researcher were the agents. The English teacher of VII E and a student of the English Education Department of UNY assisted the researcher. They were the
analysts or observers. There were some reasons for choosing class VII E students as the subject
of the research. The first reason was they lacked vocabulary and grammar which obstruct them in understanding or comprehending reading texts. The second one
was that they had low interests and motivation in joining the reading class.
D. Instruments of the Study
The instrument for collecting data in this study were non-test instruments and a test instrument. The non-test instruments included an observation guide and
an interview guide, and test instrument included the test items. The data of the non-test instruments were in the form of field notes and interview transcripts of
the teaching and learning processes. 1.
Observation guide The observation guide was used to determine the aspect observed in the
reading class when the action plan was conducted. The observation guide was in the form of a checklist. It contained some aspects with some indicators of each
aspect. In this study, four variables were observed. They were related to the
students’ behavior, the teacher’s role in the teaching of reading, the learning materials and the teaching technique. Every aspect involved several indicators to
be observed in the English class.
2. Interview Guide
The interview guide was the guidelines for the researcher in giving questions to the students and the teacher. It was used for the interview before and
after the implementation of the study. 3.
Reading Comprehension Test The reading comprehension test was used for the pre-test and the post-test.
It was a multiple choice test consisting of 50 items. The materials were adapted from some textbooks. In developing the comprehension questions, In developing
the comprehension questions, the researcher based on types of comprehension proposed by Day and Park 2005 namely; literal, reorganization, inference,
prediction, and evaluation. To get the validity of the test, the researcher used content validity. The
researcher used existing concepts in the current curriculum Suharto, 2006:3. Here, the researcher developed the test based on the basic competences and the
indicators of the basic competences which were taken from the current curriculum during the study was conducted, school-based curriculum.
To get reliability of the pretests and posttest items, the researcher tried the test out to the students from the other school in which the students have relatively
the same abilities. Then after getting the students’ score in the test, the researcher
used the
ITEMAN 3.5
program where Cronbach’s Alpha statistic was used to find the reliability of the test.
