The Description before Cycle 1

CHAPTER IV RESEARCH FINDING AND DISCUSSION

A. The Description before Cycle 1

SMK Diponegoro has the great concern with students’ English ability. It is proved by the existence of some regular English programs in SMK Diponegoro. One of them is called as “Vocabulary Program” which is held every Saturday at 12.00 a. m up to 12.30 p. m. The students should memorize five words or expressions every week. In that case, the words or expressions are taken from the materials in their daily class. Personally, the researcher thinks that this program helps both the English teachers and students. For the teachers, it makes them easier to deliver the material because it has been introduced to the students before. For the students, this program helps them to keep the words and expressions in their long term memories. Besides “Vocabulary Program”, the students should practice the sentences made by the teacher entitled “My Daily Activities” every Saturday after memorizing vocabularies. It is practiced as the model for the students to enrich their sentences when they want to construct their own sentences. Moreover, there is an English extracurricular named English club. In this program, there are some students given extra lessons to deepen their understanding in English. This program is also held every Saturday after school time. As a result, the program can empirically improve students’ achievement. In 2006, SMK Diponegoro Salatiga was the second rank in the school graduation among all vocational high schools in Salatiga. It proves that SMK Diponegoro can be categorized as one of potential vocational high schools in Salatiga. There are two departments in SMK Diponegoro Salatiga, they are accounting and management departments. In this case, both accounting and management departments have similar material in English because they have similar objectives. Related to reading materials and objectives, the students are given the texts that they will probably face after graduating. They are hoped to be ready to face the real world when they have graduated from the vocational high school because of having been trained and prepared before. To reach such objectives, the teacher should select the technique which helps students to explore their ability. However, as the previous observation and interview, there were many teachers who used conventional technique to teach reading comprehension by asking the students to translate the text, then evaluating it. Unfortunately, when the researcher gave the students the fieldnote and asked them to give their interest in reading English, there were many students who did not like English because of being bored in the classroom. Moreover, many of them said that the technique used by the previous teacher was not interesting. Some students had low motivation in learning English. It can be seen from their statements in their fieldnotes, for example: “Menurut saya, bahasa Inggris adalah pelajaran yang menyenangkan sekaligus membingungkan”, “Saya tidak suka membaca teks bahasa Inggris” . Based on the problems above, the researcher considered that the attempt to improve students’ reading comprehension in this class is difficult enough. Even so, the researcher wanted to maximize the students reading comprehension by the available media, for instance the usage of the language laboratory and multimedia laboratory. Moreover, she wanted to use the reciprocal questioning technique which is theoretically able to improve students’ reading comprehension.

B. Description of the Result of Cycle 1