Applying Authentic Texts to Improve Students’ Reading Comprehension Skill(A Study at SMAN 1 Ingin Jaya)

The use of authentic texts is addressed for teaching reading comprehension as well as for creating materials to improve the teaching process of this skill. Many practitioners involved in foreign language teaching and research have argued about the benefits of using authentic texts in teaching Reading Comprehension. Authentic texts are the text which are provided and designed for social life not for instructional purposes. Although authentic texts are not created for instructional purposes but it can be the pedagogical support in teaching Reading Comprehension to reach the goal of instructional aims. In addition, to improve students’ reading comprehension skill the writer applied the authentic text in SMAN 1 Ingin Jaya in teaching Reading Comprehension. The kind of authentic texts that writer applied was the authentic texts of job application letter because it accordance with the syllabus of SMAN 1 Ingin Jaya. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the authentic texts can improve students’ reading comprehension skill in SMAN 1 Ingin Jaya and to find out the advantages and disadvantages of applying authentic texts in the classroom. Thus, the writer used the quantitative method by applying pre-experimental design and pretest-posttest and observation technique in collecting data. The sample in this study was class IIIA₁ it was taken from the population of the eight graders of SMAN 1 Ingin Jaya Aceh Besar. Then, pre-test and post-test were analyzed by statistical formula. As presented in the result of test, the mean score of the pre-test was 40,55 and the score of post-test was 56,48. It means that, authentic texts can improve students’ comprehension skill in class IIIA₁. Furhermore, the writer took the conclusion that authentic texts gave some positive advantages to students during teaching Reading in classroom, although at the same time also found many disadvantages to students from applying authentic texts in classroom.