ABSTRACT

THE STUDENTS BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE AND VOCABULARY

KNOWLEDGE AS PREDICTORS OF READING COMPREHENSION

ASTIS F
A1D4 09 007

Numerous studies have confirmed the importance of background knowledge and

vocabulary in reading comprehension. This study aims to investigate the separate and
simultaneous contribution of students background knowledge and vocabulary knowledge toward
reading comprehension, as well as to examine the better variable serving as predictor of the
students reading comprehension. Four research questions were posed to guide the study: (1)
What is the contribution background knowledge toward students reading comprehension? (2)
What is the contribution of vocabulary knowledge toward students reading comprehension? (3)
What is the simultaneous contribution of background knowledge and vocabulary knowledge
toward students reading comprehension? (4) Which variable does serve as the better predictor of
students reading comprehension?
Design of the study is correlational, which use simple and multiple linear regressions
analysis. The participant of the study is 33 students from Class XI PIA 2 SMAN 2 Wangi-Wangi
in 2014. The Instrument of the study employed two multiple choice tests, for measuring
background knowledge and reading comprehension, and one matching item test to measure
vocabulary knowledge of the students.
The results of the study reveal that, separately background knowledge contributed as
much as 14.5% in explaining the variance in reading comprehension, whereas vocabulary
contributed 21.7%. Meanwhile, Simultaneous contribution of both predictor variables accounted
for 27.7% of variance in the reading comprehension. This result suggests that students
vocabulary knowledge is a better predictor of the students reading comprehension than their
background knowledge. This was also confirmed by looking at the regression coefficient of each
predictor variable in which vocabulary is equal to 0.409 and background knowledge is 0.398.