Journal Review: 'Using Short Story to Improve Student’s Reading Comprehension’

Name : Anis Septianingsih

Class : 4E

NPM : 1910631060066

Journal : ‘Using Short Story to Improve Student’s Reading Comprehension’ by Amelia Eka Frimasary

Journal Review

A journal by Amelia Eka Frimasary called ‘Using Short Story to Improve Student’s Reading Comprehension’ attempts to explain a problem caused by the unwillingness in reading and the need to achieve a success in English among Indonesian junior high school students. As we all know, English is considered as foreign language in Indonesia. That is why Indonesian students find difficulties in learning English. There is no way for them to adapt themselves in this era except by learning English. 

The success of someone in learning is often supported by their willingness to read a lot. A person's interest in reading is very important for improving their achievement, because if they do not have interest in it, then they will not even have the motivation to read. It is as if they want to improve their English, but they are not really willing to read English. They consider English is difficult to learn before even trying to learn it. 

Therefore, Amelia Eka Frimasary in her journal conducted an experiment in SMPN 2 Bengkulu by introducing a new way to encourage the reading willingness in students using short story. The reason is because in teenagers' level, short story is the most interested literary work to read. It is not too long to read and has various interesting topics. So hopefully through this way, they can improve their comprehension in reading without boredom.

  To find out the differences in students’ score and also to know whether their interest was improved or not after the use of short story and handbook, the researcher did an experiment using questionnaire method. The result was satisfactory. It was found that short story can improve reading comprehension of the students and it made them feel interested and encouraged read English texts. The method was successful to increase the score of the students.

This journal has many advantages, one of them is that the researcher chose an interesting topic for her research, and she made her work easy to read by all people. The result of her research also turned out to be successful. The researcher kept the conclusion brief but clear, and she also enclosed very useful rational suggestions at the end of her paper.

Though this journal also has its weaknesses, such as the researcher only elected forty students to fulfill her questionnaire for the experiment while there were more than nine classes existed for second year students in SMPN 2 Bengkulu. So, the result of the experiment might not be able to represent all the opinions of the students.