The Implementation of Comic Strips to The 8th Graders Junior High School Students to Improve Reading Comprehension Skill of Narrative Text

Reading comprehension as one of the language skills which is taught at Junior High School is regarded as a skill which has a complex process. In this skill students have to master the text by recognizing the written words and understanding the meaning. In a reading session, students felt it was difficult to find information of the texts. It was because the texts are too long and complex to be understood, and the media used or the text is also not interesting. Their reading comprehension skill was still low. The average score of reading comprehension task was only 68.19%. in fact, there were 18 students out of 23 or 78,26% students were not able to achieve the minimum passing grade 75. To overcome this problem this research was conducted by employing comic strips as a media to improve students reading comprehension skill. The research questions are (1). How is the implementation of comic strips in the reading comprehension skill of narrative text to the 8th graders Junior High School? (2). How can comic strips improve the reading comprehension skill of the 8th graders Junior High School? The research is designed in Classroom Action Research (CAR). The subjects were the 23 students of the 8th graders Al-Hidayah Junior High School. There were two kinds of data gained; First teacher and students activities in the teaching and learning process, and students reflection on the use of comic strips in the class. Second is students score on reading comprehension task on the implementation of comic strips. A collaborator helped the researcher to observe the class and collect the data. The data were collected by observation and reading comprehension task. The implementation of comic strips was running well as on the planning stage. The observation showed that the students were easier on comprehending the text, so they could do their work and discuss their reading comprehension task. They got motivated and enjoyed the teaching learning process, and interest in reading was increased. The students reading comprehension skill was also improved. It can be seen by looking at the students score on the first meeting around 86.96% pass the minimum criteria with the mean score 78.48. Than on the second meeting all of the students or 100% got score more than 75 with the mean score 85.65. It means that all of them pass the minimum criterion that is 75. The result of this study showed that comic strips is applicable and practical to be applied in teaching reading comprehension.