THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS’ INTEREST IN NARRATIVE TEXT (FABLES) AND THEIR READING COMPREHENSION AT THE SECOND YEAR STUDENTS OF MTS MASMUR PEKANBARU

Basically, the students have learned English since they were in Elementary School and they have been taught English 4 periods a week as long as 4 semesters at MTs Masmur Pekanbaru. They have got various techniques given by their teacher to improve their English skill especially in reading. In reality some students’ point of view where the teacher did the teaching practice, the students more tend to be interested in reading fables. Fables are more exciting than reading English text books that are not interesting at all. But the students who dislike reading fables said that there was no use to read fables. The difference opinion is caused by the level of students’ interest toward fables. The aim of this research is to find out the correlation between students’ interest in funny stories and their reading comprehension. It is firstly proven by the writer through her preliminary research before doing the research which shows the symptoms as explained as follows: Some of the students are interested in reading fables still get low score in exercise and Some of the students are not interested in reading fables get good score in exercise . The subject of this research is the second year students of MTs Masmur Pekanbaru in the 2009/2010 academic year. The object of this research is the students’ interest in narrative text (fables) and their reading comprehension. The instrument of this research is test and questionnaire. In analyzing the data, the writer uses SPSS version 17.00. Based on the research finding, the result can be concluded that there is significant correlation between students’ interest in narrative text (fables) and their reading comprehension as shown by the explanation below: a. The score of correlation coefficient 0.444 ≥ 0.325 in significant level 5% and 0.418 in significant level 1% (see table product moment). It means that H is accepted which indicates that it is a moderate level correlation. b. The probability score or sig. (2- tailed) is 0.004 < 0.05. It means that H a accepted