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collaborator acted as the observer, I acted as the teacher. The complete description of implementation in the first cycle was presented as in the following.
a. 1
st
Meeting
The first meeting was on Wednesday, November 20
th
, 2013. Before I taught the students, the English teacher greeted the students. She told them that in the next
meetings, I would be a substitute teacher to teach English. Then, the English teacher gave the chance for me to take turn as the teacher.
In this meeting, I focused on introducing the PALS technique to the students. I started the class by saying a prayer. Then, I greeted the students and checked the
students’ attendance. As it was the first meeting, I introduced myself first. Then, I gave the general apperception about the material that would be learnt by the students.
It was done as I wanted to build interaction between the teacher and the students. There were only few students who responded to the questions and the others kept
silent. Some of them even had a chat with their friends. However, some students answered the questions in Bahasa Indonesia.
Before I gave the worksheet to the students, I introduced PALS technique to them. This technique was still new for the students. I told the students how they dealt
with the technique and explained each step in PALS technique. While I was explaining the technique, the students did not listen carefully to him. Many of them
were having a chat with their friends. When I finished explaining the steps, I gave a text entitled
“
Football Game
” and “
My New Classmate
” to the student. Then, I distributed the worksheet to the students.
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After distributing the worksheet, I asked the students to read the text by implementing the PALS technique. As it was the first meeting, I guided them in each
stage on PALS technique. First, I divided the students into groups consisting of two students per group. This distribution was based on the result of the pre-test before. To
gain maximum result of applying PALS, I combined the higher reader with the lower reader in each group. After I finished the distribution of the students in each group, I
explained the steps again to use PALS technique. As some of the students were still confused, I repeated by using Bahasa Indonesia. Then, I asked them to start the
activity and to ask him if they found any difficulties. When the students were working on tutor and tutee role-play, I monitored
them and gave feedback. It was found that some students could do tutor and tutee role-play well. Rather than discussing the text given, they tend to talk with their
friend about something else. Moreover, there were also some students who did not understand doing tutor and tutee role-play but they did not ask me in dealing with the
tutor and tutee role-play stage. Here, it was found that when the students had difficulties, they just kept silent and did not try to ask the teacher. I decided to ask
some students who did not understand how to deal with the tutor and tutee role-play stage. I re-explained how to deal with that stage. After re-explaining, I gave an extra
5 minute to finish that stage. After that, I asked the students to continue to the retelling stage. The students have to retell what they read before. For this stage, I only
gave 5 minutes.
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The next stage was the paragraph shrinking stage. In this stage, each students read one paragraph, stopped after the paragraph, and told the main idea of the
paragraph with 10 minutes time given for this stage. The last one is the prediction relay stage. In this stage, students were asked to reasonably predict what happened in
the next paragraph, red at least half passage, checked their prediction accurately and grasped the important information by note taking in order to solve the question
provided below the text. The students took turns in this activity, started by the higher reader to be a model for the lower reader. In this stage, I also monitored the students
if any of them were confused about the text or the process of this stage. When they had finished the prediction relay stage, I asked some volunteers to
write the main ideas of some paragraphs and the answers on the whiteboard. There were only two volunteers who wrote the main idea and three students who have the
courage to share their findings and answers related to the text. Then, I discussed the main ideas of the paragraphs in the text and the answers of the questions together
with the students. It was the first time for them to have such activities and it made the students confuse to speak up. It referred from the field note and interview with the
students.
