THE EFFECT OF COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH TOWARDS STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION

The research aims at finding out the effect of Communicative Approach’s learning model to the students’ reading ability. The research was conducted at SMP PGRI 3 South Jakarta. The method applied was experimental research. Samples were taken randomly and grouped in two classes of experiment and control consisting of 30 students of each group. The analysis of data for hypothesis test was by using t-test. Prior to the calculation of hypothesis test, it was preceded by the calculation of normality test by applying Lilliefors and homogenity test with F-test. Findings show that for experiment class, Lcount = 0.1097 and Ltabel = 0.161, even controll class it is obtained Lcount = 0.1214 and Ltable = 0.161. if Fcount= 1.32 and Ftable=1,84. It can be concluded that both research groups are normally distributed and the data is homogenous with α = 0.05. the hypothesis test with t-test statistic formula, it is obtained that tcount is 2.46 and ttable is 1.67. After being compared, tcount value is somewhat higher than ttable value (2.46 > 1.67).


INTRODUCTION
The English language has become an important role in people's daily life (Ahyani and Hasbullah, 2018). English is an international language is that English is the product of a world economy cultural system, and it is the preferred medium of the international communities of business, science, culture and intellectual life. English is an international language that it is the most widespread medium of international communication. The English language has become a global matter. Its uses have expanded to cover virtually anything from the language of international relations to the language of science; from the language of international business to the language of tourism and popular culture. The presence of English can be felt in all existing media. As a global language, English develops a special role that is recognized in every country. This might seem like stating the obvious, but it is not for the notion of special role that has many facets. Such a role will be the most evident in countries where large numbers of the people speak language as their mothertongue.
The existence of English today from century to century has made it becomes the "lingua franca", with its "enormous functional flexibility" (House, 2003:243). An essential reason for this expansion has been the role of non-native speakers of English and their ready acceptance of the language. In fact, the overall majority of English speakers in the worldwide are non-native speakers who often use the language in influential networks, and the proportion of those speakers is growing rapidly. English as "lingua franca" or as an international means of daily talks and conversation which is spoken by more than half of the world's population. People have significantly put their intention in dealing with English language to lessen the 'barrier' of their cross-continent communication.
Along with the variety of uses in different fields, non-native speakers have also brought about a variety of Englishes, in the linguistic sense. Since English used as a "lingua franca", it characteristically manifests itself in spoken language, and accent is one evident area of this diversity. According to those who appreciate linguistic diversity, variation in accent is acceptable as long as intelligibility and conversation flow will be secured. This means that interlocutors are required high-grade accommodation skills as well as cultural sensitivity since many of the English accents native or non-native, they will encounter will be unfamiliar to them.
Nowadays, the role of English in the world according to Hornby, et. al. (2005:506), "English is the language originally of England, now is spoken in many other countries and used as a language of international communication through out the world". In Indonesia, English which is the first foreign language, has been one of the main subjects among other lessons taught to students from the level of elementary up to secondary or high school levels. Various topics and discussions are carried out in the class as established by each curriculum applied by each educational institution. Furthermore, there are more and more internationally-standardized schools (which apply certain international curricula) to meet with the global need of language competence.
The communicative approach is used in the language teaching that starts from a theory of language as communication. Communicative language teaching sets as its goal for the teaching of communicative competence. in Hyme's view in Richards and Rodgers (2001:159), "The goal of language teaching is to develop the communicative competence". What does the communicative competence mean? Perhaps we can clarify this term by first comparing it with the concept of grammatical competence. Grammatical competence refers to the knowledge we have of a language that accounts for our ability to produce sentences in a language. It refers to knowledge of the building blocks of sentences (e.g., parts of speech, tenses, phrases, clauses, sentence patterns) and how sentences are formed.
Grammatical competence is the focus of many grammar practice books, which typically presents a rule of grammar on one page, and provides exercises to practice using the rule on the other page. The unit of analysis and practice is typically the sentence. While grammatical competence is an important dimension of language learning, it is clearly not all that is involved in learning a language since one can master the rules of sentence formation in a language and still not be very successful at being able to use the language for meaningful communication. "By learning grammar, someone can understand what URL: http://jim.unindra.ac.id/index.php/jedu/index DOI: https://doi.org/xx.xxxxx/xx.xxxx.xxxx someone else talks because his language could be organized, so they can communicate each other well" (Nurjanah, Anggoro and Dwiastuty, 2017:310).
