Research Plan

The Use of Pictures as Media to Improve Students’ Reading Comprehension at the Eight Grade
Students’ of SMP Negeri 7 Gorontalo

1. Background
Reading is an important skill developing second language competence. The success of a learning
a second language is by taking the power of reading. Among the four skills, reading is one of the
skills that plays an important role in learning English. It is a basic skill in learning English
because every teaching learning activity in an English class involves reading (Grellent, 1996). In
the classroom, we will face many techniques applied to the students under the expectation that they are
able to or easy to understand the lesson. For a teacher, it is necessary to find new teaching media to
overcome the problems and not to forget to motivate the students. In this paper, the writer wants to know
the effect of picture as a media to improve students’ reading comprehension. To make the students easily
understand about the reading material, teacher needs to have a teaching media. Then, the writer chooses
visual media that is picture to increase students’ reading mastery. Pictures are considered as the best
media in teaching reading because using picture as a teaching media are able to give the students a clear
illustration regarding the correlated topics in texts, tell the students what is going on, and what are the
persons in the text are talking about. Nowadays, the pictures and the technologies are becoming more and
more advanced. In this decade, we can already materialize a more advanced picture that added by motion
and sounds by using simple applications provided in home personal computer. Moreover, the students
now are quite used and interested to apply any high teach media.
Based on the explanation above, the researcher conducted the research in SMP Negeri 7
Gorontalo. The reason why the researcher chose the school because the method which used by the teacher
was bored especially in teaching reading. So that’s way, the researcher implemented picture as a media
becausepicture help the students easily understand a description or explanation of the writing. It means
that, picture are able to attract students attention to learn reading.
2. Problem Statement

Based on the background above, the researcher is formulated the problem statement as follows
“How is the improvement of students’ reading comprehension by using picture at SMP Negeri 7
Gorontalo?”
3. Research Design

The research design in this research will be used a pre-experimental method, with one
group pretest and posttest design. The researcher used one-group pretest posttest design usually
involves three steps: (a) administering a pretest measuring the dependent variable; (b) applying
the experimental treatment T to the subjects; (c) administering a posttest, again measuring the
dependent variable. Differences attributed to application of the experimental treatment are then
evaluated by comparing the pretest and posttest score.