The Relationship Between Students Reading Interest and Their Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Reading is one of the important skills as reading a lot of literature people can quickly understand language. The ability to read and understand the text is called reading comprehension. One factor contributing to reading comprehension is reading interest as it drives people to attempt reading activities. Improving the interest in reading can create a positive atmosphere and motivate people to read which supported the reading comprehension. That’s why the researcher interested in studying the correlation between reading interest and reading comprehension. The current study is conducted using correlational design on 8th grade students at SMPN 28 Malang. The data were collected using a questionnaire of reading interest and a reading comprehension test which covered were literal and inferential reading comprehension. The data analyzed using Pearson’s product moment in SPSS 24.0 to measure the correlation between variables. The results of the study reveals that the majority of students is at average level of reading interest, and their scores in literal reading comprehension is greater than inferential reading comprehension. The result of correlational analysis indicates no significant correlation between reading interest and literal reading comprehension (r=0.234, p=0.077) while the correlation between reading interest and inferential reading comprehension indicate a positive and significant correlation (r=0.293, p=0.026). Keywords: Correlation, reading interest, reading comprehension