THE READABILITY OF READING MATERIALS IN ENGLISH TEXTBOOK FOR THE NINTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMP SWASTA NASRANI 1 MEDAN

This study investigated the readability level in an English textbook entitled “Interactive English 3” which is used by the ninth grade students of Junior High School. This chosen textbook was published by Yudhistira in 2009. There were 3 text genres such as procedure, report and narrative text. The study was designed in qualitative research. The data were collected from all the reading materials of the textbook which consisted of 22 reading texts. SMOG Grading Formula was chosen as the technique to analyze the data. From the analysis, it was found that 77% of the texts were readable based on the SMOG Grade Level. Meanwhile there were only 23% of the texts that showed unappropriate level to be read by ninth grade students regarding to the level of readability which showed 3 texts were too easy to understand because they were appropriate for grade 6, and 2 texts were too difficult to understand because they were appropriate for both grade 11 and 12. Hence, this textbook was appropriate to be used by teacher and students in ninth grade level because the general texts inside it has shown appropriate level according to SMOG Grade Level even though there were still some texts which had polysyllabic words (more than 3 syllables).