Using Graphic Organizers as Media to Increase Students' Reading Comprehension

Graphic organizers are visual frameworks assisting students in the comprehension of a text. It helps students to organize information, process information, see the relationships between ideas, and understand and apply information more easily. The aims of this study were: (1) to find out whether or not the use of graphic organizers in teaching reading can increase students’ reading comprehension and (2) to discover the difficulties in applying graphic organizers as media in teaching reading. This study was conducted at second year in MTsS Darul Ihsan Aceh Besar which involved 25 students as the sample. The population was 146 students. The writer used purposive sampling in deciding the sample. The methods used in this study were quantitative with pre-experimental study of pretest-posttest group design and qualitative method in which the instruments used were written test and interview guideline. For the technique of data collection, the writer administered pre-test, treatment, post-test, and interview. The data collected were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The result of the test showed that the mean score of the pre-test was 52; meanwhile, the post-test was 70. The finding revealed that the improvement of the mean was 18. Furthermore, the result of t-test calculation showed that tcount was higher than the ttable (tcount = 5.33 > ttable = 1.711). So, the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted and the null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected. It meant that there was the significant increase of the students’ reading comprehension after they are taught by using graphic organizers. The difficulties of using graphic organizers as media in teaching reading were: the students were lack of vocabularies and poor basic knowledge of structures which took times for re-explanation and reduced time for exercising graphic organizers.