IMPROVING THE READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY OF THE TENTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMA N 6 YOGYAKARTA IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR OF 2013/2014 USING COLLABORATIVE STRATEGIC READING.

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

This chapter concerns the background to the study, identification of the problems, limitation of the problems, formulation of the problem, objectives of the study, and significance of the study. Each of these is presented below.

A. Background to the Study

Reading as one of the four language skills (i.e. speaking, listening, reading and writing) is important for senior high school students. It becomes important since it should be mastered by senior high school students in order to reach the aims of teaching reading in the recent curriculum namely School-Based Curriculum or KTSP. In this curriculum, the students are expected to understand the meaning of interpersonal and transactional written texts in the form of recount, narrative, procedure, descriptive, news item, report, analytical exposition, hortatory exposition, spoof, explanation, discussion, and review in daily life contexts and to access knowledge. Besides, students are expected to be able to respond to meaning of short functional text accurately (i.e. announcements, advertisements, invitations, etc). Responding to the aims, most of the final exam material deals with texts. Due to this condition, reading becomes important and students are expected to have good understanding of the texts. To have good understanding of the texts, the students need reading comprehension skills. In order to have good comprehension skills, the students also need to have an ability to access integrated background knowledge with meaning constructions as it is explored by Baddeley (2000),

Ericcson and Kintsch (1995), Verhoeven and Perfetti (2008), and Zwann and Radvansky (1988) that successful comprehension and retention depend on the ability to reliably access and integrate background knowledge, and the ability to generate, maintain and update iterative forms of meaning constructions.

In practice, according to the preliminary observation conducted on July 2013 in class X.5 of SMA N 6 Yogyakarta, it was found that the students had low ability in reading comprehension. It was reflected by some cases such as incapability in grasping the information from the text, finding the main idea, and getting meanings of difficult words. These problems were caused by some factors deriving from the students and the teacher. First, the factors that came from the students’ behavior, for example, talking to friends, texting, and browsing the internet, affected their learning process. When the teacher asked them questions related to the text they could not answer. This problem arose because they had less motivation and interest in the process of teaching and learning. In addition, based on the students’ and my point of view, there was another factor that caused students’ low motivation and interest in the process of teaching and learning, i.e. the method used by the teacher. The teacher gave a monotonous teaching method so that the students felt bored and reluctant to get involved in the process of teaching and learning. When the students felt bored and had less attention to the teaching and learning process they would have less willingness to explore their ideas to achieve a good reading comprehension.

In addition, based on students’ point of view, reading was important only to get good result on the national examination. Consequently, students just followed

English classes to pass the final exam of Semester 1 and Semester 2 without any willingness to explore their comprehension skills in the daily activity of the process of teaching and learning. Indeed, the students had low motivation on reading. Most of them could not grasp the information from the texts even finding main ideas. These common problems were influenced by the lack of vocabulary and the inappropriate teaching technique. The inappropriate classroom teaching technique done by the teacher diminished students’ enthusiasm about the texts. Students with low motivation had limited vocabulary. They could not comprehend the whole texts so that they felt bored with reading and sometimes they gave up when they were asked to get the information in the texts. As a result, the students turned into less active readers and at the end they become less competent in reading skill.

Based on the situation above, it requires the use of strategies such as applying an appropriate technique in teaching reading. One of the appropriate techniques that can be applied in the process of reading teaching and learning is Collaborative Strategic Reading, abbreviated as CSR. In CSR, the students will be accustomed to collaborative peer practice and their reading skill will be gained from the collaborative peer practice (Spielberger, 2002: 17). In CSR, all the students are actively involved and everyone has the opportunity to contribute as a group member to learn from and understand the text (Klingner, Vaughn, Boardman, 2007: 139). Through this activity, students are given a chance to talk much with their friends by discussing the topic given from the teacher in a group work so that it can minimize in-class activity during teaching and learning process.

Considering the problems above and the strength of applying CSR as a technique in improving reading comprehension ability, the researcher developed an observation into a scientific research under the title of Improving The Reading Comprehension Ability of the Tenth Grade Students of SMA N 6 Yogyakarta in the Academic Year of 2013/2014 Using Collaborative Strategic Reading.

B. Identification of the Problem

To identify the problems occurred in the teaching and learning process of reading, the researcher has conducted an observation in July 2013 in class of X.5 of SMA N 6 Yogyakarta. Based on the observation, there were found some factors influencing the reading comprehension ability of the tenth grade students of SMAN 6 Yogyakarta. They were the students’ vocabulary mastery, the learning materials, the students’ interest, the students’ motivation, and the teaching technique used in the classroom. Each problem was connected to other problems. Based on the observation, it was found that the problem that caused other problems was the teaching technique used in the classroom.

The conventional teaching technique did not train the students in the teaching and learning process of reading. It did not engage all the students to the activity. A group work was not conducted. The students were mostly demanded to read the text aloud from the only text book, then, they were called randomly to answer the questions by writing them on the whiteboard. This activity made the other students (who were not called) belittle the text and did other activities. Meanwhile, the teacher just warned the students to keep silent and pay attention to their friends who wrote the answer on the whiteboard in front of the class while thinking about

the answers of the questions based on the text. After the students answered all the questions on the whiteboard, the teacher discussed them all with the class. The teacher read the sentences aloud and asked the students about their meaning. When nobody answered, he translated the sentences into Bahasa Indonesia. This teaching technique seemed monotonous and did not boost students’ motivation to learn, thus, they were reluctant to participate in the teaching and learning process.

This ineffective teaching technique caused class behaviors. During the teaching and learning process, most of the students talked to their friends, played their cell phone and some of them browsed the internet. They pretended that they understood the text, but when the teacher asked them with the questions related to the text, they seemed so serious to look at the text just like thinking about the answer. They were just silent and gave no responses to the teacher’s questions. Only some students who did the exercise on the whiteboard that could answer the teacher’s questions while the others were just silent. This ineffective teaching technique which de-motivated and disengaged the students in the teaching and learning process of reading caused low comprehension.

C. Limitation of the Problem

Based on the identification of the problems stated previously, there are some problems that can be found during the teaching and learning process. This research is focused on improving reading comprehension through the use of Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR). The collaborator and the researcher limit the study on the technique considering the reason that the technique can be a crucial case in teaching reading comprehension.

D. Formulation of the Problem

In line with the identification and the limitation of the problems, the formulation of the problem of this research study is: “How can reading comprehension ability be improved through the use of CSR?”

E. Objective of the Study

In line with the problem formulated above, the objective of this research study is to improve the reading comprehension ability by using CSR.

F. Significance of the Study

The findings of this study are expected to give some contributions to some parties both theoretically and practically as follows.

1. Theoretical significance

The findings of this study will give information for others about the result of the students’ reading comprehension ability taught by CSR and can be a reference for other researchers who want to conduct research on the same subject.

2. Practical significance

For the teachers, the findings of this study will be a valuable input in choosing an appropriate technique in teaching reading. For the students, the findings will help them to improve their reading comprehension.

7 CHAPTER II

LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

This chapter presents some theories which underline and relate closely to this study. The discussion of this chapter is divided into two parts, i.e. literature review and conceptual framework. In the literature review, the researcher discusses theories which support the topic of the study. In the conceptual framework, the researcher relates the theories mentioned previously to the focus of the study.

A.Literature Review 1. The Nature of Reading a. Definition of Reading

Reading is an interactive process between a reader and a text which leads to automaticity or reading fluency (Alyousef, 2005: 144). In this process, the reader interacts dynamically with the text as he/she tries to elicit the meaning, and various kinds of knowledge being used are linguistic or systemic knowledge (through bottom-up processing) as well as schematic knowledge (through top-down processing).

