THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING AUTHENTIC MATERIAL TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ ABILITY IN READING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT FOR THE FIRST GRADE STUDENTS OF MAN KUTOWINANGUN THE ACADEMIC YEAR OF 2012/2013

Abstract

Reading is one of the four English skills that many students are interested in because this skill is familiar and close to them. For many students, reading is the most important of the four skills in English, particularly in English as a second and foreign language. If their reading skill is poor they are very likely to fail in their study or at least they will have difficulty in making progress. If the teacher could take an appropriate media in teaching reading, it would help the students to read in effective way. One of media in teaching reading that can be used is Authentic Materials. Authentic materials are ones which can be very interesting and resourceful that the students can deal with to improve their reading ability in the class. In addition, they can experience themselves dealing with authentic texts and situation they might face when reading such text in real life, such as from magazines, newspapers, novels, menus, tourism leaflet, etc. The aim of this research is to know whether there is any effectiveness of using authentic material to improve students’ ability in reading descriptive text for the first grade students of MAN Kutowinangun in the academic year of 2012/2013. This study can be categorized as quantitative experimental research because the researcher was doing experiment by giving the treatment to the students. In this research, the researcher took 64 students as the sample; they were experimental group and control group. For the experimental group, the researcher used class X.7, which consists of 32 students. Meanwhile, for the control group, the researcher took 32 students of X.1. Then, the researcher conducted pre-test and post-test for both classes. The researcher taught descriptive text by using authentic material in the experimental class and a textbook in the control class. Statically, the researcher analyzed the data by using t-test. After analyzing the data, the researcher concludes that teaching descriptive text by using authentic material is effective to improve students’ reading ability. In a fact, the result of t-value is 2.57. Based on the 0.05 significant levels, the value of t-table is 2.000. The computation shows that t-value is higher than t-table, that is 2.57 > 2.000. Another fact shows that using authentic material is effective shown by mean of experimental group is higher than control group. That is 80.125 for experimental group and 76.625 for control group.