ABSTRACT
This final project was about the use of short stories to develop student’s reading comprehension skill for the eight grade students at SMP Negeri 4 Jepara in the academic year of 2008/2009.
The objective of this study is to find out the result of using English short stories to improve students’ reading comprehension achievement.
In order to achieve the objective of this research, the writer designed an experimental research and chose pre-test post-test control group design with one treatment for this study. The writer took two classes, one as an experimental group and the other as a control group that consist of 34 students each group.
To obtain the data, the writer carried out three steps. The first step was pre-test and the second step was treatments. There were two activities between control and experimental class in the treatments. The differences of the activities were on the materials used. At the end of the activities or the third steps, it was used the post-test as an assessment test. In analyzing the data, the writer used statistical analysis with t-test formula. The value of the t-test was calculated by using SPSS program and the result will be attached in the appendices.
The result of this study showed that the students in the experimental group got the better development in the average scores than the control group in reading comprehension test. The experimental class got better development, the average increased 7.64 points (from 63.24 to 70.88), whereas the control class only increased 4.85 points (from 62.65 to 67.50). it was supported by the significant difference between t-value and the critical value, that was t-value was higher than the critical value (2.186 > 1.67) with 5 % alpha level, number of subjects 68 and df = 66.
Based on this finding, it is suggested that short stories can be used by the teachers to improve students’ ability in reading comprehension.
