Being an International language, English is spoken in the most International event and it is used as the medium of the flow of information on science, technology, and culture. It is learned from primary schools up to university. People realize that teaching English at this level becomes very important and need much concern. As an English teacher, he or she demands to explore effective techniques, method, and approaches. To learn English, students learn four skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. One of skills that many materials are easy to be found by the students is reading. They can read the English text in a lot of media; such as English books, magazine, newspapers, novels, film, advertisements, and even status on Facebook. Through reading, students can get new information to enrich their knowledge.
Research questions in this study is intended to answer the following questions (1) How high is students’ understanding of idiom, (2) How high is students’ reading comprehension of recount text, and (3) Is there any significant correlation between students’ understanding of idiom and their reading comprehension of recount text at fourth semester students’ of The Department of English Education of UIN Walisongo Semarang. The objective of this study are (1) to investigate students’ understanding of idiom, (2) to investigate the students’ reading comprehension of recount text, (3) to find out whether there is significant relationship between students’ understanding of idiom and their reading comprehension of recount text at fourth semester students’ of The Department of English Education of UIN Walisongo Semarang.
This research was conducted at the 4th semester of English education of UIN Walisongo Semarang in the academic year 2014/2015. The sample of this study is 46 students. The method used in this study was quantitative method and the technique used was a correlational technique. In collecting the data, idiom test and reading comprehension test were used. The scores of idiom test were collected from twenty multiple-choice questions. In addition, the reading comprehension test was also given to the students to assess their reading comprehension. The result of this study shows that there is a positive relationship between idiom understanding and reading comprehension. It is proved by the rxy (0.3342) which is bigger than r table in the degree significance 5% (0.297). It is considered that the null hypothesis (H0) in this study is rejected and the alternative hypothesis (Ha) which states that there is significant relationship between idiom understanding and reading comprehension is accepted. In conclusion, there is a positive relationship between idiom understanding and reading comprehension. Although, the students’ understanding of idiom doesn’t give much effect to the students’ reading comprehension.