Abstract :
Reading involves two kinds of knowledge namely; knowledge of substance and
knowledge of language. The knowledge of substance refers to the readers’
understanding of the content and of the text they are reading, while the knowledge
of language refers to the readers’ understanding of structure, vocabulary, and the
relationship between word to word, phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, or even
paragraph to paragraph of the language the reader is dealing with.
The objectives of this research were to find out whether there was a difference of
students’ reading comprehension ability before and after being taught through
reference word and to see if there was a significant increase of students’ reading
comprehension ability after being taught reference word. This research used one
group pretest posttest design.
It is assumed that students’ understanding of reference word gives positive effect
to ward students’ reading comprehension ability. Thus, the more students
recognize reference word in the written material, the higher their reading
comprehension ability will be.
The population of this research was the tenth grade students of SMA YP UNILA
B. Lampung. The sample of this research was X5 and it was selected by using
random sampling technique through lottery. In collecting the data the researcher
administered the pretest, treatments and posttest. The data was analyzed by using
statistical computerization i.e. repeated measure t-test of SPSS version 15.00 for
windows. In which the significance was determined by p<0.05. The result of t-test
computation showed that p=0.00 (p<0.05, p=0.00). Therefore, it is concluded that
there is a difference of students’ reading comprehension ability before and after
being taught through reference word and there is a significant increase of
students’ reading comprehension ability after being taught reference word.