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3 Asking the students to make study group which consist of four to five students in each group heterogeneous learning teams. They will learn about the
reading material. 4 Giving a text to each of group. They will share information, solve the problems,
read to each other and do the task given by the teacher . 5 Explaining some points of the material if the students have some difficulties.
6 Asking each groups to present or read the result of their discussion. 7 Giving conclusion and states the topic for the next meeting
B. Rationale
Reading is a essential factor that influences one‟s activities in
communication. Reading builds communication with people around us. For the students reading is a means of learning all subjects. Reading is really important
than the others language skills. Reading English texts is useful, such as: for pleasure, study purpose, careers, and so on. It also provides good model for good
writing. Moreover, by reading a text one will have a chance to study a language, such as: vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, and the way of constructing
sentences, paragraphs, and texts. The objective of teaching English in junior high school is stressed on
reading skill. Students are taught to comprehend written English text. Therefore, teacher has a responsibility to make students easier in comprehending written text
and facilitating them in order to get well comprehension. It is difficult for students to comprehend a foreign language text, since their mother tongue is different
systematically with a foreign language. The researcher observed and recognized that students
‟ reading comprehension of the Class VIIIA of SMP Negeri 1 Matesih in the academic year of 20092010 was still low and far from the
expectation. The writer found out that there were gaps among the students in the class. Only some students who have a good achievement and are active follow the
teaching-learning process and the others were passive. Most of them were sleepy, bored, and not enthusiastic to follo the teaching-learning process. So, the
interaction in the class was low. Their ability was still far from the expectation,
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and most of them still found troubles and difficulties in understanding or comprehending a text, especially in understanding vocabularies, finding main
ideas, referents, finding detail information , author‟s purpose, etc.
Teacher also had a contribution to students‟ difficulties. The teaching-
learning process shown that it was monotonous. The teacher in the school never uses study group or pairs, the way the teacher taught reading was not encouraging
students to be active, the teacher dominated the class, and during the lesson, the teacher just reads the written text without knowing whether the students got the
information or not. To overcome those problems, the researcher used Cooperative Integrated
Reading and Composition as an alternative technique. The rational of using this technique was to make the students active in learning. If the students were always
active in the classroom, they would be able to do the works effectively. By applying CIRC, students would learn by themselves, learn more, feel
more confident, feel more dedicated, enjoy the class, teach each other, and become independent learners. By using CIRC in the teaching and learning, the
students can use their own knowledge and share their knowledge with their friends. Besides that, they could interact with each other to solve problems. It
would also help weaker students in learning. Related with reading comprehension, CIRC was a teaching method where students could work together in small group
to help each other. Based on the explanation above, it can be assumed that CIRC method can
improve students‟ reading comprehension.
C. Hypothesis
