The Purposes of Question Generation Strategy

D. Previous Study

The previous study “The effects of question generating strategy instruction on EFL freshmen’s reading comprehension and use of English tenses” conducted by Dentisak Dorkchandra aims to find out whether the instruction of a question generation s trategy facilitate university EFL freshmen’s to enhance reading comprehension and their ability to use English tenses. The data collection tools used was pre-and post-test conducted to 20 students in control group and 20 students in experimental group. The results in this study show that question- generating strategy instruction can significantly improve the Thai university freshmen students’ reading comprehension and use of English tenses. 49 The second previous study was “The Effect of Question-Generation S trategy on Iranian EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension Development” conducted by Ali Akbar Khansir and Jamshid Gholami Dashti, aims to investigate the effectiveness of question-generation strategy on Iranian EFL third grade high school students’ ability in reading comprehension passages via multiple-choice question. In this study, the participants were one hundred and twenty male and female students. To collect data, proficiency test, pre-test and post-test were administered in this study. The result of the study showed that question-generation strategy had significantly impact on the Iranian EFL third grade high school learners’ in reading comprehension passages. 50 The third previous study is “Effects of Question-Generation Training on Reading Comprehension ” conducted by Beth Davey and Susan McBride, aims to explore the effects of training question generation on comprehension question performance, quality and form of generated questions, and accuracy of predicted comprehension. The sample is 260 sixth grade students which are placed in 1 of 5 experimental groups: question training, question-generation practice, inference question-response practice, literal question-response practice, and no-question control. The result indicates that students who are trained to generate questions for 49 Dentisak Dorkchandra, op. cit., pp. 32 —45. 50 Ali Akbar Khansir Jamshid Gholami Dashti, op. cit. pp. 38 —45. expository passages outperformed the comparison groups on several comprehension and meta-comprehension measures. 51 From the three previous studies above, there are several differences compared with this study. The first different thing is the sample. In those three previous studies, the samples are from fresh graduates, high school students and elementary students while in this research, the sample is the eighth grade of junior high school students. The second different thing is the target passages that the students want to improve their comprehension by using question generation strategy. The three previous studies uses question generation strategy to improve the students’ reading comprehension in expository passage and passage in general while in this study, the students use question generation strategy to improve their reading comprehension in narrative text.

E. Thinking Framework

Reading is one of four important skills in English. It becomes a necessary skill to be mastered by students because the students can get new information, enrich their vocabulary, and improve their motivation to learn the language. Reading is not only the process of reading a written language, it is also a process which aims to understand what the writer means and or what the text is all about. However, students still have difficulties in comprehending the text or get what is in the text. Teachers should find an appropriate technique to teach reading in order to help students improve their comprehension. One of the techniques that can be used by teachers to improve students’ reading comprehension especially in narrative text is question generation strategy. Question generation strategy is one of reading comprehensions strategies in which readers create and answer meaningful questions about key point or main ideas while reading. When using question generation strategy, students can create their own questions and answer it by themselves rather than only answer questions created by the teacher. By generating questions, students will actively engage and 51 Beth Davey and Susan McBride, Effects of Question-Generation Training on Reading Comprehension, Journal of Educational Psychology, 1986, Vol. 78, No. 4, pp. 256 —262. interact with the text. Furthermore, students will have a deeper understanding of the text because they know what they need to find in the text. Therefore, they will have a better comprehension about the text.

F. Research Hypothesis

Research hypothesis of this study is: students’ reading comprehension of narrative text that were taught by using Question Generation Strategy is higher than students’ reading comprehension that were taught by using silent reading method.