The Use of Pictures as Media to Improve Students’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Reading is an important skill for developing second language competence. The success of a learning a second language is by taking the power of reading. In the classroom, we will face many techniques applied to the students under the expectation that they are able to or easy to understand the lesson. For a teacher, it is necessary to find new teaching media to overcome the problems and not to forget to motivate the students. In this paper, the writer wants to know the effect of picture as a media to improve students’ reading comprehension. The purpose of this research is to find out whether the use of pictures can improve students’ reading comprehension or not. To make the students easily understand about the reading material, teacher needs to have a teaching media. Then, the writer chooses visual media that is picture to increase students’ reading mastery. Pictures are considered as the best media in teaching reading because using picture as a teaching media are able to give the students a clear illustration regarding the correlated topics in texts, tell the students what is going on, and what are the persons in the text are talking about. Nowadays, the pictures and the technologies are becoming more and more advanced. In this decade, we can already materialize a more advanced picture that added by motion and sounds by using simple applications provided in home personal computer. Moreover, the students now are quite used and interested to apply any high tech media. Based on the result of discussion, it can be concluded that pictures are theoretically can be a good media to help the students enhancing their reading comprehension. Therefore in this view, it is justifiable to hypothetically conclude that using pictures for strengthening students’ visual sense can help them to understand a text.