eighth grade students of SMP N 7 Purworejo. In this research the researcher took
60 students as the sample. As the experimental group, the researcher used class
VIII B which consists of 30 students. Meanwhile, as the control group, the
researcher took 30 students of class VIII A. Then, the researcher gave pre-test and
post-test to both classes.The researcher then statistically analyzed the data by
using t-test polled variance.
After analyzing the data, the researcher concludes that teaching narrative
text using REAP strategy is effective. As the fact, the result of t-value is 3.66
based on the 0.05 significant level, the value of t-table is 2.00. The result of
computation shows that t-value is higher than t-table, that is 3.66>2.00. So, it can
be stated that the alternative hypothesis “the use of REAP strategyto improve
reading comprehension ability in narrative text at the eighth grade students of
SMP N 7 Purworejo in the academic year 2011/2012 is effective” is accepted.
