Abstract

THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS’ PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND THEIR SKIMMING READING COMPREHENSION AMONG THE SECOND SEMESTER STUDENTS OF ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM OF STAIN JURAI SIWO METRO

ABSTRACT

By:

M. SAYID WIJAYA

This research was aimed at finding out the description of the correlation between prior knowledge (x) and skimming reading comprehension (y) among the students who took Reading II course at STAIN Jurai Siwo Metro in the academic year of 2010/2011. The population of the research was the students who took Reading II course and the sample of the research was 74 students. The data were taken from prior knowledge and skimming reading comprehension tests and was analyzed by Pearson’s Product Moment correlation through SPSS.

Considering the result of pre survey, one of the problems which had been identified was the students cannot associate their prior knowledge to the reading text well, especially in skimming the text. In skimming the text, the students only had a short time to do the test while they have to find out what the text about. Here, prior knowledge played a crucial role which determined the level of the students’ comprehension. In this case, the writer tried to investigate whether there was correlation between prior knowledge and skimming reading comprehension.

Furthermore, the tests were used to collect the data. The test of prior knowledge was used to measure the level of students’ prior knowledge and consisted of 40 questions in the topics of health, education, culture and religion. Then, the test of skimming reading comprehension was used to measure students’ skimming reading comprehension and consisted of 20 questions in the topics of health, education, culture and religion. Each items consisted of four choices, A, B, C, and D.

Moreover, the result of data analysis illustrates that r _observed = 0.381 and is categorized into modest correlation. Next, r _observed is consulted to r _table of the significant level of 5% = 0.235 and 1% = 0.306. Finally, the data confirms r _observed is higher that r _table.  Thus, it can be inferred that the Alternative Hypothesis (Ha) is accepted. There is positive and significant correlation among the second semester students of English Education Study Program of STAIN Jurai Siwo Metro.