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 ”
