CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
A. Background In this information era, science and technology development demands people to improve their knowledge and experience. One way to improve their knowledge and experience was through reading. Reading is the effective way to get information. If someone said the book wasthe window of the world, we can say that reading is the eye of the world because we can know all the things through reading. Reading is one of the basic skills of English, but it has a very complex process where the reader tries to discover meaning in print page or script. Through reading one can enhance his experiences, develop new concept and improve his thinking or knowledge.
Reading is the third of the four basic language skills, they are: listening, speaking, reading and writing that must be mastered in language learning and language skill that palys an important role in teaching. Reading
comprehension isknowledge understood after reading. It is an active thinking procces with that notonly depend on skill but also on students’ experience and prior knowledge which involved understanding of vocabulary to know the meaning of reading, torelationship among wordsand to concept organizing ideas, to recognize the student’s purpose in making judgment, and to do evaluation. It is taught in integration with the other language skills. As one of the language skill, reading received more emphasis than the other, it is given the first priority. Based on the observation diagnostics text which hadbeen done in SMP Negeri 25 Cenrana Kabupaten Maros , especially for class VIII B still poor in comprehending a reading text. They feltdifficult to understand the reading text and they didnot have a sufficient reading skill to understand the entire text given, as value of observation in the classroom the students’have scores 5.05, this score wasas a poor category. In this research the aim wasto solve this problem until the students hadgood score, while the standard curriculum is 65. Furthermore, comprehension is a really important either in reading and other skills. The ability of someone to comprehend closely related to background knowledge. Coady (1981: 3) states that the interest and background knowledge would enable the students to comprehend at reasonable rate and keep him involved in the spite of synthetic difficulty.
In SMP Negeri 25 Cenrana, based on observation, those problems werecaused by the lack of reading comprehension strategies. As Thompson (1993:2)states, problem in comprehension could be a result of the lack of instruction time assessing reading at the word and sentences levels rather teaching referential or inferential comprehension.
From that case, the teacher should have interesting method or strategy in reading class. There aremany strategies can be used to improve reading comprehension. Here, the researcher would use Context Clues Strategyto develope the students’ reading comprehension of the text read. The researcher hopes this strategy will be an interesting and attractive strategy in learning especially in reading class. Context Clues Strategy can help the students master in reading comprehension which is bit of information from the text, by combining priorknowledge, allow the students to decide the meaning of unknown word in the story, or article that they read. It is also useful to guide the studentsto figure out the meaning of a word from the context. Beside that the context clues would be helpful to motivate the students to improve reading comprehension when it was applied because it presented very simple instruction that can be easy??????????????????????
DAPATKAN PROPOSAL ATAU SKRIPSINYA LENGKAPNYA DI SINI ATAU KLIK DI SINI
