An Analysis of the Second Year Students’ Ability to Read Aloud English Narrative Text at English Education Department of Bung Hatta University

Abstrak

Reading aloud is an activity of reading texts or books loudly. Tarigan (2008: 23) defines reading aloud is an activity that is a tool for teachers, students, or readers along with other people or listeners to catch and understand an author’s information, thoughts and feelings. According to Laminack (2006), there are three aspects in reading aloud; pronunciation, fluency and intonation. Errors in reading aloud an English text might happen to English as a Foreign Language learners. There are some kinds of text, one of them is narrative text. Generally, the purpose of this research was to describe the second year students’ ability to read aloud narrative text. Specifically, the purposes of this research were to find out the second year students’ prounciation, fluency and intonation. Relating to this, the researcher conducted a research related to the second year students ability in reading aloud narrative text at English Education Department of Bung Hatta University.

The design of this research was descriptive research. The population of this research was all of the second year students of English Education Department of Bung Hatta University. The researcher used total sampling technique because there were only 24 students. The data of this research were collected from reading aloud test. To make the test reliable, the researcher used a narrative text as the instrument. The researcher used inter-rater technique for this research to make the test reliable. It was found that the reliability index was 0.82 which means the test was reliable.

The results of this research showed that most of the second year students of English Education Department of Bung Hatta University had very good ability. There were 17 (70.83%) students who had very good ability, 6 students (25%) who had good ability, and 1 (4.17%) student who had moderate ability. Specifically, there were three aspects of reading aloud that were tested:  pronunciation, fluency and intonation. In the term of pronunciation, all of the students (100%) had very good ability. In the term of fluency, there were 12 (50%) students who had very good ability, 8 (33.3%) students who had good ability, 3 (12.5%) students who had moderate ability, and 1 (4.2%) student who had bad ability. In the term of intonation, there were 2 (8.3%) students who had very good ability, 4 (16.7%) students who had good ability, 10 (41.7%) students who had moderate ability and 8 (33.3%) students who had bad ability.

In line with the findings of this research as discussed above, it can be concluded that mostly the students’ reading aloud ability was very good, and specifically, the students’ pronunciation ability in reading aloud was very good, their fluency ability in reading aloud was very good, and their intonation ability in reading aloud was moderate. Dealing with such conclusion, it is suggested to the lecturers to provide sufficient information to students about producing correct intonation. It is suggested to the students to practice more in order to improve their reading aloud ability, and the next researchers are suggested to carry out another research on factors that influence students’ intonation.

Keywords : Reading Aloud, Pronunciation, Fluency, Intonation