THE IMPLEMENTATION OF INDEX CARD MATCH STRATEGY TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ READING SKILL AT THE EIGHTH GRADE OF SMPN 1 JETIS PONOROGO IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR OF 2013/2014

Rohmah, Risda Nadhirotur. 2014. The Implementation of Index Card Match Strategy to Improve the Students’ Reading Skill at the Eighth Grade of SMPN 1 Jetis Ponorogo in the Academic Year of 2013/2014. Thesis. English Education Department. Teacher Training and Education Faculty of Muhammadiyah University of Ponorogo. Advisors: (1) Siti Asiyah, M.Pd (2) Diyah Atiek Mustikawati, M.Hum. Key Terms: Teaching, Index Card Match Strategy, Reading Skill There are many languages in the world, one of them is English. It is an international language that many people all over the world use. In Indonesia, English is a foreign language and it is included as the subject in the school. There are four skills of English those are, reading, listening, writing, and speaking. Reading is a language skill which is used to communicate indirectly. However, some students still get difficulties. Based on the observation in SMPN 1 Jetis Ponorogo, the problems of teaching reading are the students bored in the method of teaching learning process especially in reading, lack of vocabularies, and laziness in reading long texts. To solve these problems, English teacher should use interesting strategy to improve the students‟ reading skill. In this case, the researcher would apply Index Card Match Strategy. This strategy would help students to study actively in happy condition or situation, make them enjoy their learning, practice their speed of think, try to competition in answering reading test with their friends, and receive the material of reading easily. Based on the fact above, the researcher formulated the statement of problem, how can the implementation of Index Card Match Strategy improve students‟ reading skill at the eighth grade of SMPN 1 Jetis Ponorogo at the academic year 2013/2014. The research was done in SMPN 1 Jetis Ponorogo started on January 30th until February 20th 2014. The subject of this research was class VIII D that consisted 25 students. In collecting data, the researcher used three research instruments, those are observation checklist, questionnaire, and test. Based on the result of this research, the implementation of Index Card Match Strategy could improve students‟ reading skill, it was seen from the improvement from cycle 1 and cycle 2. The criteria of success were 80. At the beginning of the process (cycle 1), not all of students past the test, there were 14 students got score under 80 with the mean score 64,9, and the final test (cycle 2) 23 students got score above 80 with the mean score 87. Beside of that, the result of questionnaire showed improvement from 68,5% to 85% and the final result of observation checklist showed that they are more active in teaching and learning process than before (cycle 1). Finally, the researcher concluded that the implementation of Index Card Match Strategy could improve the students‟ reading skill at the eighth grade of SMPN 1 Jetis Ponorogo. The researcher gives suggestion that English teachers can use and improve Index Card Match Strategy as the alternative strategy in teaching readin