Reading is more that just a visual attention.

The readers not only must see and identify

the written words in front of them but they also have to interpret what they read to decipher
the meaning behind it. That is why, reading without comprehend\sion means nothing and it is
important to comprehend the text to gain the information needed from the text. Nay, without
comprehension skills, a student will struggle with recall of information and total
understanding of the text.
Quite often, there is reliable evidence that reading comprehension difficulty occurs in
English foreign learners. For Indonesian students, comprehending an English text is not as
easy as Indonesia text. It is because Indonesian students do not get used to apply English in
their daily life. It is often the case that written language is different from spoken language.
Spoken language tends to have shorter clauses connected by more coordinate conjunctions,
while writing has longer clauses and more subordination. Besides, an English word has many
meanings which depend on the context which is called grammatical meaning. On the other
hand, the students usually just focus on the meaning of the one word not in the whole text, so
that they will look up the meaning of the word in the dictionary when they come across a
word that they do not understand. They do not realize that it would be a waste of time.
Whereas knowing how to pronounce words even knowing the meaning of individual words is
not sufficient. It indicates that the learners are not able to receive even understand the
message of the text. This case happens because they only read the English text without
comprehending the text so that they get difficult to find the main idea or the topic of the text.
It may seem like an obvious thing to say, but we read in order to gain meaning from a text.
In addition, reading comprehension is primarily a matter of developing appropriate,
efficient comprehension strategies. The good readers usually apply reading strategy
appropriately. They can skim a text to get the general idea of a passage. For example, most
readers are able to read only a title of a text and the first paragraph or more to determine what
it is about and whether or not they want to read the text. Also, good readers can scan things
they read to find the specific information. For example, locating a number in the phone book.
Good readers use either skimming or scanning to read for comprehension. Furthermore, there
is one more strategy in reading comprehension i.e. reading for thorough comprehension.
Unlike skimming and scanning, activities that aim at having students read for thorough
comprehension require students to read meticulously. The main goal is for the students to
understand the total meaning of a reading selection. Realizing those strategies as one of
important parts of reading, the students can apply those strategies appropriately in order to
make the students read efficiently even comprehending the text.
 Related to the problem above, the teaching of the reading based on the school based
curriculum (KTSP, 2006:10) for senior high school for the eleventh grade students has the
following purposes: (1) to find out the structure of the text, (2) to find out the main idea of the
text, (3) to find out the specific information of the text. Therefore, it can be said that
comprehending the text is badly required by the students to gain the meaning of the text.
In the basic course outline of the English competency based curriculum for Senior
High School, it is stated that the objective of learning English in Indonesia is expected to
reach the informational level because they are prepared to continue their education to
university level. They are supposed to reach the epistemic literacy level is too high because
English as foreign language in Indonesia (Depdiknas, 2006:307).
Based on the informal interview with deputy head of the curriculum of MAN Jember
1. The researcher got the information that the eleventh grade students in MAN Jember 1 are
divided into four programs such as; natural science, social science, religious, and language
study program. The language program students learn multi foreign languages; they are
English, Arabic and Japan. The researcher only wants to concern on the eleventh grade
language program in MAN Jember 1 because the language program students get English time
more intensive than the others. They get additional time in learning English. Moreover, the
researcher conducts the informal interview to the English teacher of the eleventh grade
language study program MAN Jember 1. Based on the interview results, the researcher got
the information that the students have English class five hours in a week with two hours
additional time. They only use English worksheet in learning English without any English
textbook and get the other materials from the teacher directly.
Furthermore, based on the school based curriculum (KTSP, 2006:316) the eleventh
grade students of senior high school are taught Narrative Text. It is the one of five genres of
the text that is taught in Senior High school. Narrative text is found in two semesters of the
eleventh grade. It means that the students of the eleventh grade get Narrative text material in
both odd and even semesters. In line with the explanation above, the students also have got
the Narrative text material when they were in tenth grade. Thereby, the researcher is
interested to conduct this study by describing the real condition.

1.2 The Operational Definition of the Terms

The operational definitions of the variables refer to definition of terms in a way that
the explanation used in this study with the aim is to avoid misconception about the ideas and
concepts between the researcher and the reader. They are as follow:
1.2.1 Descriptive Study
According to Syaodih (2011:72), Descriptive study is the most basic research. This
study is aimed to describe the phenomenon either the natural or man-made phenomenon. This
study examines the form of activities, characteristics, changes, relationships, and similarity to
the other phenomena.
In line with the statement above, “descriptive study is the study that really describes
what is occurred in an arena, field or certain area” (Arikunto, 2010:3). This descriptive study
is proposed to describe systematically, accurately, and factually the reading comprehension
achievement of the eleventh grade language study program students at MAN Jember 1 in the
2011/2012 academic year without giving treatment, manipulating or changing to variables but
describing the real condition.

1.2.2 Reading Comprehension Achievement

In this study, reading comprehension achievement deals with the students’ scores on reading
comprehension test in understanding the text, by finding the general and specific information
in terms of word, sentence, and paragraph meaning.

1.2.3 Narrative Text

The reading material that will be used in this research is narrative texts. Narrative text is a
kind of text to retell the story that past tense. The purpose of the text is toentertain or to
amuse the readers or listeners about the story.