The Effectiveness of Bima Folktales as Learning Materials to Teach Reading Comprehension

Bima is one of the region located at West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. This tribe has many well-known folk stories between their people that can be considered as learning materials to teach reading comprehension in EFL class. The previous studies showed that folktales is effective to teach reading comprehension, it enhance reading comprehension achievement of students. However, how effective Bima folktales as learning materials to teach reading comprehension especially at the level senior high school’s students should be investigated because there is no study about it before. Being designed in true experimental with post-test only control group, the objective of this study is to find out whether using of Bima folktales as learning materials is effective or not to teach reading comprehension on high school‘s students. Conducted on tenth grade students of IPA at SMA Negeri 2 which consists of 62 students who were divided into experimental group and control group. These two groups were proved on the same level of reading comprehension ability by the scores of mid-term test. Based on independent t-test in SPSS 20.0 version for windows calculation, it was proved that the significant values of variances assumed was .097. It is indicated that the students’ reading comprehension achievement of experimental group and control group were homogenous. Meanwhile, sig. (2-tailed) value was .005 which less than .050 and it means that the H0 is rejected and H1 is accepted. The results of study showed that students of experimental group were performed better than students of the control group, although they have the same level of reading comprehension before the treatments were given. Suggestions purposed for further researchers to conduct the study with the related topic by providing more learning materials about Bima folktales. Because the time limited during Covid-19, the next researcher also could add more times for treatments, choosing more samples and preparing the test items more than the available items in order to have back up items if there are many difficulty items than the moderate items or if there are items deleted.