Teaching Descriptive Texts to Tenth Grade Students in Deli Serdang

The objectives of this study were to describe the teachers' ways of teaching reading of descriptive texts to tenth grade students in Deli Serdang, Indonesia and to reveal the underlying reasons for these approaches. This study was conducted by using a descriptive qualitative design. The subjects were two English teachers who taught the tenth grade students at SMA Swasta Melati Hamparan Perak in the 2018/2019 academic year. The data were collected by observing, video recording and interviewing, and were analyzed by using Miles and Huberman techniques. The findings show that the approaches that the teachers used were not focused on enabling the students to be independent or skilful readers. Most of the ways directed the students to become good at reading texts or translating the texts into Bahasa rather than teaching how to comprehend descriptive texts. Most of the approaches were focused on translation, vocabulary enrichment, stating ideas, pronunciation and managing the class. The approaches did not facilitate reading comprehension. This was due to the misperception of the concept of teaching reading comprehension. Keywords: teaching, reading comprehension, descriptive te