CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background
Nowadays,
science and technology development demands people to increase their knowledge
and experience. One way to increase their knowledge and experience is through
reading. Reading is one of the effective ways to gain information. If people
say a book is the window of the world, we can say that reading is the eye of
the world, because we can identify things through reading. Reading is one of
the basic skills of English, but it has a very complex process where the reader
tries to discover meaning in print page or script. Through reading one can
enhance his experiences, develop new concept and increase his thinking or
knowledge.
Reading
as one of the basic communicative skills’ of English, reading is an important
part of English, as the way of gaining information from written source. Harmer
(1991: 68) states that reading is useful for other purpose; it provides good
models for English writing and also provides opportunities to study language.
For the reasons it will be important to make the reading activity as effective
as possible.
Indonesian
curriculum has put English as compulsory subject to learn from elementary until
university, where reading is one of English skills that the students must
master. Besides that, in the final examination test of each school level almost
90% are reading test form where the students are asked to find out the
information of text (Depdiknas, 2009). So the teacher has to pay attention for
this case or for reading subject even most of the students considered that
reading is difficult subject.
Most
of reading methods and strategies has been used in the classroom alternately.
The result shows that some the students’ English reading achievement is still
far from satisfaction. Hafsah (2005:35) assumes that the students find
difficulties in reading such as they do not understand the content of the
material, what the text about and also hard to find main idea of paragraph. So
the question now is how to make the students are interested in learning reading
or we can say what should be teacher done to increase the students ability in
reading especially in identifying information of the text.
The
observation result when the researcher conducted teaching practice at the
second year of SMK , the students’ reading comprehension
skill still poor. All of the students
can be read but only a few of students can comprehend or can understand what
they have read especially English text. It because many factors such as the
students consider that English is a subject that very difficult, bored and
scares because meaning and letters are different. The other factor is the
teacher always uses the same method to teach English subject like the direct
method. It is also make the students more bored to study English. As value of observation in the classroom the
students’ has score 5.5. This score is as a poor category. In this research the
aim is to solve this problem until the students have a good score, while the
standard curriculum is 6.5. The researcher wants to achieve the score at
7.0 target in learning reading comprehension.
Facing
the problem above, the researcher would like to introduce a method that could
be used by teachers to improve their teaching and can help the students to have
better comprehension in learning English reading, it is Aesthetic Realism
Method.
Using
Aesthetic Realism Method will be helpful the students in reading. It makes
substantial improvements in their ability to answer comprehension questions
based on textbook material, gains that are maintained over time.
Based
on the explanation above, the researcher would like to conduct a class action
research under the title “Improving the
Students’ Reading Comprehension through Aesthetic Realism Method at the Second
Year of SMK ”
