Electronic Theses and Dissertation

Reading, as an important skill in studying a foreign language, is a way to get new information in a text. most english teachers face various problems in teaching reading. these problems can be related to the teachers' difficulty in making the students understand the texts, the students' ability in answering the questions within texts, and their lack of interest in studying reading. departing from such problems encountered during the writer's teaching practice at sman 6 banda aceh and based on a theory on grammar translation method which can help students improve their achievement in reading, the writer is challenged to prove whether this method is really effective in teaching reading. this experimental research entitled "the application of using grammar translation method in teaching reading" was conducted at sman 6 banda aceh. in this research the writer took two classes and each class consists of 30 students as the samples. xi ia i class was selected as an experimental group and xi is 1 as control group. before starting teaching the writer gave a pretest to both groups. it consist of 20 questions which are related to reading comprehension questions, antonyms and synonyms, constructing sentences and filling in the blanks. then the writer taught the experimental group by giving a four session treatment related to the application of grammar translation method in teaching reading. after the treatment, a posttest was given to both groups. based on the research conducted the writer found that teaching reading by using grammar translation method is not applicable. based on statistical analysis of the experimental and control groups, it was found that the mean score of pretest for experimental group is 45.66 and for control group is 40. the mean score of posttest for experimental group is 46.5 and for control group is 51.61. after analyzing all the data collected from the experimental and control groups, the writer discusses some findings. the value of t-test is -3.56 while the critical value of t-table at level significances 0.05 and 0.01 with degree of freedom (df) 58 are 1.671 and 2.390 for one tail test. it can be seen that t-test is lower than t-table (1.671 and 2.390) so that the h is rejected. therefore, the hypothesis which says "grammar translation method is still applicable in teaching reading to the second grade students of sman 6 banda aceh" is rejected.