Improving Students’ Reading Comprehension through Semantic Mapping Technique at the Third Year of Science Program of SMA Negeri 12 Padang.

This research was conducted to solve students’ reading comprehension problem on English text. In general, students could not activate their background knowledge about the topic that would be discussed on the text. Therefore, students could not get information and add their knowledge from the text read. A research to improve students’ reading comprehension was needed to reach purpose of teaching English as stated in curriculum. Through this action research, the researcher could find out whether the semantic mapping technique could better improve the students’ reading comprehension at the third year of science program 1 of SMAN 12 Padang or not and factors which caused the improvement. The research was conducted in two cycles; each cycle consisted of four meetings. The result showed there were improvements in mean scores of the students test before doing action to test in cycle 1, test cycle 1 to cycle 2, and mean scores of each reading comprehension indicators such as finding topic, main idea, detail information and reference. Although there were improvements on cycle 1, but the minimum passing grade (KKM) has not been fulfilled, and students’ activities on learning process were also not better yet. For the reasons, the researcher had to continue the research to the second cycle. While doing the second cycle, there were expected improvements on the process of learning and the students’ reading comprehension achievement. The students average score was up to KKM 65, it become 70,97. The improvement was about 10,42 from cycle one 60,55. So, the research could be ended at the second cycle. Based on the research findings, using semantic mapping technique in teaching reading could better improve the students’ reading comprehension. While the factors caused the improvements were firstly, the procedure of semantic mapping gave the chance to the students to prepare their readiness from activating background knowledge about the topic till they could get information from the text read. Moreover, the students knew how they could make use their potential on learning process. The last, the teacher’s role on encouraging students’ attention and motivation also supported the improvement.