Communicative competence includes the following aspects of language knowledge, those are knowing how to use language for a range of different purposes and functions, knowing how to vary our use of language according to the setting and the participants (e.g., knowing when to use formal and informal speech or when to use language appropriately for written as opposed to spoken communication), knowing how to produce and to understand different types of texts (e.g., narratives, reports, interviews, conversations), and knowing how to maintain communication despite having limitations in one's language knowledge (e.g., through using different kinds of communication strategies). In other words, communicative competence considers language as a tool used for communication.
The Communicative Approach is based on the idea that learning language succesfully comes through having to communicate real meaning. The goal of teachers, especially of those employing the Communicative Approach in their lessons, is to "produce" communicatively competent students. When learners are involved in real communication, their natural strategies for language acquisition will be used, and this will allow them to learn to use the language. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) or Communicative Approach (CA) is an approach to language teaching that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of study. CLT is usually characterized as a broad approach to teaching rather than as a teaching method with a aclearly defined set of classroom practices of features.
Classroom activities guided by the Communicative Approach are characterized by trying to produce meaningful and real communication at all levels. As a result, there may be more emphasis on skills than systems, lessons are more learner-centered, and there may be the use of authentic materials. When the goal of instruction is communicative competence, everyday materials such as train schedules, newspaper, articles and travel tourism website become appropriate classroom materials because reading them is one way the communicative competence developed. Since communication is a process, it is insufficient for students to simply have knowledge of target language forms, meaning and function. Students must be able to apply this knowledge in negotiating meaning. It is through the interaction between speaker and listener (reader and writer) that meaning becomes clear.
According to Irmawati (2012:94), "The Communicative Approach is followed by meaningful principle that learning would improve if the subject was relevant to the need of the students". The main principles of Communicative Approach include: goal of effective communication, learning language by using it to communicate, focus on meaning and appropriate usage, focus both on fluency and accuracy, use the authentic materials to reflect real life situation, and integration of four skills (listening, reading, speaking, and writing).
The Communicative Approach could be said as the product of educators and linguistics who had grown dissatisfied with audio lingual and grammar translation methods of foreign language instruction. They felt that students are not learning enough realistic JEdu: Journal of English Education Pages 79-88, Volume 1, Number 2, July 2021 whole language. They do not know how to communicate using appropriate social language: in brief, they were at loss to communicate in the culture of the language studied. In the intervening years, the Communicative Approach had been adapted to the elementary, middle, secondary and post secondary levels and the underlying philosophy has spawned different teaching method known under a variety of names, including national function, teaching for proficiency based instruction and communicative language teaching. Briefly, the Communicative Approach is one of the important approaches to help learners to be able to contact with others in order to talk fluency and to express about themselves confidently and to present many social issues in their environment as quick as possible.
Reading does not draw on one kind of cognitive skill, nor does it have a straightforward outcome. Most of the texts are understood in different ways by different reader. Reading is a complex developmental challenge that we know to be intertwined with many other developmental accomplishments: attention, memory, language and motivation. Reading is not only a cognitive psycholinguistic activity but also a social activity. Many factors affect student's success in ability to read. In general, these can be identified by some factors: standard and poor teacher, environmental conditions, subject matter and techniques to learn lesson material.
For foreign language learners, in reading, they have to be prepared to use various ability and strategies that are already possessed from their reading experiences in their native language. They will need knowledge they possess to help themselves in many dimensions of language implicated in any text. Researchers have established that the act of reading is a no-linear process that is context dependent. Readers tend to jump ahead or to go back to different segments of the text, depending on what they are reading to find out. Asking learner to "read" a text requires teachers specifying a reading goal. One minimal goal is to ask the learners to find particular grammatical construction or to identify words that relate to particular features or topics of the reading. But such goals are only partial. For example, a text also reveals a lot about the readers for which it is written and a lot about subject matter that foreign language learners may know or may anticipate.
Beyond knowledge about how the English writing system is working out, though there is a point in students' growth when we expect "real reading" to start. Students are expected without help to read some unfamiliar texts, to rely on the print and to draw meaning from it. There are many reasons why students have difficulty in learning to read. On the students' part, the study focused on the investigation of reading problems. The reading problems basically deal with linguistic and non-linguistic problems. The linguistic problems consist of vocabulary, sentence or grammatical problems, and rhetorical structure, while the non-linguistic problems consist of background knowledge used in reading.
