THE EFFECT OF COMIC STRIPS ON THE GRADE EIGHT STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION AT SMPS PRAYATNA MEDAN

Abstract

Many students have difficulty in reading and understanding story texts. One of them is narrative text. One of the difficulties encountered by students is finding information or main ideas. They usually lack of vocabulary so that what is contained in the reading content is not understood by them and they do not even know what the text means, and their motivation in learning English is lacking. The purpose of this research is to find out whether Comic Strips have a significant influence on reading comprehension or not. This research was conducted using quantitative methods. The research sample consisted of 40 students from SMPS Prayatna Medan. There are 20 students in class VIII-1 as the experimental class and 20 students in classVIII-2 as the control class. From the data that have been analyzed, it was found that experimental class students had higher scores with treatment using comic strips compared to the control class treatment without comic strips. The results of calculations using the t test show that tcount is higher than ttable. (4.48 > 2.02) with df: 38 at the significance level a=0.025. It could be concluded that Comic Strips in teaching reading had significant effect and could enhance the students’ reading comprehension on narrative text.