THE USE OF MIND MAPPING TECHNIQUE TO INCREASE STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION IN DESCRIPTIVE TEXT

The objective of this research is to find out whether using Mind Mapping technique is an effective way to increase the students’ ability in reading comprehension. The population of this research was the second year students of SMP Negeri 3 Bandar Lampung that consists of seven classes and two classes were chosen as the experimental class and the try-out class. The research design was one group pretest posttest design. In collecting data, the reseacher administered pretest, treatments, and posttest. The result of the students’ score before and after treatmens implied that mind mapping technique could increase the students’ reading comprehesions. The mean score of pre-test was 57.64 and post-test was 72.11. By comparing between the mean of pre-test and post-test, it can be found that the increase of the mean was 14.47 point. Paired-sample t-test indicates signifiant increase of students reading comprehension achievement after the implementation of Mind Mapping technique ((33) = 8.790; p = 0.000, p0.05) Based on the data, it can be concluded that mind mapping technique is worth applying in the teaching –learning of English reading comprehension ability, particularly at the second year students of SMPN 3 Bandar Lampung.Keywords: descriptive text, mind mapping technique, reading comprehensio