Manga readers’ perceptions on manga’s contribution to their reading comprehension skill improvement

The objective of this research is to find out about manga readers’ perception on manga’s contribution to their reading comprehension skill improvement and to what extent reading manga contributes their reading comprehension skill improvement. This study was a qualitative descriptive research and categorized as survey study. The participants of this study were 25 readers who were between 16 to 25 years old and have already liked reading manga. This study used questionnaire and interview to collect the research data. The analysis results lead to several findings. First, 92% of manga readers had positive perception on manga’s contribution to their reading comprehension skill improvement. They believed that reading manga in English gave more benefit in improving their reading comprehension skills. Second, 90,2 % of readers perceived that reading manga could contribute to the improvement of their reading comprehension skill including the ability to recognize literary device; the ability to make inference using background/prior knowledge; the ability to follow the structure of passage; the ability to develop and use a battery of reading strategis; and the ability to determine authors’ purpose. Therefore, based on the findings of this study, the researcher concludes that reading manga could contribute to the readers’ reading comprehension skill improvement. With these results, the researcher suggests to the teachers and / or educator to start using manga as reading material in the classroom. In adition, she also suggests the English learners to read and use manga as an option to learn and improve their English reading comprehension skill