ELT Perspective 4(2), September 2016 ISSN: 2354-7340 131 USING VISUAL SCAFFOLDING STRATEGY FOR TEACHING READING IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL Nurul Fauziyah Lestari (nrlfauzyalstr@gmail.com.) Misdi (misdirina@gmail.com) English Education Department Swadaya Gunung Jati University Cirebon INTRODUCTION The role of reading skill in English language is very crucial nowadays. It becomes a way to communicate among human being. Humans are able to get a lot of knowledge from reading. Reading is an activity which engages a text, brain and eye to create a meaning. We could not get any meaning from the text, if we do not take any activity of reading. Reading is also a skill of how an author or a writers tries to communicate or delivers some messages to the readers through a written text. Mastering reading skill is a must for all of the students who are studying English as a foreign language (Johnson, 2008). When people talk about reading, it cannot be separated from comprehension or understanding. For instance, a reader who understands what she or he has read can answer questions about it. Smith (2004) notes that: “Comprehension may be regarded as relating aspects of the world around us, including what we read to the knowledge, intentions, and expectations we already have in our head. It is clearly the purpose of reading and of learning to read.” (p. 13) Learners need to be familiarized with how sentence are functionally exploited to carry meanings in a discourse Abstract This research was aimed to investigate the effectiveness of using visual scaffolding strategy in teaching reading comprehension at the eighth grade of junior high school. The design of this study was a quasi experimental study. The subjects were the students of state junior high schools in Cirebon, Indonesia. The data were obtained by administering reading test and from observation as a supporting data analysis. The data of the test were analyzed by using t-test formula to know the difference of the students’ comprehension in reading narrative text between two groups. Meanwhile the result of the observation was analyzed descriptively. The results indicate that there was a significant difference on students’ learning result before and after Visual Scaffolding applied. Keywords: reading comprehension, narrative text, visual scaffolding strategy