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

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.