THE IMPLEMENTATION OF DIRECT READING STRATEGY IN TEACHING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT TO HELP READING COMPREHENSION TO THE SEVENTH GRADERS

English for education is usually used as an introduction to English. English can be applied in four skills, such listening, reading, speaking and writing. Reading is an ability to draw meaning from a printed page and to interpret the information appropriately. Reading is an essential skill which can receives several special focuses. Besides, reading is very useful to get more capacity of language components (e .g. vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation). Direct reading activity is chosen to this research because it is very useful to develop the students’ reading comprehension. It is supported by Betts (1946) who said that direct reading activity can be used to expand and strengthen the students’ reading skill, because this activity can monitor the students’ understanding about the text while they are reading. The researcher chose descriptive qualitative as the research design.Observation sheet, tasks result and interview form were used to collect the data. From the data, the researcher made description and analysis to answer the research questions. The results from observation sheet shows that the teacher implemented direct reading activity on three meetings. By implementing those activity, the teacher can make an interesting and effective situation in learning English. The result of students reading tasks shows that most students made progress in some aspects of reading such as content, organization, vocabulary, language use and mechanic. Means that direct reading activity was very helpful to beginner who wants to learn English.