There are several types of reading and corresponding types of activities to develop corresponding reading skills: (1) skimming reading is reading to confirm expectations; reading for communicative tasks; (2) general reading or scanning is reading to extract specific information; reading for general understanding; and (3)  A person may read in order to gain information, to verify existing knowledge, and to comment on a writer's ideas or writing style. A person may also read for enjoyment or to enhance knowledge of the language being read. The purpose of reading guides the reader's selection of texts. Its purpose also determines the appropriate approach to reading comprehension. A person using a scientific of articles to support an opinion needs to know the vocabulary that is used, understand the facts and cause-effect sequences that are presented and recognized ideas that are presented as hypothesis and givens.
Comprehending English texts can be learned through learning to read properly and carefully to discern ideas, points, and the general feelings that the writer intends to convey. Understanding the contents of a sentence is not simply knowing the meaning of each and every word in the text, but also to understand the general content of said English text. The ability to comprehend English texts on students can be properly detected through continuous evaluation of the students' studies (Supeno and Suseno, 2019).
Ideally each text used in such curriculum should be pedagogically staged so that learners approach it by moving from pre-reading, through initial reading and into re-reading. This sequence carefully moves the learner from comprehension tasks to production tasks as follows: 1) Pre-reading is the initial levels of learning, as described in Bloom's Taxonomy involve recognizing and comprehending features of a text. As proposed here, pre-reading tasks involve speaking, reading tasks involve speaking, reading, and listening. 2) Initialreading orients the learner to the text and active the cognitive resources that are associated with learner's own expectations. For example, discussion of genres and stereotypes may help the learner to identify the potential reading difficulties and strategic ways to overcome these challenges. Simple oral and written reproduction tasks should precede more complex production tasks that call for considering creative thinking about several issues at same time. 3) Re-reading is when the learner is encouraged to engage in active production such as verbal or written analysis and argumentation. These activities require longer and more complex discourse. At this point, the language learner's critical thinking needs to interact with their general knowledge. Ideally, cultural context and the individual foreign language learner's own identify emerge as a control to all acts to production.
When we begin to read, we actually have a number of initial decisions to make, and we usually make these decisions very quickly, almost unconsciously in most cases. For example, when we pick up a newspaper, we usually look at the front page with some combinations of search processing, general reading comprehension and skimming. The purpose for reading is to integrate information, to write and to criticize texts, and to read for general comprehension. The type of the text determines the specific knowledge, skills, and strategies that readers need to apply in achieving reading comprehension. Comprehension is the understanding and the orientation of what is read. To be able to accurately understand written material, students need to be able to decode what they read, to make connection between what they read and what they already know and to think deeply about what they read. One big of requirement comprehensions is having a sufficient vocabulary or knowing the meaning of enough words. There are several types and ways of reading, with different rates that can be attained for each, for different kind of material and purpose. Subject reading combines sight reading with internal sounding of the words as is spoken, advocates of speed reading and comprehension. These claims are currently backed only by controversial, sometimes are non-existent scientific research, speed reading is collection of the ways for increasing reading speed without and unacceptable reduction in comprehension or retention. It is closely connected to speed learning. Photo reading is a collection of speed-reading techniques with an additional technique of photo reading to increase reading speed, comprehension and memory while proof reading is a kind of reading for the purpose of detecting typographical errors. One can learn to do it rapidly and professional proofs readers typically acquire the ability to do so at high rates, faster from some kinds of material than for others.
To increase their ability in reading, there are five texts which were given to the students, namely: narrative, recount, description, report, and procedure. Narrative text is a text that functions to entertain the readers. Recount text refers to the text that tells the events in the past. Descriptive text is a description of the certain someone, place to be clear and specifies that aims at describing certain someone, things, and places. Report text is a kind of text to give information about something based on the common results systematically. This text usually describes the nature, environment or many things at sciences conditioning just in general. Procedure text is a kind of text to tell the way to do something through the steps. It aims to give explanations of how to do or to make something by doing the step given.