In support to the definition above, Griffiths, Sohlberg, and Biancarosa (2011: 6) propose reading as an iterative, interactive process. It combines two processes, i.e. bottom-up and top-down processes that are active simultaneously related to word identification and comprehension. Regarding comprehension, Anastasiou and Griva (2004: 283) define reading as a complex process including a combination of

perceptual, psycholinguistic and cognitive abilities that has three key components such as accuracy, fluency (involves time), and comprehension.

In line with Anastasiou and Griva that involve fluency as one of three components of reading that supports a reading process, Anderson (1999) in Ueta (2005: 4) includes fluency as a part of reading. He states that reading is an active process, fluent process, which involves the reader and the reading materials in building meaning. Meaning does not reside on the printed page, nor is it only in the reader.

On the other hand, Spratt, Pulverness, and Williams (2005: 21) define reading as one of the four language skills (reading, listening, writing, and speaking) that is categorized as a receptive skill. It is categorized as the receptive skill because it involves responding to texts rather than producing it. Meanwhile, Urquhart and Weir (1988) in Ueta (2005: 4) define reading as the process of receiving and interpreting information encoded in language form. In this case, the language form can be in sentences or texts.

In reference to the arguments above, reading can be defined as a skill that involves the processes which engage the readers to communicate with the texts so that they can construct meaning and grasp the information from the texts.

Reading has the main goal, i.e. to extract and to construct meaning from the text (Anastasiou and Griva, 2009: 283). Clark and Silberstein (1977: 51) in Nunan (2004: 53) specify the purposes of reading into four things and they should be same in class as they are in real life. The purposes are: 1) to obtain a specific fact or piece of information (scanning), 2) to obtain the general idea of the author

(skimming), 3) to obtain a comprehensive understanding of reading, as in reading a textbook (thorough comprehension), or 4) to evaluate information in order to determine where it fits into our own system of beliefs (critical reading). Overall, the ultimate goal of reading is to understand what is read.

b. Components of Reading

The components of reading help students to understand what is read. Five components of reading as proposed by National Reading Panel (2000) in Sedita (2010: 11) are set out in the figure below.

Figure 1.Five components of reading (Adapted from National Reading Panel (2000) in Sedita (2010:11)).

The figure above shows five components of reading. They are phonemic awareness, phonics/word study, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Phonemic awareness involves the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Before students learn to read, they must understand how the sounds in words work. Phonics is related to the ability to understand the relationship between the letters of written language and the individual sounds of spoken language. It includes the use of letter combinations and patterns, syllable types, and skills to read and spell words. Fluency is the ability to read text quickly, accurately, and automatically, with proper expression

5 Components of Reading

Identifying words

accurately and fluently Constructing meaning once words are identified

Phonemic Awareness

Phonics/ Word Study

and understanding. Vocabulary involves the ability to understand the meaning of words. While comprehension is the ability to derive meaning based on the information in the text. In order to derive meaning in the text, the reader‘s own knowledge is needed to use. Comprehension can be improved by teaching students using specific reading strategies.

Based on the figure above, the first three components (phonemic awareness, phonics/word study, and fluency) are necessary for basic decoding. They allow readers to identify and spell words accurately and fluently. The last two components (vocabulary and comprehension) enable readers to construct meaning once words are identified. These last components have a strong effect on understanding what is read.

In the same field, Alderson (2000) in Liu (2010) reinforces the argument about the two last components above by proposing two components of reading. They are decoding (word recognition) and comprehension. Besides these two components, vocabulary is also a considered part in reading.

In the different opinion, Alliance for Excellent Education (2004: 4) provides two important components to improving students‘ comprehension. They are prior knowledge and strategy instruction. Prior knowledge leads students to connect material in a text to their own experiences and create a foundation for them to read text effectively. Such connection is often used for making references and prediction. Besides the prior knowledge, reading comprehension instruction can be useful in improving students‘ reading comprehension. It provides the students with an opportunity to use strategies without directly telling them which strategy to use

and how to use it. Through comprehension strategy instruction, students learn a set of useful tools that allow them to improve their reading comprehension.

c. Reading Skills and Strategies

To make the concept of reading clear, the researcher needs to explore the differences between reading skills and strategies. Besides reading skills, reading strategies are one of pre-requisites needed in order to comprehend the texts. The differences of each are presented by the following definition.

Reading skill is an important tool that students need to become academically successful. The school curriculum allows texts to use in order to acquire the information. Therefore, when reading a text the goal is to understand its content. In this case, skills are seen as parts of the generalized reading process (Liu, 2010: 153). By having the skills, students will have a good reading competence. They will get fewer difficulties when they do a reading activity.

Urquhart & Weir (1998) cited in Liu (2010: 153) describe a reading skill as ―a cognitive ability which a person is able to use when interacting with texts.‖ When interacting with the texts, a reader (i.e. a student) uses his/her cognitive ability in order to grasp the information even to comprehend them.

Reading skills have some sub-skills, i.e. scanning (reading for specific information), skimming (reading for gist), reading for detail, and approaches such as extensive reading and intensive reading. When scanning, the readers do not read the whole text. They just quickly read most of the text until they find the information they are interested in. While skimming is reading quickly through a

text to get a general idea of what it is about. Another sub-skill is reading for detail. This sub-skill engages the readers to get the meaning out of every word.

Another approach is extensive reading. Extensive reading involves reading long pieces of text, for example, a story and an article. Besides, there is intensive reading. In an intensive reading, the texts are used to examine the language. Learners are asked to look for all the words in the text related to a particular topic, or work out the grammar of a particular sentence. This activity is aimed at making learners more aware of how language is used. These sub-skills influence how readers read (Spratt, Pulverness, and Williams, 2005: 22).

Different from the definition of reading skills, a reading strategy is a plan or a way of doing something; a specific procedure one uses to perform a skill (Hollas, 2002). In this case, strategies are used to help learners focus on reading and to do more than just read the words on a piece of paper. Furthermore, he suggests that to improve the effectiveness of each reader, the skills of a strategic reader in the content areas can be broken down into seven areas as follows.

1. Predicting – declaring in advance or to foretell on the basis of observation and/or experience.

2. Visualizing – forming mental pictures of scenes, characters and events. 3. Connecting – to link two things together or to associate and see a

relationship.

4. Questioning – to inquire or examine.

5. Clarifying – to make understandable or to become clear and free of confusion.

6. Summarizing – to concisely obtain the essence or main point of the text. 7. Evaluating – to form an opinion about what you have read.

The predicting, visualizing, and connecting areas are implemented as before reading strategies. They are used to promote students‘ interest and involvement in the upcoming assignment. These kinds of strategies help the students to activate their prior background knowledge so that the learner can begin to make a connection to the reading. The question and clarification areas are implemented as during reading strategies. These strategies are used to help reinforce comprehension and maintain self-interest. These particular strategies help the students engage personally and respond to the text, consolidate ideas, and find a reason for the sequence of information. While summarizing and evaluating are implemented as after reading strategies. These strategies are used by the student to thoroughly understand what they have just read. The evaluation and summarizing process allow the students to recall the information from the texts they have read. d. Macro and micro-skills for reading

In order to be efficient readers, students need macro and micro-skills. According to Brown (2004:187), there is a list of some important micro-skills that learners should use in reading. The micro-skills include some items as follows.

1) Discriminating among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.

2) Retaining chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory. 3) Processing writing at an efficient rate speed to suit the purpose.

4) Recognizing a core of words, and interpreting word order patterns and their significance.

5) Recognizing grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), system (e.g. tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.

