Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Language is systematic. Language is a set of arbitrary symbol. Language is used for communication Brown, 2000: 5. Think about the importance of language in our everyday life. Language is needed to speak to others, listen to others, read, and write. Our language enables us to describe past event in detail and plan for the future. Language lets us pass down information for one generation to the next. One of the languages that is acceptable and spread in the world is English language. English is called as International language or Lingua Franca. It is used to help people to communicate in doing their daily activities such as education, politic, trading, etc. English is regarded as a foreign language in Indonesia. It is a compulsory subject taught from junior high school up to university. There are four major skills which are important to be learnt in learning English, they are: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Reading and listening are said to be passive or receptive skills, while writing and speaking are said to be active and productive skills. In university, reading skill is very important . Reading remains the most accessible for the satisfaction of the varied needs of many people Robinson, 1975: 10. It will give much information that is useful for life. 2 Harmer 1998: 68 says that many of the students want to be able to read texts in English either for their careers, for study purposes or for simply pleasure. By reading the students can get and become familiar with the new grammar and can widen their vocabularies. Nunan 2003: 69 says that for most of these learners it is the most important skill to master in order to ensure success not only in learning English, but also in learning any content subject where reading is required. In short, with the strengthened reading skill, learners will make greater progress and development in all order areas of learning. Based on preliminary study, many students of university have difficulties to know the words in the text and they have low understanding of the message from the text. Probably the students know the words but they don ’t know the meaning of the text. Some students know the meaning of the words or vocabularies of the text but they cannot get the message of the text. And there are some students who don’t know the meaning of the text at all. It can be seen from their mistakes when the teacherlecturer asks them to read, to translate, and to comprehend the texts. And it also can be seen from the result of tests, their result is still low. The teacher models to teach reading is one of factors in this case. The teacher of reading must have a variety of approaches. There are many approaches and models to teach reading, one of them is reciprocal teaching. Reciprocal teaching has two major features: 1 instruction and practice of the four comprehension strategies —predicting, question 3 generating, clarifying, and summarizing; and 2 a special kind of cognitive apprenticeship where students gradually learn to assume the role of teacher in helping their peers construct meaning from text, it is said by Alverman and Phelps http:www.greece.k12.ny.usinstructionela612 readingReading20strategiesreciprocal20teaching.htm. It is designed as a discussion technique and built on the cooperative nature of learning that causes the student’s reading comprehension of the text to be deeper through social interaction. But, many teachers still use ―Direct Instructional Model‖ to teach reading. In this model, the activity is teacher-centered and the students lack of opportunities in the class. They just become the followers and depend on the teacher during the teaching and learning process. Usually, the teacher asks the students to read the text, asks the difficult word, and then asks the students to translate the text. M ethods that are used by the teacher in teaching material have important role to improve the students’ ability in learning the material, especially in teaching reading. The other things that can influence the students ’ reading skill come from other factor besides teacher’s model. It is the students’ intelligence. Deboer 1966: 131 says that background experience, interest, and native intelligence may also play a part in determining how many and which individual words a reader may miss and still have high comprehension. The students’ intelligence has the crucial thing to improve the students’ 4 reading skill. Deboer 1966: 132 states there is a substantial correlation between intelligence and reading ability. It is true that a child who is intelligent enough to go to school is intelligent enough to learn to read simple materials. It means that the students who have high intelligence will have high ability in understanding a text, while the students’ who have low level of intelligence will have low ability in understanding a text. To solve the problem above, the researcher uses the reciprocal teaching in teaching reading on the consideration that it can facilitate the teacher to arouse the students’ attention and improve the students’ reading skill . She considers students’ intelligence high or low to know whether reciprocal teaching model is suitable for students who have high intelligence or low intelligence, and to know whether direct instructional model is suitable for students who have high intelligence or low intelligence. In this study, the researcher is interested in conducting an experimental research entitled : ―The Effectiveness of Reciprocal Teaching M odel to Teach Reading Viewed from the Students’ Intelligence‖

B. Identification of the Problem