IMPROVING READING COMPREHENSION THROUGH PQRST OF THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMP HARAPAN NUSANTARA IN ACADEMIC YEAR 2015/2016

Reading skill especially in comprehending a text is considered as an important skill. This skill should be taken into account in the teaching learning process. However, the phenomenon existing in school clearly shows that reading is one of the biggest problems for the students especially in VIII.1 class. The undertaking of the present classroom action research was mainly intended to figure out whether the implementation of PQRST can improved the subjects‟ reading comprehension. The subjects of the present study were the eighth grade students of SMP Harapan Nusantara in academic year 2015/2016 that consisted of 20 male and 19 female. Based on the result of the pre-test which was carried out in the pre-cycle, it pointed out that the subjects‟ ability in reading comprehension was still low where the mean score of the pre-test was 2.3. The present classroom action research was then carried out by using PQRST in two-planned cycles. The result of the post-test in each cycle was obviously showed that there was significance improvement concerning the subjects‟ ability in reading comprehension of narrative text in which it improved from the result of pre-test; 2.3 to 3.2. This research furthermore showed that there was changing learning behavior as the result of the positive responses concerning the technique applied in improving the subjects‟ reading comprehension. To summarize, the present classroom action study proved that PQRST could improve reading comprehension of the tenth grade students of SMP Harapan Nusantara in academic year 2015/2016; in addition, the subjects also responded positively the implementation of PQRST.