6) Recognizing that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.

7) Recognizing cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signaling the relationship between and among clauses.

The macro-skills include some issues presented below:

1) Recognizing the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation.

2) Recognizing the communicative function of written texts, according to form and purpose.

3) Inferring context that is not explicit by using background knowledge.

4) Describing events, ideas, etc., inferring link and connection between events, deducing cause and effects, and detecting such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.

5) Distinguishing between literal and implied meanings.

6) Detecting culturally specific references and interpreting them in a context of the appropriate cultural schemata.

7) Developing and using battery of reading strategies, such as scanning and skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning of words from context, and activating schemata for the interpretation of texts.

e. Types of Reading Performance

There are two types of classroom reading performance as proposed by Brown (2001:312), i.e. oral and silent reading. Oral reading is suitable for beginning and intermediate levels and commonly used as a pronunciation test. While silent reading is divided into extensive and intensive reading. The definition of extensive and intensive reading can be derived from the differences between them as proposed by Hafiz and Tudor (1989: 5) in Alyousef (2005: 147), that is:

In intensive reading activities learners are in the main exposed to relatively short texts which are used either to exemplify specific aspects of the lexical, syntactic or discoursal system of the L2, or to provide the basis for targeted reading strategy practice; the goal of extensive reading, on the other hand, is to ‗flood‘ learners with large quantities of L2 input with few or possibly no specific tasks to perform on this material.

Specifically, extensive reading involves reading long pieces of text, for example, a story and an article. While in an intensive reading, the texts are used to examine the language. For example, learners are asked to look for all the words in the text related to a particular topic, or work out the grammar of a particular sentence. Extensive and intensive reading influence how the readers read and both of them is aimed at making learners more aware of how language is used (Spratt, Pulverness, and Williams, 2005: 22).

2. Reading Comprehension

a. Definition of Reading Comprehension

Comprehension is a complex process that has been understood and explained in a number of ways. Comprehension is seen as a complex process as proposed by Duke and Pearson (2002: 1) that it is consuming, continuous, and provides complex activity, but it is satisfying and productive for good readers.

According to Snow (2002: 11), comprehension is ―the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language‖. This process is seen as an interactive process that consists of three elements: the text as being comprehended, the reader that is doing the comprehending, and the activity in which comprehension is a part, as it is proposed in the definition of reading comprehension.

In line with Snow, Pardo (2004: 272) states that comprehension is a process in which readers construct meaning from texts. In order to construct meaning, the readers are interacting with the texts through the combination of their prior knowledge and previous experience, information in the text, and the stance how the readers connect with the texts.

In reference to the definitions above, reading comprehension is a process that enables readers to actively interact with the texts through communicative way in order to get meaning from the texts.

Comprehension processes result in three levels of representation of a text‘s meaning. They are sentence level representation, proposition level of representation, and situation model (Griffiths, Sohlberg, and Biancarosa, 2011: 7).

The sentence level representation is literally a word-for-word rendering of the text being read. While the proposition level of representation is a level in which the reader extracts the core ideas from the literal text. In this level, with word meaning available, syntax is parsed to establish relations between words leading to construction proposition level meaning. The highest level representation of a text‘s meaning i.e. the situation model that represents the integrated situation described in a text. Situation models describe the representation constructed when readers integrate and update what they already know about the topic into a more complex and holistic conceptualization of it. Specifically, reading comprehension depends upon a number of cognitive processes. Griffiths, Sohlberg, and Biancarosa (2011: 12) add that the readers must be able to ―hold onto‖ new information as it is being read, while retrieving relevant information from background knowledge and the readers must integrate information to construct representation of meaning.

b. Factors Affecting Reading Comprehension

In teaching reading comprehension, a teacher should be aware of some factors because the success or the failure of reading comprehension can be affected by some factors such as meta-cognition, decoding/fluency, knowledge, and vocabulary and language skills (Sedita, 2010: 13).

The meta-cognition factor is closely related to motivation. Weak self-monitoring skills and a lack of useful strategies can impede reading comprehension. Furthermore, students will be more successful in reading comprehension if they are motivated to understand and engage in text they read (Snow: 2002). Weaknesses in the area of decoding and fluency are the main causes

of poor reading comprehension. When the students have weaknesses in these areas, they are unable to focus on comprehending what they are reading.

The next factor is knowledge. In this case, knowledge is related to background knowledge and knowledge of text structure. A lack of life experience or vast reading experience can affect the amount of background knowledge that the students can access when they are reading because without sufficient background knowledge they cannot relate to the information to construct meaning. In order to comprehend the texts, a reader must have knowledge of text structure at the sentence, paragraph, and discourse levels. They must be able to understand each sentence and to link the ideas from one sentence to others. In support to this, Carlisle and Rice (2002) in Sedita (2010: 13) propose that students who have good grammatical awareness tend to be good readers.

Besides meta-cognition, decoding/fluency, knowledge, and vocabulary, the success or the failure of reading comprehension can be affected by other factors such as vocabulary and language skills. Mastery of vocabulary has strong relationship with reading comprehension. This relationship arises since the texts entail recognizing words even comprehending the texts. Thus, a reader with wide vocabulary will be able to recognize words in the texts so that he/she has possibility to easily comprehend the texts rather than them who lacks of vocabulary.

Based on the factors above, there are some learning weaknesses that the students may have which also affect reading comprehension. Those factors are

attention, short or long-term memory, visualizing and creating images, expressive language skills, and English as a second language (Sedita, 2010: 14).

c. Problems in Reading Comprehension

The capability of being able to comprehend the texts is not easy to achieve. Students who do not have a strong foundation in comprehension skills become struggling readers and are often caught in a cycle of failure. They become those students because they find that reading is very difficult to learn.

One of the problems faced by the students is the linguistics knowledge of English text. In this case, it is often difficult to prove, for the students of English as a foreign language, that texts in English can be understood even though there are structures that the students have never seen before. Hedge (2000: 192) proposed that in processing texts, the second language readers will find difficulties when they find unfamiliar aspects of the English language. For example, the inability to understand cohesive devices in a text will impede their understanding of the relationships of sentences. Accordingly, cohesive devices include such things as reference items (for example, ‗they‘ and ‗this‘), lexical cohesion through a chain of synonyms (for example, ‗funding … financing … resourcing‘), or deletion of items such as relative pronouns (for example, ‗which‘ and ‗that‘). By understanding language knowledge, the learners find it easier to grasp the meaning of a particular text.

Another major difficulty that may be experienced by the students of English as a foreign language in mastering reading skill is the lack of vocabulary items. If students want to be good readers with a wide range of texts, they need to

understand in acquiring a great number of vocabulary items and they need to recognize about 95 percent of the words they might encounter in text for instructional purposes (Grabe, 2009: 333). In line with it, Nations (2006) in Grabe (2009: 333) insists that independent fluent reading generally occurs when a reader can recognize 98-99 percent of the words in a given text. However, it is often found that most learners worry about the meaning of a particular word in a text being read. Therefore, they never achieve the minimum standard of mastery level to read texts in English. Furthermore, most of them have not found the urge of English for their field of study. As a result, they will feel unmotivated in learning English.

On the other hand, a number of problems are also faced by the teachers. The teachers find the difficulty in the teaching reading. One of them deals with learning strategy. An appropriate strategy, which provides interesting activities, will encourage students to be active, and realize the demand they are supposed to have. In this case, the teachers have not found the appropriate strategy to use in teaching reading. Since they do not find the appropriate strategy to teach, the students pay less attention to the teacher, they are less active in the classroom, and have their own activity with friends during the process of teaching and learning. The teacher then may find it difficult to control the class. As a result, the teaching and learning process do not run well.

