A. Background of study Reading is an essential skill for every people no matter who they are.

It is one of the ways to earn much knowledge and information. In addition, reading also be an essential activity because through reading the reader can communicate with an author, by using his or her ability in understanding a reader can understand and acquire the information that written by the author without meeting directly with the author. As said by praticia gillespre silver in her book Teaching Reading to Children with Special Needs reading is a communicative process between the reader and the author. 1 In appearance, reading is an easy skill to practice, every student could read English text but they dont understand what is being read. However, in the reality reading is not as easy as we though. To be a good reader, he or she has to be able to understand what she or he reads, as stated by Miller the good reading maybe the ability to scan rapidly and to process large quantities of written material quickly.2 Therefore every reader or student has to understand deeply on what they have read. Comprehension is an important aspect in reading process. Reading without understanding is meaningless because the aim of reading process is to comprehend and to understand the written texts. Students success in reading is evaluated by their ability in understanding the context of the text. So, they can find the information that written in the text. Unfortunately, now days there many students who fail in reading process, they just read without knowing the context of the text. There are many students who waste their time in opening dictionary to search the meaning of unfamiliar words. And there are also many students who feel boredom in learning reading comprehension.

In order to understand whatever is going to read, student should know and master certain skill that required in reading text. In this case, Heaton says that there are some specific skills involved in reading: one of them is the ability to understand the meaning of words and words groups in the context in which they appear (this also included an ability

to use context clues to determine the meaning of particular words).3 From this statement that true context clue will help the reader in understanding the text. Rahayu Utami has conducted the research about The Using of Context Clues Among Students in Mastering Reading Comprehension. In her thesis she observed students familiarity of using context clues and an aid to comprehend the reading text. However, in this thesis the writer will not observe but the writer will apply using context clues in teaching reading comprehension to know whether it is effective to increase students comprehension or not. Rahayu was chosen the student of English Department of Tarbiyah faculty IAIN Ar-raniri as the sample of her study. Whereas, the writer will choice the third year student of senior high school of Ruhul Islam as the sample of my study. Considering the explanation above, the writer interested in applying to use context clues in teaching reading comprehension in order to increase students ability in understanding reading texts. So, the title of this thesis is Application of Using Context Clues in Teaching Reading Comprehension