The background of the study in this research is based on the phenomenon that the students find some difficult sentences or words in comprehending English reading text. To develop teaching reading comprehension, teacher needs strategy to make students enjoy and easy to understand the text. Facilitating students’ ability to identify the meaning of ambiguous sentences through contextual meaning formulation is a strategy aimed at improving reading comprehension, principally the ambiguous sentences. Students may be weak in vocabularies, so that there are many unfamiliar words making them hard to comprehend the reading text. Their mastery of vocabularies is limited. When they read English text, they tend to focus on the word rather than on the entire text. They try to look for the difficult words in their dictionary, therefore it takes time too much.
The problems of this research can be stated as follows:
1. How is the implementation of contextual meaning formulation in teaching ambiguous sentences in MAN Kendal?
2. How is the improvement of students’ ability to identify the meaning of ambiguous sentences after being taught through using contextual meaning formulation in MAN Kendal?
Research design is Classroom Action Research. Classroom action research is a reflective study done by teacher in a classroom for getting solution about the problem until it can be solved. The researcher intends to elaborate classroom action research because it is a kind of research to be used in his research and it could be done by a teacher in which involves a group of students to improve the teaching and learning process. In these findings, the researcher presents the result of research and the analysis of the data collected which were conducted through pre-test and two times of treatments. Pre-test was considered as the preliminary reflection. Two times of treatments were the teaching and learning processes and the assessment tests that were considered as the implementation.
In this research, the researcher took the tests of their achievements in two cycles. In the first cycle, the average of the students’ achievement was 6. And in the second cycle, they got 7.25. Students’ comprehension to identify the meaning of ambiguous sentences improved step by step as well as their motivation to learn English reading text and they comprehended the English reading text well. The result of observation showed that the students improved their ability to identify the meaning of ambiguous sentences after being taught using contextual meaning formulation efficiently and effectively. The teacher contributed the skill and knowledge to the students, so that, they have ability in comprehending and discussing the English reading text.