Dealing with the problems above, the researcher needs to apply a certain technique and strategy to overcome the problems. In this case, the technique should be particularly interesting from second language standpoint. It means that it

is effective with students including language minority students. In order to solve the EFL classroom‘s problems on reading comprehension, the technique is expected to give some benefits to learning process such as motivating the students, improving social interaction in the classroom, creating a positive learning environment, and improving reading skills.

d. Strategies for Reading Comprehension

For most second language learners who are already literate in a previous language, reading comprehension is primarily a matter of developing appropriate and efficient comprehension strategies. Comprehension strategies are also regarded as deliberate and goal oriented processes used to construct meaning from text (Abidin and Riswanto, 2012: 192). Some strategies are related to bottom-up procedures and others are related to top-down processes. The following are ten strategies that can be applied as classroom techniques (Brown, 2001):

1. Identifying the purpose of reading (clearly identify the purpose in reading something so you will know what you are looking for);

2. Using graphemic rules and pat terns to aid bottom-up decoding, especially for beginning level learners;

3. Using efficient silent reading techniques for rapid comprehension (for intermediate to advanced levels);

4. Skimming the text for main ideas (quickly running one‘s eyes across whole text for its gist) for prediction;

5. Scanning the text for specific information (quickly searching for some particular piece or pieces of information in a text); 6. Using semantic mapping or clustering (grouping ideas into

meaningful clusters, helps readers to provide some order to the chaos);

7. Guessing when you aren‘t certain (guess a meaning of a word, guess a grammatical relationship, guess a discourse relationship, infer implied meaning, guess about a cultural reference and guess content messages);

8. Analyzing vocabulary (look for prefixes, look for suffixes, look for roots that are familiar, look for grammatical

contexts that may signal information, look at semantic context for clues);

9. Distinguishing between literal and implied meanings; 10. Capitalizing on discourse markers to process relationships.

Considering comprehensive reading strategies, Lai (1997) cited in Nunan (2004: 62-63) presents some strategies for reading. He proposes that by matching strategies, texts and reading purposes it is possible for second language readers to significantly increase both their reading speed and their comprehension. The strategies and the explanation are set out in the table below.

Strategy Explanation

1. Having a purpose

It is important for students to have a clear purpose and to keep in mind what they want to gain from the text.

2.Previewing Conducting a quick survey of the text to identify the topic, the main idea, and the organization of the text.

3.Skimming Looking quickly through the text to get a general idea of what it is about.

4. Scanning Looking quickly through a text in order to locate specific information.

5.Clustering Reading clusters of words as a unit. 6. Avoiding bad

habits

Avoiding habits such as reading word by word. 7.Predicting Anticipating what is to come.

8. Reading actively

Asking questions and then reading for answers. 9. Inferring Identifying ideas that are not explicitly stated. 10.Identifying

genres

Identifying the overall organizational pattern of a text.

11.Identifying paragraph

Identifying the organizational structure of a paragraph, for example, whether it follows an inductive or deductive pattern.

Table1. Reading Strategies (Adapted from Lai (1997) in Nunan (2004: 62-63))

Good readers will adjust their strategies to the type of text they read and to the purpose for which they are reading (Anastasiou and Griva, 2009: 283). They will distinguish between important information and details as they read and are able to relate new information with information already stated. They employ strategies then to make it understandable.

e. Techniques in Teaching Reading Comprehension

Considering the problems found in reading comprehension, the researcher feels that it is necessary to provide a model of teaching strategy as a technique in teaching reading comprehension, as mentioned in the previous section, that it may

12. Identifying sentence structure

Identifying the subject and main verb incomplex sentences.

13. Noticing cohesive devices

Assigning correct referents to proforms (they can be pronouns), and identifying the function of conjunctions.

14. Inferring unknown vocabulary

Using context as well as parts of words (e.g. prefixes, suffixes and stems) to work out the meaning of unknown words.

15. Identifying figurative language

Understanding the use of figurative language and metaphors.

16. Using background knowledge

Using what one already knows to understand new ideas.

17. Identifying style andits purpose

Understanding the writer‘s purpose in using different stylistic devices such as a series of short or long sentences.

18. Evaluating Reading critically, and assessing the truth value of textual information.

19. Integrating Tracking ideas that are developed across the text through techniques such as highlighting and note-taking.

20. Reviewing Looking back over a text and summarizing it. 21. Reading to

present

Understanding the text fully and then presenting it to others.

help students create a good learning atmosphere to take part actively in the classroom activity in order to improve their reading comprehension.

Regarding the techniques in teaching reading comprehension, some experts proposed different ideas. The most common idea is advanced by Brown (2001: 299) that there are three techniques in teaching reading comprehension, i.e. bottom-up processing, top-down processing and interactive processing.

1) Bottom-up processing

In bottom-up processing the readers construct meaning from the smallest unit, i.e. from letters, words, phrases, and sentences. In this process, the readers build up a meaning from the written words on the page. The readers recognize letters, words, and working out sentence structure.

2) Top-down processing

Top-down processing requires the reader to interpret the text by moving from the highest to the lowest unit analysis. Here, the reader makes use of his existing knowledge to predict the meanings of the texts (Goodman in Alderson, 2000: 17). 3) Interactive processing

This processing is the combination of top-down processing and bottom-up processing. This process allows the readers to use both bottom-up and top-down processing in turn or at the same time. The readers can adopt a top-down processing to activate their background knowledge, then, move to the bottom-up processing by focusing on the smallest unit. The movements from one to another are based on the type of text as well as on the reader‘s background knowledge, language proficiency level, motivation, strategy use, and beliefs about reading.

In order to get the success of reading comprehension, the reader needs the most suitable strategy that includes the approaches above to get the final purpose in reading the text.

3. Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR)

CSR is a reading comprehension strategy that combines modification of reciprocal teaching and cooperative learning strategy or student pairing (Vaughn, 2002: 1). In reciprocal teaching, teachers and students take turns leading a dialogue concerning key features of text through summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. This definition is supported by Grabe (2009: 233) that claims CSR as a promising approach to combined strategies instruction that draws on both reciprocal teaching and cooperative learning, and that has been used with both L1 and L2 students. It provides readers with dual reading approaches simultaneously, bottom up and top down model.

In a more specific way, Spielberger (2002: 17) exclaims that CSR combines instruction in comprehension strategies and study skills with collaborative peer practice. Here, students learn four strategies through direct instruction and teacher modeling such as preview (i.e., preview and predicting), click and clunk (i.e., monitoring for understanding and vocabulary knowledge), get the gist (i.e., understanding the main idea, and wrap-up (i.e., self questioning for understanding). In CSR, students learn pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading strategies. In pre-reading, they have brainstorming and predicting.

During reading, they deal with click and clunk and get the gist, while after reading they have wrap-up activity. Each of these strategies is briefly explained as follows. 1) Preview – before reading

Preview allows students to generate interest and activate background knowledge in order to predict what they will learn. In other words, the students are asked to brainstorm what they already know about a topic and predict what they think they will learn.

2) Click and Clunk – during reading

In this strategy, the students monitor their comprehension and apply fix-up strategies to help them figure out unknown words when comprehension breaks down. In other words, click and clunk are self-monitoring strategy which controls students understanding about words, concepts and ideas that they understand or do not understand, or need to know more about.

3) Get the Gist – during reading

In this strategy, students identify the most important ideas about a topic in a section of text to confirm their understanding of the information.

4) Wrap Up – after reading

This strategy provides students with an opportunity to wrap up by generating questions and reviewing the key ideas they have learned.

