In junior high schools,reading is an essential sklill that must be mastered by the students, But related to the condition and situation right now, there are some students who still unable to read comprehensively. Therefore, it is important to conduct a research entitled” improving the eight grade students’ reading comprehension by using activating background knowledge”.
In this research, the problems are “How does the use activating background knowledge improve the reading comprehension of eight grade students’ at SMPN 7 Bondowoso in academic year 2016/2017?” and “ How does the use background knowledge improve the eight grade students to be actively involved in english learning process at SMPN 7 Bondowoso in the 2016/2017 academic year?”.The purpose of this study is to know how activating background knowledge is able to improve the VIIIA grade student’s reading comprehesion narrative text.
The kind of this research is classroom action research which done in two cycle. The participants that the researcher used are 28 students of VIIIB. The preliminary observation is done by observing the teaching and learning process of reading during the implementation and the observation the score of reading from the English teacher.
Based on the result of reading test score in cycle 2, the target percentage of the research that was 75% of students got ≥ 72 has been achieved. It can be concluded that activating background knowledge is able to improve the students’ reading comprehension at SMPN 7 Bondowoso in the 2016/2017 academic year.