IMPROVING STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION BY USING TASK-BASED LEARNING (A Classroom Action Research at the 8th Grade Students of SMP Negeri 11 Surakarta in the Academic Year of 2010/2011)

Oleh :
Ii Ariyani. - X2209021 - Fak. KIP

The aims of this research are to know: (1) how far Task-Based Learning can improve the students’ reading comprehension, (2) what the advantages of Task-Based Learning for teaching learning process. This research was carried out at SMP N 11 Surakarta. It was conducted on April 2011. The subject of the research was the students of class VIII B of SMP N 11 Surakarta in the academic year of 2010/2011. The numbers of the students in class VIII B were 36 students. They consisted of 15 girls and 21 boys.The research’s method was Action Research. It was conducted in two cycles. The procedure of this research consisted of planning, action, observation, and reflection. There were two types of data in this research namely qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data were obtained by making notes, interviews, and photographs of all the activities in the process of teaching and learning. Quantitative data were obtained from the students’ scores of pre-test and post-test. The result of the research showed that: (1) Task-Based Learning (TBL) could give many improvements of the student’s reading comprehension which includes: (a) the students got easy in comprehending English text, (b) the students could identify main idea, detail information, reference, vocabularies and the generic structure of reading text easily. The improvement of students’ reading comprehension could be seen from the mean score of the pre-test, post-test 1 and post-test 2. The mean score of pre-test conducted before research was 5.6. The mean score of post-test 1 of the first cycle was 6.35 and the mean score of post-test 2 of second cycle was 7.58. (2) Task-Based Learning gave advantages in the teaching learning process which includes: (a) the atmosphere of the classroom were alive and interesting, (b) the students’ participation in class was high, they had a willing to participate in class activities, (c) the students were more active.