The four strategies above are drawn into the CSR‘s plan, set out in the following diagram.

Figure 2. CSR’s Plan for Strategic Reading (Adapted from Klingner (2010) in International Journal of Humanities and Social Science (2012: 193))

CSR can be implemented in two phases, i.e. teaching the strategies, and cooperative learning group activity or student pairing (Vaughn, 2002: 2). In the first phase, teaching the strategies, students learn four strategies i.e. preview, click and clunk, get the gist, and wrap up as explained before. In the second phase, cooperative learning group activity or student pairing, students have learned the four strategies (preview, click and clunk, get the gist, and wrap up) and they are ready to apply CSR in their peer-led cooperative learning groups.

Preview #Brainstorm: What do we already know about the topic? #Predict: What do we predict we will learn about?

Click and Clunk

# Were there any parts that we hard to understand (clunks)? # How can we fix the clunks? # Use fix-up strategies:

1. Reread the sentences and look for key ideas to help you understand.

2. Reread the sentences before and after looking for clues. 3. Look for the prefix, root word, or suffix in the word.

4. Break the word apart and look for smaller words.

Wrap-Up # Ask Questions: What questions check whether we understand the most important in the passage? # Review:

What are the most important ideas?

Get the Gist: What is the most important person, place or thing?What is the most important idea about the person, place, or thing?

BEFORE READING

DURING READING

The procedures for using in groups are outlined below. 1) Set the stage

The teacher assigns students to groups of four of varying ability. Then, the teacher assigns roles to students. Students can take the roles in turn so that they can experience a variety of roles. The roles include leader, clunk expert, gist expert, and announcer.

Leader. The leader should tell the group what to read next and what strategy to use next.

Clunk Expert. He/she uses clunk cards to remind the group of the steps to follow when trying to figure out the meaning of their clunk(s).

Gist Expert. He/she should guide the group toward getting the gist and determines that the gist contains the most important idea(s) but no unnecessary details.

Announcer. He/she calls on group members to read a passage or share an idea.

2) Process

The steps to apply CSR in a cooperative learning group are as follows:

a) Step 1: Whole class introduction. In this step, the teacher introduces the topic, teaches key vocabulary, and provides instructions.

b) Step 2: Cooperative group activity during preview, click and clunk, get the gist, and wrap up).In this step, each group member plays an assigned role and fills out a CSR learning log during the activity.

Name : _____________________ Date : ____________ Today‘s Topic : __________________________________________

BEFORE READING : Preview

Brainstorm : What do you already know about the topic? (connection to prior knowledge)

Predict : What you might learn about the topic.

DURING READING : Section 1

Clunks Fix-up Strategies

___________ = ______________________ 1 2 3 4 ___________ = ______________________ 1 2 3 4 Gist :

DURING READING : Section 2

Clunks Fix-up Strategies

___________ = ______________________ 1 2 3 4 ___________ = ______________________ 1 2 3 4 Gist :

etc.

AFTER READING : Wrap-Up

Questions : Write questions and answers about main idea.

Review : Write something important you learned from this passage.

The CSR learning log is set out below:

Figure 3.CSR Learning Log (Adapted from the presentation of Improving Reading Comprehension with Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) (Klingner, 2010: 28), CSR Study funded by Institute of Education Sciences 2009-2010.

c) Step 3: Whole class wrap up strategy. In this step, the teacher discusses the reading passage, reviews clunks, answers questions, or shares some review ideas.

Principally, the goals of CSR are to improve reading comprehension and to increase conceptual learning in ways that maximize students‘ involvement in the teaching and learning process. The cooperative learning concept in CSR promotes students to be active, collaborative as well as cooperative in achieving similar

learning goals (Abidin and Riswanto, 2012: 193). The goal of CSR and the concept within lead the use of CSR in the classroom especially in classroom teaching reading comprehension. Besides, the benefits of CSR (that engages students to work in small group cooperatively so they have opportunity to discuss and share the ideas among the members of the groups as well as develop their social skills) and cooperative learning techniques also take part in the use of it. The benefits of cooperative learning techniques as proposed by Johnson & Johnson (1987) and Slavin (1995) in Abidin and Riswanto (2012: 193) are promoting student and academic achievement, increasing students‘ retention, enhancing student satisfaction with their learning experience, help the students develop skills in oral communication, developing students‘ social skills, promoting students‘ self– esteem, and help the students to promote positive race relation.

4. Teaching Reading Comprehension

a. Teaching Reading Comprehension in Senior High School

Teaching is showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, giving instructions, guiding in the study of something, providing with knowledge, and causing to know or understand (Brown, 2007: 8). It implies that teaching is a tool for guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, and setting condition for learning.

Teaching reading means guiding and facilitating learners to read, enabling the learners to read, and setting condition to read. The teacher‘s apprehension of the learners will determine the teacher‘s philosophy of education, teaching style and approaches, teaching methods and classroom techniques.

Teaching reading in senior high school is challenging for the English teacher. It becomes challenging since the exam is about text and the aim of the teaching reading that is stated in the recent curriculum. In the recent curriculum namely School-Based Curriculum or KTSP, the students are expected to understand the meaning of interpersonal and transactional written text in the form of recount, narrative, procedure, descriptive, news item, report, analytical exposition, hortatory exposition, spoof, explanation, discussion, and review in daily life contexts and to access knowledge. It means that students are not only expected to understand the texts but also to link them with the daily life contexts and to access knowledge from them. This ability then is tested in the final exam. Most of the final exam is dealing with texts. Thus, it brings the students to have a good reading comprehension.

Teaching reading comprehension in senior high school is different. When teaching reading for senior high school students, the teacher does not teach the students to learn to read only, but also to teach them to read to learn. In order to urge the students to have a good reading comprehension, the English teacher needs to provide the best technique in teaching reading while apprehends the characteristics of the students and the situation in the classroom, facilitates the students with appropriate and challenging situation, and considers all factors that can affect students‘ reading comprehension so that their ability in reading comprehension can be improved.

b. Reading Comprehension Assessment

Assessment is the process of observing and measuring learning (Penn: 2012). Teachers use assessment in reading to make sure that students are making measurable progress. They evaluate a student's level of achievement and skill for the purpose of supporting and improving students‘ learning.

Regarding a measure, in selecting a test or assessment procedure, it is important to select a measure that closely matches the users‘ needs or purpose. According to Klingner (2007: 17), teachers should consider numerous factors when choosing a test or assessment procedure. Those factors are presented as follows.

1) The purpose of the testing (screening, progress monitoring, assessing level of reading, research, or assessing students‘ competence in comparison to peers).

2) The specific information needed about the student‘s reading comprehension (types of questions missed, level).

3) The number of students being tested (i.e., an individual, a small group, or a whole class).

4) The length of the test (e.g., shorter tests can be easier to give and less stressful for the student, but may not have enough questions or types of tasks to provide sufficient information about a student‘s performance).

5) Whether the test is an individually or group-administered test. 6) The number of forms available with the test, particularly if

multiple administrations are needed (e.g., many norm-referenced tests come with two forms, making them useful for assessing progress over time—students are given one version of the test as a pretest and another as a posttest).

7) For norm-referenced tests, the extent to which the norming sample is similar to the students to whom the test will be administered.

8) The examiner‘s qualifications (e.g., whether the tester has the skills to give highly specific tests).

9) The amount of training needed to administer a test, score it, and interpret results (e.g., norm-referenced tests typically require some training).

