Improving students' reading comprehension ability of Descriptive text through Mind Mapping strategy at the first grade of MTSN 1 Bandar Lampung

The objectives of this research were to find out whether there is any significant difference of the students’ reading comprehension at the first grade of MTsN 1 Bandar Lampung before and after the implementation of mind mapping strategy and to find out the students’ responses on the implementation of mind mapping strategy at the first grade of MTsN 1 Bandar Lampung. The design used was one group pretest posttest. The subject of the research was the first-grade students of MTsN 1 Bandar Lampung. VII C was chosen as the experimental class and VII D was chosen as the control class. The instrumen were reading test and questionnaire. The data were in form of scores taken from pretest and posttest. The result indicated that there was an improvement of students’ reading ability viewed from the pretest to posttest score (30.72 to 57.82) after they had been taught using mind mapping technique. Besides, a set of questionnaire was used to find out the students’ responses toward the mind mapping technique. It was found that majority of the students had positive responses toward the mind mapping technique. Thus, it can be concluded that Mind Mapping technique facilitates the students to improve their reading ability.