The Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement and Perception Towards the Use of Online Reading Material of the Seventh Graders of SMP Tri Dharma Palembang

The use of online reading materials to improve students’ reading comprehension achievement is highly recommended. Online reading is separate from reading printed texts since it involved reading digital content such as e-books, e- dictionaries, web pages, and online education. Thus, the aims of this study were to investigate the use of online reading materials to improve students’ reading comprehension achievement and to find out significant mean difference between the students’ who were taught by using online reading materials and those who were not taught by using online reading materials. The quasi-experimental design was employed to compare the results of pretest and posttest in experimental and control groups. The 70 students were selected and divided into two groups purposively. 35 students in experimental group and 35 students in control group. In addition, pretest, posttest and students’ perception were used to collect the data. The data were analyzed by using t-test (paired sample t-test and independent sample t-test) with the help of SPSS v.25 program. The result of paired sample t- test in experimental group showed that t-obtained was 9,420> t-table (df=34) was 1.690 at the significant level of 0.05 and sig. (2-tailed) was 0.000 < 0.05. It could be concluded that there was significant improvement in students’ reading comprehension achievement after being taught by using online reading materials at SMP Tri Dharma Palembang. Furthermore, the result of independent sample t- test showed that t-obtained was 20.075> t-table (df=68) was 1.667 at the significant level of 0.05 and sig. (2-tailed) was 0.000 < 0.05. It means that there was significant mean difference between experimental and control groups. The findings revealed that teaching by online reading materials was effective to improve students’ reading comprehension achievement at the seven-grade students of SMP Tri Dharma Palembang in the academic year of 2022/2023.
Key words : Reading, Reading Comprehension, Online Reading Material