B.Relevant Studies

There are some studies related to this study that were previously conducted by other researchers. The first researchers are Klinger and Vaughn. They conducted the research in 1998 with 26 seventh and eighth graders with low learning abilities who used English as a second language. In this study, students learn to use modified reciprocal teaching methods in cooperative learning groups (i.e., brainstorm, predict, clarify words and phrases, highlight main idea, summarize main ideas and important detail, and ask and answer the questions). It was found that CSR was effective in improving reading comprehension for most of the students with low learning abilities. In 2000, they implemented CSR with fourth graders with a wide range of reading levels. Students in the CSR group significantly outperformed those in the control group on comprehension. In a subsequent study, fifth grade students were taught to apply CSR by trained classroom teachers during English as a Second Language (ESL) science classes. It was shown that the students significantly increased their vocabulary from pre- to post-testing. Furthermore, students in CSR groups spent greater amounts of time engaged in academic related strategic discussion and assisted one and another while using CSR.

The second researcher is Fan who conducted a research in 2010. The research was conducted on 110 Taiwanese students from two intact classes. The purpose of the research is to investigate the impact of CSR towards EFL Taiwanese students‘ reading comprehension. The questionnaire and standardized reading pre-test, post-test and interviews were used to gather the data. The research findings showed that

the statistical results confirm CSR was more effective than the traditional teacher-led reading approach which focuses on vocabulary and grammar teaching in improving the students‘ reading comprehension scores. The findings indicated that CSR had a positive effect on the Taiwanese university learners‘ reading comprehension particularly in relation to the comprehension questions on getting the main idea and finding the supporting details. Moreover, a detailed analysis of qualitative data suggested that the learners with relatively homogenous English ability provided collaborative scaffolding for comprehension texts through co-construction, elaboration, and appeal for assistance, corrective feedback, and prompts.

The third researcher is Wang who did the research in 2008. He examined the effect of CSR on sixth-graders‘ reading comprehension and learning attitudes. Sixty-two pupils from two intact classes were divided into a control group receiving the traditional teacher-directed reading instruction and an experimental group of CSR instruction in combination with story retelling strategy training for fifteen weeks. Multiple measures were used in this study. They consisted of a questionnaire of English learning background, pre-tests and post-tests of reading comprehension, five post-tests administered after reading stories, a story reading post-test which students had not ever read in the class and a questionnaire of students‘ attitudes towards the intervention. It was reported that modified CSR approach was effective in fostering her six-graders‘ overall reading comprehension and understanding of the meaning of the stories, and that it increased their English learning motivation.

This research is a bit different from those previous ones. It observes 30 tenth grade students of a senior high school with low reading comprehension. This research was conducted in the classroom action research that used specific texts (i.e. narrative and recount texts) and used interviews, field notes, and the reading comprehension tests that were reflected in the form of pre-test and post-test to gain the data. The different method will lead to different results.

C.Conceptual Framework

Since reading plays an important role for senior high school students, it is necessary for students to have an ability of comprehending some kinds of reading texts. The students are expected to be able to communicate with the texts as they are expected to gain knowledge and grasp the information from the texts. However, the students of the tenth grade of SMA N 6 Yogyakarta found difficulties in comprehending texts. The problem arouse since the use of monotonous technique in teaching-learning reading in the classroom that could not boost students‘ ability of reading comprehension.

CSR is a technique that is believed to improve students‘ reading comprehension. It employs four strategies that are challenging and interesting that can maximize students‘ involvement in the teaching and learning process. They are preview, click and clunk, get the gist, and wrap-up.

Preview allows students to generate interest and activated background knowledge in order to predict what they will learn. In other words, the students are asked to brainstorm what they already know about a topic and predict what they think they will learn. In click and clunk strategy, the students can monitor their

comprehension and apply fix-up strategies to help them figure out unknown words when comprehension breaks down. It means that click and clunk are self-monitoring strategy which controls students understanding about words, concepts and ideas that they understand or do not understand, or need to know more about. After click and clunk strategy, students are expected to identify the most important ideas about the topic in the section of the text to confirm their understanding of the information in the other strategy during reading (get the gist). The last strategy is wrap-up strategy. In this strategy, the students are given the opportunity to wrap up by generating questions and reviewing the key ideas they have learned.

The idea of applying CSR in this research study is based on some reasons related to the benefits of CSR offered by Klingner, Vaughn, and Boardman (2007: 139). They are: 1) in CSR students are engaged to be actively involved in the teaching and learning process, 2) CSR gives an opportunity to every student to contribute as group members so that they can learn from and understand texts, and 3) in CSR students are adjusted to have social skills as they have to respect other arguments of the members in the group.

D. Hypothesis

Based on the conceptual framework above, the hypothesis of this research can be formulated as follows: when CSR is used in the teaching and learning process of reading, the reading comprehension ability of the tenth grade students of SMA N 6 Yogyakarta will be improved.

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CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHOD

This chapter consists of seven sections namely research design, research setting and participants, research procedures, research instruments, data collection technique, data analysis technique, and research validity and reliability. The discussion of each part is presented below.

A.Research Design

The design of this study is classroom action research. It is categorized as action research since the study relates to the matter of problem solving and the main purpose is to improve students’ learning, students’ reading comprehension ability. Furthermore, this research study occurs through a dynamic process which is flexible to the changes with the condition of the field. In this study, the researcher involved four phases in each cycle which are essential as proposed by Kemmis and Mc Taggart (1988) in Burns (1999). Those phases are planning, action and observation, and reflection. The plan was arranged by the researcher with the collaborator to solve the problems in reading comprehension of X.5 students of SMA N 6 Yogyakarta. The plan was more effective and provided greater flexibility of unpredictable situation in the field and obstacles that were not seen before. Then, the researcher implemented the plan to the process of teaching reading comprehension in class X.5. By using triangulation technique, the researcher and the collaborator observed the effects of the critically informed action in the context in which it occurs. After the observations were done, there

was reflection on these effects to overcome the weaknesses as the basis for further planning. The researcher did these kinds of phases until the treatment can be granted as effective. The concept of action research is set out by Kemmis and McTaggart (1988) in Burns (1999) in the Figure 4 as follow.

Figure 4. Action Research Cycles (adapted from Kemmis and McTaggart (1988) in Burns (1999))

B.Research Setting and Participants

This research study was conducted at SMA N 6 Yogyakarta, which is located in Jalan C. Simanjuntak No. 2 Yogyakarta. There are some facilities at SMA N 6 Yogyakarta that support teaching-learning process. One of them is a language

laboratory. The language laboratory is located near front office. The number of the classroom is not huge because the students at this school are involved in the moving class. The size of each classroom is medium and adequate, used by 30 students. Each classroom has been provided with a speaker hanging on the wall in front of the class, a viewer, and a white board. This school is also provided with the internet connection that is available for all school participants. The internet connection sometimes is used by the students to find the meaning of difficult words through an online dictionary as they are reluctant to bring a real dictionary.

The participants of this study were 30 students of class X.5.Based on the interview with the teacher conducted in July 2013, the researcher knew that the students of X.5 had good basic of English. They understood when the teacher used little English in discussing the materials. However, they seemed to be reluctant in reading class so that the scores of the quiz or exam were far from satisfactory scores. This opinion then supported the result of the observation conducted by the researcher that the students were getting bored in the reading comprehension session. This session, indeed, was necessary to help with this research study.

The study was conducted for about two months starting from July to August 2013. The researcher applied some cycles consisting of the step of reconnaissance, identifying, planning, pre-testing, implementing, reflecting, and post-testing. In this research, CSR was used as a method for the treatment to improve the students’ reading comprehension ability in the class of X.5 of SMA N 6 Yogyakarta.