Reading comprehension is an extraordinary feat of balancing and coordinating many abilities in a very complex and rapid set routine that makes comprehension a seemingly effortless and enjoyable activity for readers. According to Stoller and William (2002:291), "Reading for general comprehension when accomplished by a skilled fluent reader, requires very rapid and automatic processing of words, strong skill in forming a general meaning representation of main ideas and efficient coordination of many processes under very limited time to constraints". These abilities are often taken for granted by fluent readers because they usually occur automatically, that is, we make use of these abilities without giving them much thought of if we are fluent readers.
Reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text or message. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text or message. Comprehension is simply another for "understanding". At its simplest, reading comprehension is a way to identify about whether or not the students have understood what they have read. However, teachers tend to use it to mean more than that. In the "teacher talk", comprehension includes the understanding of what it says in the text, understanding of what it does not say explicitly, but what you can work out or suppose might have happened or be going to happen, knowing about the organization of ideas in one sequence rather than another, being aware of the writer's choice of words and sentences, and considering what the writer wanted the reader to think.
Reading comprehension is important for three main reasons, firstly, because the more readers understand the text, the more meaning and enjoyment they can gain from it. Second, reading is the means through which most of curriculum is taught as students grow older. If the students do not fully understand what they read, they cannot access the whole curriculum, and this will affect their result. Third, the more students understand the craft of the writer, the more they can improve their own writing. Teaching reading comprehension was based on a concept of reading as the application of an asset of isolated skills such as identifying words, finding main ideas, identifying cause and effect relationship, comparing and contrasting and sequencing. Teaching reading comprehension is viewed as mastery of these skills. Comprehension instruction followed what the study called mentioning, practicing and assessing procedure where teachers mentioned a specific skill that students were to apply. The instruction is little to help students learn how or when to use the skills, nor is ever established that is particular set of skills enable comprehension.

METHOD
The method applied in this research was an experimental research method where the writer directly collected the data from respondents which was further used on the technique of data analysis. The source of data in this research was the students' test result on the learning process taught by using Communicative Approach and conventional method. The writer arranged some tests in order to identify the students' ability and competence. The test items are in form of multiple-choice tests with four alternative or possible answers on text content followed by students. Those test results were then processed by employing statistical computation.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In analyzing the data, the writer analyzes the data from the results of students' English learning at grade eight at SMP PGRI 3 South Jakarta for academic year 2015-2016. It is pointed out that there is an adequate capability on the subject. This is shown on the calculation result of data analysis that the students' English learning achievement of grade eight on the experiment class with Communicative Approach obtained the scores of mean 72.07; median 73; and mode 73.88; and deviation standard 9.34. This indicates that the scores of students' English learning taught using Communicative Approach does not show the satisfying improvement. The result can be seen in distribution figures below: JEdu: Journal of English Education Pages 79-88, Volume 1, Number 2, July 2021 However, according to the assessment standard, the students' achievement can be categorized into 'adequate' or 'good level. In other words, the students' English capability is quite satisfying even though it still needs an improvement. The comparison of students' English learning results using conventional and Communicative Approach are as follows: The table above shows the statistical scores of mean, median, mode, deviation standard, and variance of English learning result for both methods, that is, control and experiment classes. The scores of the control class taught using conventional method shows that they are below the scores of experiment class taught by Communicative Approach. The mean scores of both classes are classified into criteria "adequate" and "good".
It shows that the students of grade eight at SMP PGRI 3 South Jakarta possess adequate capability in mastering the English language; therefore, if they are continuously given stimulus in the form of enjoyable teaching and learning atmosphere, they may acquire much better learning result.  From the table above, it is seen that of the research groups are less than ( < ) which means both experiment and control groups data are normally distributed. The data is also homogenous where the result shows that (1.32) is less than (1.84). From the hyphotesis test, the result shows that there is significant effect of using Communicative Approach towards students' reading comprehension. The result of t-test is 2.46, and t-table of the freedom degree (60-2=8) at significant level 0.05 is 1.67. The fact that t-table value (1.67) is less than t-test value (2.46) shows that null hypothesis (Ho) is rejected, and in contrary, the alternative hypothesis (Hi) is accepted. It can be concluded that there is significant difference in the scores of the students' ability between the conventional and the Communicative Approach as the methods in the classes. In other words, the hypothesis of "there is an effect of the Communicative Approach to the result of the students' reading of grade eight at SMP PGRI 3 South Jakarta" is accepted.