THE LEXICAL DENSITY OF READING MATERIAL IN ENGLISH ALIVE TEXTBOOK FOR THE TENTH GRADE STUDENTS' OF SENIOR HIGHY SCHOOL

The study deals with Lexical Density Of Reading Material In English Alive Textbook For The
tenth Grade Students’ Of Senior High School. The aim of this study is to analyze what kind of
genre has the highest lexical density and to reveal lexical density of Reading Material in English
Alive Textbook. This study was conducted by using descriptive qualitative method. The source
of data in this study is reading texts of English Alive textbook for the tenth grade students’ of
Senior High School published by Yudhistira, 2010 . This study was done by analyzing 10 texts
as sample of all reading texts in the textbook by determining the content words and grammatical
words and then calculating the amount of content words divided to the total of words in each
text. The findings show that three texts are in low category (40-50%), six texts are in the medium
category (50-60%), and one text is in the high category (60-70%). The lexical density of recount
text are 54.98 % and 49.20%, narrative texts 53.95% and 49,69 %, procedure texts 55.91 %,
62.86 %, descriptive texts 52.52 % and 54.78 %, news item text 58.78% and 44.26%. The
highest lexical density is Procedure text with the percentage of lexical density 62.86%. So it can
be concluded that the lexical density in the textbook is around (40-70%). It means that the
reading texts are in, high, medium, and low lexical density category. But six of ten reading texts
are in medium category. It is suggested that further textbook writers concern with the lexical density
of the reading texts so that the textbook can be used and understood by the teacher and the students.