Improving Reading Skill through English Club Activity Kampus Mengajar

Kampus Mengajar is part of the Kampus Merdeka program. It means independent study program held by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia which provides opportunities for students to sharpen skills according to their talents, interests and develop themselves by going directly into the world of work as preparation for future careers.

Kampus Mengajar also aim to be able to be placed in remote schools, helping to improve the quality of student learning due to limitations in terms of science, technology and facilities. Inadequate infrastructure.

I teach the English activities at SMP N 24 Depok 8th grader while doing my duty as a teacher for Kampus Mengajar Program. My English teaching activity in this program is English Club. Which is done out of school hours, on every Saturday by online.

This English Club program is very important, especially for reading skill comprehension at junior high school students because they must be ready with technological developments that are very easy to spread and easily accessible to all reach. The technology that is currently developing uses an international language, is English, which requires them to be able to comprehend so that it is easy to understand.

Razali and Razali (2013) stated that some readers use their background of knowledge and experience to compose meaning from the text, then the readers will connect the ideas in the text to what the already know in order to get the comprehension of the text.

This study wants to present, a case study on students’ perception of Kampus Mengajar activities through English Club.  To improve the ability of English for student, that can be done by various methods. Reading comprehension is the ability to understand information in a text and interpret it appropriately what is meant by the text (Grabe & Stoller, 2002).

Based on Basic Competence which is issued by Kementrian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan 2013 that basic competence 2013 of the first grade senior high school, the students are expected to comprehend social function, text structure, and language features in reading text. But in real situation, the students have low ability in reading comprehension.

Result of the study from their perceptions to evaluate whether this program held by the government has an influence on the development of the quality of students in helping educators and could improve the learning process, especially English and can be to improve the students to be more qualified.