Abstract:
The thesis is intended to know the correlation between students’ reading
speed and their understanding of a short passage in reading comprehension of the
second year students of SMP Negeri 2 Buayan Kebumen in academic year
2012/2013.
In this research, there are two questions to be answered they are 1) is there
a positive and significant correlation between students’ reading speed and their
understanding a short passage, 2) how far is the correlation between students’
reading speed and their undestanding a short passage. The number of people were
the second year students of SMP Negeri 2 Buayan with the number of 36 students.
They were taken using by purposive sampling. In collecting data, the researcher
used test. Test was used to know the level of students’ reading speed and students
understanding a short passage. This research was conducted on the second year
students of SMP Negeri 2 Buayan in academic year 2012/2013.
Based on the computation of Pearson correlation product moment, the data
was calculated both by manually and SPSS program version 16. Based on the
computation, the researcher found there result. First, the mean of students’
reading speed was 71.38 and it can be categorized as good. Second, the mean of
students understanding a short passage was 64.58 and it can be categorized as a
fairly good. Third, there is a positive and significant correlation between students’
reading speed and their understanding of a short passage that is 0.784.
The findings can be proved from the amount of samples (N=36) and the
level of significance (5%), the result of the computation done both manually and
by SPSS was 0.784. Based on the value in the table of r product moment, for
(N=36) and the significance level, the value of r product moment (rt) is 0.329. The
computation shown that robtained is higher than rtable (ro > rt) is 0.784 > 0.329 and it
is categorized as a high correlation. It means that there is a high correlation
between students’ reading speed and theirs understanding of a short passage.
