Abstract:
Language plays important role in our life. English is one of the subjects that are taught since in the elementary until university and examined in the national examination to determine the students‟ graduation. In improving reading comprehension, there are many ways. One of them is joining the English Club. English Club can motivate the students to study English. The objective of this research is to find out the reading comprehension of the eleventh grade of SMK N 2 Purworejo who joined the English Club and that those who didn‟t and to find out whether there is any significant difference of the students reading comprehension who joined the English Club and those who did not.
The reseacher applies a descriptive quantitative reseach in conducting the reseach. The researcher employs one independent variable and one dependent variable. In this research, the independent variable is joining English Club and symbolized by (X) while the second variable is called dependent variable was the students reading comprehension ability and symbolized by (Y). The researcher took two classes as the sample, XI AP 1 (32 students) and XI Pm 1 (32 students). For this research, the researcher used purposive sampling because of the limitation of time. While the instrument used in this thesis is test and questionnaire. The test is used to test of students reading comprehension. The test consists of 25 items to get the data. The questionnaire is used to know who joined the English Club and those who did not. In this research the questionnaire are divided into two parts. Part A consist of the students who join the English Club. Part B consists of the students who did not join the English Club. The researcher calculated both manually and by using SPSS 17 program.
The result of this research shows that the first, the average reading comprehension of the eleventh grade of SMK N 2 Purworejo who joined the English Club was good category. Second, the average reading comprehension of the eleventh grade of SMK N 2 Purworejo who didn‟t join the English Club was sufficient category. Third, there is any significant difference between the reading comprehension of the students who joined the English Club and that of those who did not. The result of the calculation shows that the mean score of students who joined the English Club and that of those who did not are 70 and 65.0476. To see whether the hypothesis is accepted or rejected, the t-value is consulted to the t-table at the 0.05 significance level. It shows that the t-table is 2.000 and the t-value is 6.849. It means that t-value is higher than t-table, that is 6.849>2.000. So, it can be concluded that joining English Club on students reading comprehension of the eleventh grade students of SMK N 2 Purworejo in the academic year of 2012/2013 is effective.
