ACTIVATING EFL STUDENTS' BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE TO ENHANCE THEIR READING COMPREHENSION (A Quasi-Experimental Study at MTs Sabilurrosyad Jatinagara, Ciamis)

Background knowledge plays an important role in reading comprehension, the more people know about the topic, the easier people to read a text, understand it and retain the information. However, previous study shows that MTs students generally face challenges when reading: lack of motivation, limited vocabulary and less experience that make the students not understand completely what text is about. In this part, the researcher intended to activate EFL students’ background knowledge to enhance their reading comprehension. This study is intended a) to find out the students’ reading comprehension skill before their background knowledge is activated, b) to find out the students’ reading comprehension skill after their background knowledge is activated, c) to find out the significant differences between the students’ reading comprehension before and after activated their background knowledge. The population of this study is the 9th grade students of MTs Sabilurrosyad. The class 9th A was taken by the school as the sample. The instruments of this study are the test and documentations. Therefore, Quasi-experimental was used in this study. From the result of pretest and posttest data analysis, the average score of the experimental class of pretest and posttest score is from 52.52 to 78.43. The accounting of "t" test uses the paired t-test. It was known that the was 9.11 and ttable was 2.07. Therefore, the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted, and the null hypothesis was rejected because the is higher than the ttable. It means there is the significant differences of students’ skills in reading comprehension after their background knowledge is activated. The conclusion shows that in activating EFL students’ background knowledge can enhance their reading comprehension. Therefore, it is recommended that this strategy be used by English teachers during teaching reading comprehension