Implementing Cartoon Media to Maximise Students’ Reading Comprehension

The objectives of this research are to find out whether there is a significant difference in the reading comprehension between students who are taught by using cartoon media and the students who are taught by using conventional media, to find out the effectiveness between cartoon media and conventional media in teaching reading comprehension. This experimental research was carried out in SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Sleman in the academic year of 2018/2019. The findings of the study show that the mean scores of students who were taught by using cartoon media are higher than the scores of those who were taught by using conventional media, 68.16 > 60.91. The result of ANCOVA shows the level of significance is lower than 0.05. i.e. 0.0000 < 0.05. thus H1is accepted and Ho is rejected. It shows clearly that the use of cartoon media to teach reading comprehension is more effective than conventional media.


INTRODUCTION
Reading is one of the important skills at school as National Examination employs more texts. Reading comprehension is a necessary skill for students to be successful in school. It means that reading has great influence in the teaching learning process at school. When students lack knowledge about a certain topic, its condition affects their reading comprehension ability. Some problems occur in comprehending reading, for example, reading comprehension can be restricted when students lose interest and disengage from reading. When having difficulties in reading, students tend to be not motivated in continuing reading the rest of the text. It is so sad that students who struggle with reading difficulties do not like to put effort in finding the meaning of unfamiliar words found in the text.
Most of Indonesian teachers generally apply common instruction in teaching reading. They have already known that most EFL students lack in comprehending reading text. But, they still have less effort to overcome this obstacle. Students should be trained to be aware of and effectively use reading strategies to solve those problems in teaching reading. These poor teaching strategies can lead to the students' failure in reading comprehension.
Dealing with these comprehension problems, teachers must find certain media which help the students to maximise their ability to solve these problems. Excellent and effective teaching demands a host of devices, techniques and strategies not only to achieve cross critical outcomes, but because variety, itself, is a desideratum. One teaching media that can be used to overcome these problems is cartoon media. Cartoon media is a form of media as the representation of man's character, man's idea, and certain situations by using drawings instead of real people and places. Cartoon media is a kind of simpel yet interesting media that can be used to teach reading comprehension. This research intention is to show how cartoons have important benfits in the teaching-learning English.
By using cartoon media, the teacher can help the students to be motivated in reading, because cartoons consist of colorful pictures. Cartoon media also can help the students to raise their prior knowledge related to the topic.
To lead to the research findings, the problems to be dealt with this are formulated as follow: 1. Is there any significant difference in reading comprehension between students who are taught by using cartoon media and conventional media? 2. Which one is more effective between cartoon media and conventional media to teach reading comprehension?
Cartoon media has been investigated by some researchers. It has been applied in teaching reading as a strategy to improve students' reading comprehension. implementing cartoon media to teach reading comprehension can be a solution to the lack of motivation in comprehending reading text. Studies that provide cartoons as a teaching medium to teach students has been done, one of them done by Nasab and Mostlagh (2017). Based on this, subtitled cartoons are effectively used in maximising learners' vocabulary knowledge. Similar to that study, researchers tried to employ cartoons as a media to maximise students' reading comprehension.
Gea (2013) states that reading is the process of decoding symbols in order to construct meaning. Students have to acquire knowledge about morphemes, words and sentences. It is a passive skill. It is important to read in a concrete rhythm because if children read too fast or too slow they are not going to understand the text. Instructional media should be selected on the basis of how they maximise learning.
This selection should be on the basis of their contribution to achieving the set lesson objectives according to the learners' level and ability. Selection is based on how well media performs the intended task (Wamala, 2014).
In the term of cartoon, the concept cartoons were developed by Keogh and Naylor (1992) to propose an innovative teaching and learning strategy through a constructivist view of learning in science in Taslidere (2013). In this globalization era, students are forced to maintain their critical thinking and problem solving. Students need innovative teaching strategies to enhance their spirit of learning English.
In the print media, cartoons equally assist in providing a clear mental picture, speed understanding, help memory and provide a shared experience. Some cartoons are even featured without captions or written explanations, yet the messages inherent in them are still understood by readers (Onapka, 2014) There are some merits in using cartoon media. The visual images in cartoons and comics help encourage students to observe and analyze the situation. Besides, the humors in cartoons and comics comprise enjoyment in the foreign language classes and release students' burden and tenseness in learning a new language (Afrilyasanti and Basthomi, 2011).

RESEARCH METHOD
The design of this research is a quasi-experimental which there are two groups namely experimental group and control group. The experimental group consists of students who are taught by using cartoon media, and the control group consists of students who are taught by using conventional media. The instrument used to collect the data is in the form of a reading test. students who were taught by using cartoon media and those who are taught by using conventional media in terms of reading comprehension. The inferential statistics used in this research was obtained by using SPSS 22.0. The ANCOVA was used to answer the formulation of the study above. Before doing the ANCOVA, the test normality and the test homogeneity need to be found out first.

RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
1. The significant difference between the students who are taught by using cartoon media and conventional media.

Cartoon media is effective to teach reading comprehension
Cartoon media is effective to teach reading comprehension. Table below shows that the score of the students in the experimental class is higher than the students in the control class. Based on the result score of students reading comprehension, it showed that the mean score of students' reading comprehension in experimental class before taught by using cartoon media was 59.83. Meanwhile, the mean score of students' reading comprehension in experimental class after taught by using cartoon media was 68.16. It means that the mean score of students' reading comprehension after the treatment is higher than before the treatment. The students' reading comprehension scores were improved by using cartoon media.

CONCLUSION
Based on the research and analysis, the conclusion is that cartoon media is an effective media to teach reading comprehension for the students at the third grade of SMP Muhammadiyah 1 Sleman. Since the cartoon media is implemented in the class, the students are more attractive in the teaching and learning process. There was significant improvement of the students' score in reading comprehension after the cartoon media applied in the class. As what has been stated earlier that cartoon media can maximise students' reading comprehension.