THE EFFECT OF APPLYING SEMANTIC MAPPING STRATEGY ON THE STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION

This study deals with the effect of applying Semantic Mapping Strategy on the students’ reading comprehension. It was conducted by using experimental research design. The population of this study was the Grade Ten (X) students of SMA Negeri 15 Medan with five parallel classes. The samples of the study were two classes divided into two groups, experimental and control group which were chosen by using lottery technique. Seventy six students were taken as the samples. The experimental group was taught by using Semantic Mapping Strategy, while the control group was taught by using Conventional Way. The instrument for collecting the data was a multiple choice test of narrative text. The data of this study were taken from the students’ score of reading test. Kuder Richardson (KR21) formula was applied to obtain the reliability of the test. Based on the calculation, it showed that the reliability of the test was 0.85 categorized as high reliability. There were two data used in this research. They were pre-test and post-test. Then, after analyzing the data, it was found that the value of tobserved was 4,899 with the degree of freedom (df)=74 at the level of significance p(0,05) = 1,893. It means that tobserved is greater than ttable (4,899 > 1,893). The result of this study shows that Semantic Mapping Strategy has a significant effect on the students’ reading comprehension. It means that the hypothesis is accepted.