Authentic materials for reading comprehension

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to analyze the importance of authentic materials to improve reading comprehension of students at Cambridge School of Languages. This study had a quantitative approach since a reading pre-test and post-test based on a standardized Cambridge 2020 test was applied to measure the student's level of reading comprehension. In addition, this research used a pre-experimental design because the treatment was applied to a single group of students in the A2 level course (in total 8 students) formed the experimental group, the level of this research is exploratory, correlational, and descriptive. Six kinds of authentic materials were chosen: newspaper articles, magazines, song lyrics, movie reviews, travel brochures, and biographies; focused on improving reading comprehension. Reading comprehension strategies such as predicting, scanning, skimming, inferring, making connections, questioning, and summarizing were also applied. On the other hand, each lesson plan was planned in three stages: pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading. The verification of the hypothesis proposed in the present study was carried out by statistical analysis of the results obtained in the pre-test and post-test. For the verification of the hypothesis, the SPSS program was used to find the normality test with Friedman's test, T-test, paired samples statistic, and paired samples test. The post-test results showed that students who worked with authentic materials significantly improved their reading comprehension skills. Therefore, it is important to suggest the implementation of these authentic materials that strengthen reading comprehension skills at the literal and inferential levels. Literal comprehension level consists of understanding what the text states explicitly, recognizing information within the text. Inferential comprehension level analyzes the premises in the text to deduce a conclusion. In addition, students reflect more interest in reading, improve reading comprehension skills, and expose the student to the maximum amount of real language in order to obtain more information from real life. To conclude, the use of authentic materials positively influenced the improvement of reading comprehension and encourages students to read for pleasure.