General Understanding of Story Mapping

4. Teaching Narrative Text by Using Story Mapping

There are some steps to teach narrative text by using story mapping compiled from Farris’ book, they are: 34 Step 1: Introducing to students the concept and the benefit of using story mapping technique, one of them is to develop their comprehension in reading a text. Step 2: Explaining the major components of story mapping through identifying a story first concerning to figure out the title, the theme of story, the important characters and personality traits of specific participant of story, then identifying the orientation or significant plot developments. It leads to sequence of action to note characters’ attempts in overcoming problems, then evoking to get solution. A teacher needs to give the interactive instructions clearly for each story component. To build questioning before or after reading to construct their motivation and their comprehension. After they finish reading a story, they fill out the section of story mapping sheet. Step 3: Directing students when they commit errors to reread the story. 34 Ibid. Step 4: Having students read independently. They are encouraged to write the answers just using key words while the teacher is questioning such as ‘who is the main character? What is he like? Where does the story take place? etc.’ then the teacher gives them praise for appropriately identifying the story mapping elements. Step 5: Asking students to complete story map worksheet on theirs after students use story mapping independently. Then, the teacher checks students’ response and conference individually with those students requiring additional guidance and support. Step 6: Giving students an evaluation. It is necessary to check their reading comprehension of a story using a printed test to gain working individually.

D. Relevant Study

To support the study, the writer searched for the previous relevant study. The first study was conducted by Grunke, et. al. entitled, “Analyzing the Effects of Story Mapping on the Reading Comprehension of Children with Low Intellectual Abilities ”. In their study, they were using an Experimental design. The participants of this study was three 5 th grade students from a regular education public school and three 8 th grade students from a school for children with learning difficulties. The boys were 11 and 13 years old and the girls were 10, 11, 14 and 14 years old. They were identified having high difficulties in comprehending text. They were categorized into the lowest quartile. In this study, there were 18 narrative texts from three German story books which were selected. Then, all of them were altered. The text was standardized into 150 words. To teach female and male students, they followed a procedure by Idol, those are: Modelling phase, leading phase and testing phase. The result of the study showed that story mapping extremely effective. All participants were able to dramatically increase the number of correct responses in the continuously administered probes from M= 3.88 during baseline to M=8.97 during intervention. 35 35 Grunke, et. al., Analyzing the Effects of Story Mapping on the Reading Comprehension of Children with Low Intellectual Abilities. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal 112, 51-64, 2013