LEXICAL DENSITY AND GRAMMATICAL INTRICACY OF READING MATERIALS TO THE TENTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL

This study deals with lexical density and grammatical intricacy of English reading texts in the textbook for the first grade of senior high school to measure the difficulty of the text. The objectives of the study are to find out the lexical density and grammatical intricacy which formed in the reading texts of English Alive textbook and type of genre which has the highest both of lexical density and grammatical intricacy. This study was conducted by descriptive method with qualitative approach. The data of this research were the English reading texts of English Alive textbook for senior high school grade tenth published by Yudhistira. The result of the analysis showed that: (1). lexical density is formed by unification of both lexical item and grammatical item which measured to find out the proportion of information in a text while grammatical intricacy is formed by unification of both simple clauses and complex clauses in a text which measured to find out how intricate the text is. (2). lexical density influences the difficulty of reading texts if it has higher proportion of lexical items than grammatical items, While grammatical intricacy also influences the difficulty of reading texts if it has higher proportion of complex clauses in comparison with simple clauses. In this case the result of this study shows that both LD and GI has high proportion which means that the texts are difficult to understand by the students. It is suggested that further textbook writers to concern with the lexical density and grammatical intricacy of the reading texts so that the textbook can be used and understood by the students