Related Study LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Cooperative integrated reading and composition CIRC is the teaching method of this research. It is one of alternative ways to improve the students’ reading comprehension. It has proved by many teachers in the past that CIRC is an effective method to teach reading comprehension to students, especially middle school students. There are some activities of CIRC which are able to help students in understanding text such as identifying topic, the characters of the story, etc. The use of reading groups is also able to overcome the problems that have been mentioned before because it can make students excited in reading activities. Students work in pairs and do reading tasks together with their friends. Students learn how to comprehend a text through word meaning, spelling, and retell the text to their friends in a group. The main purposes of CIRC are also relevant to solve the problem for example the purpose of motivating students to read aloud and comprehend the text. As CIRC is a part of cooperative learning method, there are some advantages of using cooperative learning to solve problems of learning language. It has many various methods to be done by students and teacher, one of them is CIRC. It involves both of them, students and teacher. The form of cooperative work can be applied in many groups of students. It is easy for students to learn reading skills as well. The teacher will also be more confident than as usual because the use of cooperative work or group work. All students involve in the learning process by the teacher’s guidance. The reading comprehension instruction will be easier with the CIRC activities. Based on the teaching practice of a teacher of Scandaga Elementary School, Scotia, New York in the past as described by Slavin 2005: 204, it can be inferred that the students enjoyed the process of CIRC to be able to read well. They reached more success in reading because they were part of the process. All of them finished doing the CIRC activities and became better readers. Besides, CIRC also can help students to understand a text through the activities. Most students are closely related to the reading comprehension activities such as word meaning, identifying the characters, the main idea, the setting of a story, etc. Thus, CIRC is expected to be able to improve the reading comprehension ability of students.