C.Research Procedures 1) Reconnaissance

The first step of the procedures was reconnaissance. In this step, the researcher collected the information by doing some observations in the teaching and learning process in class X.5 to identify the real problems of the field. After that, the researcher interviewed the English teacher and some students about the teaching and learning process. After all information gathered from the observations and interviews, the researcher found the obstacles in the teaching and learning process and then she made a conclusion by selecting the critical problem.

2) Planning

After doing the observation in the reconnaissance step, the researcher made some plans to choose the actions that were feasible to be implemented in the field. In planning the actions, the researcher worked together with the collaborators. The aim of the actions was to improve the students’ reading comprehension ability. The action plan was using Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), and the researcher used lesson plans based on the course grid to teach.

3) Acting and observing the action

In this step, the researcher implemented the actions whereas the teacher and a friend at the English Education Department as collaborators took notes in the backside of the class to observe the students’ reactions and behaviors during the activities. The collaborators also helped the researcher handle the students’ disruptive behaviors. It was done by approaching the students or giving a warning. For example, when there was a student walking around the class, the collaborators

approached him and asked him to go back to his seat. Sometimes, the collaborators warned the researcher if there were some students who did not understand her explanation.

4) Reflection

Based on the observation, the researcher and the collaborators made a reflection on the implementation of the action. The reflection was conducted by interviewing the students and the collaborators about their responses to the action. The collaborators gave their contributions to the reflection on the action taken. The reflection shows whether the action was successful or not to improve the students’ reading comprehension ability. The successful action was used and reapplied in the next cycle.

D.Research Instruments

To gather the data, the researcher used some instruments, i.e. an observation guideline and an interview guideline.

1. Observation guideline

The observation guide used by the researcher to gather the information about all the things happening in the process of teaching and learning by observing the whole section of the teaching and learning process in the classroom.

2. Interview guideline

The interview guide helped the researcher to gather the data about the teaching and learning process occurred in the classroom by interviewing the teacher and the students.

3. Reading comprehension tests

Besides the instruments above, the researcher also gave students reading comprehension tests. The reading comprehension tests were in the form of multiple choices and divided into two sections, i.e. pre-test and post-test. The pre-test was given to students before the treatment and the post-test was given after the treatment. The result of the pre-test and the post-test then were compared to know whether or not the treatment improved the students’ reading comprehension ability.

E.Data Collection Technique

This research used qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques. In order to attain the data, the researcher used several data collection techniques, namely:

1. Observation

During the teaching and learning process in the classroom, the researcher observed the teaching and learning activity. The researcher observed several aspects in the teaching and learning process. The aspects included how the teacher teaches reading, the students’ behaviors, and the learning materials. This technique was to get the information about teaching and learning activity in the classroom. The results were used to identify the problems in the reconnaissance step which determined the planning step, while in the acting and observing stage, the results were used to describe the students’ and the teacher’s behaviors and the problems

that occurred during the implementation of the action. The results of the observation were in the form of field notes.

2. Interview

The researcher developed some specific questions, but she allowed the flexibility according to the interviewee responded. The teacher and some students were interviewed before and after the teaching and learning process. The purpose of this technique was to know the opinion of the teacher and the students about the teaching and learning process.

3. Reading comprehension tests

There were two kinds of reading comprehension tests in this research, i.e. pre-test (Test A) and post-pre-test (Test B). A pre-pre-test was administered in the reconnaissance step, while a post-test was administered upon the completion of the action. These tests helped the researcher to find out the students’ reading comprehension ability before and after the researcher implemented the activities of CSR. The researcher compared the results of these two tests. The results of these two tests could show whether there was an improvement or not in the reading comprehension ability.

F. Data Analysis Technique

There were two forms of the data in this study. The first was qualitative and the second was the quantitative data. The qualitative data were obtained from the interview and the classroom observation. Meanwhile, the quantitative data were obtained from students’ reading comprehension tests. In analyzing the qualitative data, the researcher did three steps, namely data reduction, data display, and

conclusion drawing/verification (Miles and Huberman, 1994: 10-12). Firstly, the researcher selected, focused, simplified, abstracted, and transformed the data which were in the form of field notes and the interview transcripts. The researcher, then, sorted, sharpened, focused, and organized the data to get the final conclusion. Afterwards, the researcher organized the data in order to come to the conclusion drawing and action. Finally, she drew conclusion from the data display to know the progress of the implementation and verified it.

Meanwhile, the quantitative data which were taken from the reading tests were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The descriptive statistics aimed to provide answers about the students’ learning achievement before and after applying CSR. The statistics which were used in the computation were the mean which was the average score attained by the subjects of the research. From the result of the reading tests, the students’ progression level was identified.

G.Research Validity and Reliability

The data of a research study must be valid and reliable. In order to get the validity of the data, as this research study was action research, the researcher applied five criteria of the validity. They were democratic validity, outcome validity, process validity, catalytic validity, and dialogic validity (Burns, 1999: 161). Each of them was in the following part.

1. Democratic validity

The democratic validity is related to the extent in which the research is truly conducted collaboratively and it allows multiple voices. In order to gain the democratic validity, the researcher interviewed the teacher, the students, and

the collaborator about the research conducted. In this research study, the opinions or suggestions were derived from the participants, the English teacher and the collaborator.

2. Outcome validity

Outcome validity relates the notion of the actions leading to the outcome that are successful within the research context. To achieve the outcome validity, the researcher not only focused on the resolutions of the problem, but she also had to reframe the problems in such a way to lead new questions. It would be done in the reflection phase.

3. Process validity

The process validity was fulfilled by conducting observations during the treatment implemented, interviews with the students, and discussions with the teacher and the collaborator. Furthermore, the process validity was determined by the researcher’s insight, skill, and knowledge about (1) the essence of communicative competence, (2) communicative language learning including communicative approach and the methodology and the techniques within, and (3) learner characteristics (i.e. intelligence, learning style, personality, motivation, cognitive abilities, and the level of learning) and the effect towards foreign language learning (Madya, 2007: 42). In this criterion, the researcher would easily determine the precise actions to achieve the expected changes with the right indicator and easily decided the actions which could cause obstacles arouse when she had a good insight, skill, and knowledge about three things above.

4. Catalytic validity

The catalytic validity relates to the extent in which the research can allow the students to deepen their understanding about the social context and how the students can make changes within the research. To fulfill this criterion, the researcher interviewed the students and the English teacher to know their perception about the changes occurred after the research conducted.

5. Dialogic validity

The researcher conducted peer review to fulfill this criterion. The peer review was done through reflective dialogues with the collaborator and the English teacher about the process of the research study to minimize the subjectivity. Besides having dialogues with the collaborator and the English teacher, the researcher interviewed the students in every meeting about the implementation of the research so that the researcher knew the strength and the weaknesses of the action. The interview was very helpful for the researcher to do better in the next cycle.

In order to obtain the reliability, the researcher used genuine data taken from observations, interviews, questionnaires, and tests. To obtain the trustworthiness the researcher used triangulation techniques as proposed by Burns (1999: 164). The four forms of triangulation were time triangulation, space triangulation, investigator triangulation, and theoretical triangulation. The forms of triangulation used by the researcher are discussed as follows:

In this form of triangulation the data were collected over period of time to get a sense of what factors involved in change processes. In this research study, the action was conducted from July until August 2013.

2. Investigator triangulation

In this case, there were observers involved in the same research setting. They were the researcher herself, the English teacher, and the collaborator. It was done in order to avoid bias observations.

3. Theoretical triangulation

In this form, the data were analyzed from more than one perspective of theoretical reviews. In this research study, the researcher reviewed the theories from some experts.

