The Reading Comprehension of the Eighth Grade Students of SMP N 1 Gembong Pati Taught by Using Start Simple Stories Activity in Academic Year 2012/2013

Reading comprehension is more complex than commonly assumed. Reading is always purposeful not only in sense that readers read in different ways based on differing reading purposes. However, many students have difficulties in reading especially in comprehending a text or stories. They felt bored because they got the long or complex stories in the beginning of teaching learning process. So, that’s way they had less reading in English. Therefore, the teacher should have alternative ways to teach in reading. One of that waysis using fun and unique activities. Start Simple Stories Activity is one of solution to solve the students’ problem to learn material to be more interest and fun. The objective of this research is: to find out whether there is any significant difference between the reading comprehension of the eighth grade students of SMP N 1 Gembong Pati before and after being taught by using Start Simple Stories Activity in academic year 2012/2013. The population of the research was the eighth grade students of SMP N 1 Gembong Pati in academic year 2012/2013. The writer uses cluster random sampling technique in taking the sample of the research. The writer gets VIII B as the sample of the research. There are 25 students. The design of this research was experimental research. The writer uses one group pre-test and post-test. The result of the experiment can be seen that the calculation of t-test, with the level of significance 0.05, the Degree of Freedom (Df) is 24, and t-table (tt) 2.064, the t- obtained (to) 13.74. In the other words, t-obtained is higher than t-table. The reading comprehension of the eighth grade students of SMP N 1 Gembong Pati after being taught by using Start Simple Stories Activity is “good”. It is showed by the mean is 76.2 and the standard deviation is 7.5. it is higher than the mean of the reading comprehension of the eighth grade students of SMP N 1 Gembong Pati before being taught by using Start Simple Stories Activity in academic year 2012/2013 which the mean 52.8 and standard deviation is 7.08. It is categorized as “poor”. Based on the research result above, the writer concludes that Start Simple Stories Activity is appropriate in teaching reading comprehension of the eighth grade students of SMP N 1 Gembong Pati in academic year 2012/2013. For the teacher and the other researcher, Start Simple Stories Activity can be applied as an activity in teaching learning process step by step