Abstrak
This research was aimed to discover the effect of using ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) on students’ reading comprehension in descriptive text at the first grade of Tsanawiyah or junior high school. It was done at Sumatera Thawalib Islamic Boarding School Parabek. The researcher found some problem, there were the students have difficulty in comprehending the English text. They did not comprehend the text because they had limited vocabularies. Because of that the students did not acquire the good score. Then, the teacher used the conventional method, the teacher centered, to explain the lesson. It made the students did not get an enough attention in learning process. This research used experimental research with quasi experimental design by using pre-test and post-test experimental and control group design. The population of this research was eleven class at first grade students in Sumatera Thawalib Islamic Boarding School Parabek, consist of 329 students. To determine the sample the researcher used simple random sampling. The samples were 1.5 as the experiment class and 1.6 as the control class. The data were gotten from the result of students’ reading comprehension in the pre-test and post-test through multiple choice task. The result of the research indicated that the score of students in post-test was higher than the score of pre-test in experimental class. The mean score of pretest was 42.14, where the mean score of students’ post-test was 59.31. It means that ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) method gave contribution on students’ reading comprehension. In addition, from the calculation of the data it showed that the value of sig. (2tailed) was 0.03 lower than 0.05 in independent sample ttest and 0.000 lower than 0.05 in paired sample test. in other words, the alternative hypothesis was accepted, which was there wa significant effect of using ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) method on students’ reading comprehension at the first grade students of Sumatera Thawalib Islamic Boarding School Parabek and there was the difference between the students’ reading comprehension by using ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) to the students taught by using conventional method. It can be concluded that, using ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) gave significant effect for students in improve their reading comprehension.