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CHAPTER IV

RESEARCH FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

This Chapter presents the research process conducted in Cycles I and II, the results of the research and the interpretation of the findings. Each cycle in this research consists of planning, action and observation, and reflection. The quantitative data obtained during the research to support the qualitative data are also reviewed.

A. Research Finding 1. Reconnaissance

In this step, some activities to find the field problems were conducted. First, some observations concerning the English teaching and learning process of class X.5 of SMA N 6 Yogyakarta were done. Second, the English teacher and the students were interviewed to get some input about the weaknesses and suggestions related to the English teaching and learning process.

a. Identification of the Field Problems

The finding of the problems was based on the observations, results of interviews, and a questionnaire. The researcher did the observations on July 17th and 19th 2013 in the classroom of X.5. The observation to identify the problems can be seen in the following vignette.

It was 7.15 a.m. The teaching and learning process at SMA N 6 Yogyakarta was about to start. The English teacher and the researcher prepared themselves to go to class X.5. When the teacher arrived to the class, the students were still noisy and were not ready for the class. Some of them were still not on their seat. After all of them were on their seats, the teacher greeted them, asked the captain of the class to lead the prayer, and checked their attendance.

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In the first cycle, the implementation of CSR was successful to make the students get involved in the teaching learning process. It also improved their reading comprehension ability. However, there were some problems occurring in implementing the actions. The class became noisy, some students had bad time management, some of them could not use clunk strategy so that they could not figure out the meaning or difficult words and some of them could not find main ideas of the texts given. Therefore, the researcher solved the problems so that in Cycle II the students’ reading comprehension improved successfully.

The research finding on improving reading comprehension is summarized in the following table.

Table 8.The Result of the Action Research Study

Action Cycle 1 Cycle II

Conducting CSR

The students showed their enthusiasm when working collaboratively in group. They became more active in participating the reading class but the class became noisy. The teacher found difficulty in managing the class.

The students showed their enthusiasm when working collaboratively in group. They were active in participating the reading class and the noisy was reduced. The teacher could manage the class.

The students’ motivation in learning was increased. It was shown by each activity they did. Only some of them who looked less enthusiastic with the class.

The students’ motivation in learning was increased since they would do all activities in the teaching and learning process. All students showed good participation in every activity.

Some students asked the teacher the translation of some difficult words.

Most of the students could figure out the unknown words because they were adjusted with fix-up strategy. The students often found The students’ vocabulary

difficult words in the text and they asked the teacher or friends the meanings of the difficult words.

mastery was improved since they could find the meanings of difficult words without asking the teacher and friends.

The students could find main ideas in paragraphs.

The students could find main ideas in paragraphs.

Time management the students had in doing collaborative work and individual activity was bad. They often needed more time to finish their work.

Some students asked the teacher the way to figure out difficult words when doing individual activity though they could do that. It was caused by the lack of confidence they had when doing individual activity. They felt that doing collaborative group work activity was better than doing individual activity because they could help each other when they found difficulty in figuring out the unknown words and finding the main ideas and its details information.

The students were adjusted with collaborative group work and individual activity that needed much time but limited so that they could manage their time to do the collaborative group work and individual activity. Finally, they could finish their work in time.

Some students asked the teacher the way to figure out difficult words when doing individual activity though they could do that. It was caused by the lack of confidence they had when doing individual activity. They felt that doing collaborative group work activity was better than doing individual activity because

The students were more confident in doing individual activity. They did not ask the teacher about the difficult words anymore. The experience of the collaborative group work activity gave them knowledge in solving the problems they found in the texts (e.g. figuring out the meanings of difficult words

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they could help each other when they found difficulty in figuring out the unknown words and finding the main ideas and its details information.

and finding the main ideas and its details information). Besides, the experience made them sure that they could do the individual activity. In short, the use of collaborative group work activity and its strategies (CSR) made students more confident in doing the activity.

The students could comprehend texts though there was assistance from the teacher still when doing collaborative group work activity.

The students could comprehend the texts given without teacher’s assistance.

The improvement of the students’ reading comprehension is also presented in the score of pre-test and post-test. The summary of the result of the pre-test and post-test is presented in the following table.

Table 9: The Result of the Pre-test and Post-test

Test Frequency Mean

Pre-test 30 62.27

Post-test 30 83.60

Table 9 shows that the mean score of post-test (83.60) is higher than that of pre-test (62.27). The gain score of students’ reading comprehension test is 21.33, which shows that there is an improvement in their reading comprehension ability.

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This chapter presents the conclusions, implications, and suggestions of the research. These points are presented as follows.

A. Conclusions

The research findings and discussion in Chapter IV show that the reading comprehension ability of the tenth grade students of X.5 at SMA N 6 Yogyakarta improved through the use of CSR. The improvement of the students’ reading comprehension ability was indicated from the result of some kinds of data, i.e. observations, interviews, and the students’ scores of reading comprehension tests.

Based on the observations, it was found that the class behaviors reduced. CSR could maximize the students’ involvement in the teaching and learning process. The students actively participated in the teaching and learning process. They were enthusiastic doing group work tasks. Besides, their ability in finding main ideas and detailed information increased. Their vocabulary mastery was also improved through the use of fix-up strategy as one of the strategies of CSR. In reference to the interviews with the students and the English teacher also questionnaires given to the students, it was found that the students feel more comfortable with the setting of CSR. The setting of condition for learning boosted the students’ interest in the teaching and learning process of reading. In short, they admitted that the strategies of CSR (i.e. preview, click and clunk, get the gist, and wrap-up) that were combined to cooperative learning group activity could

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successfully generate their interest in the teaching and learning process of reading, activate their background knowledge, improve their vocabulary mastery, and help them identify the main ideas of texts and the detailed information that finally could help them improve their reading comprehension ability.

The other data deriving from students’ scores in reading comprehension test before and after the implementation also showed the improvement of reading comprehension ability. The gain score of students’ reading comprehension test is 21.33. It shows the improvement of the students’ reading comprehension ability.

B. Implications

The research findings show that the implementation of CSR in the teaching and learning process of reading successfully improves students’ reading comprehension ability. The use of fix-up strategy of CSR also improves their vocabulary mastery. CSR guides the students through before, during, and after reading comprehension strategies while collaboratively working with peers so that they could gain confidence. Besides, it successfully maximizes their involvement in the teaching and learning process of reading, therefore, they could participate well in the teaching and learning process of reading. In short, the result shows that CSR is a guide framework for the students with disabilities in reading. These results imply that CSR is highly recommended in the teaching and learning process of reading because it offers some benefits. They increase the students’ reading comprehension ability and vocabulary mastery and also encourage them to be actively participated in the teaching and learning process of reading.

C. Suggestions

Based on the conclusions and implications explained above, some suggestions are addressed to the English teacher and other researchers.

1. To the English teacher

It is essential for the English teacher to use various interesting teaching techniques to improve students’ reading comprehension ability. The teacher needs to enrich himself with the knowledge of how to teach reading comprehension effectively. He needs to use an effective interesting teaching technique that is most appropriate for the students because the application of techniques in teaching reading comprehension determines the improvement of students’ ability in reading comprehension. Observing the students’ characteristics before determining the teaching technique that will be used in teaching reading comprehension is necessary and truly helpful. Giving rewards can also be an alternative way in motivating the students to learn. All of these things will improve the quality of the English teaching learning process.

2. To other researchers

This research only focuses on improving the students’ reading comprehension ability using CSR. It does not embody other activities in making the learning activities more various and the reading materials that were modified based on the students’ learning interest. Therefore, other researchers may conduct research about CSR which improves the students’ reading comprehension ability, the students’ motivation in learning, the interaction among the students, and also the interaction between the students and the teacher.