Improving the Eight Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement By Using Direct Reading-Thinking Activity.
Background of the
research:
English in Indonesia is foreign language were
not everybody have ability to use it. In writing, speaking listening or reading
they do not have ability use all of them. And there are only some people who
can do it. It is so regrettable to knowing that fact. Especially nowadays,
English is one of the basic languages in the world that most of the people use.
Scientist, professor, and other people who have knowledge above than average
people, most of them use English as communicating, and to express what they
want to share the knowledge they have. Budiharso (2006:26) says the reading is
means of communicating information between the writer and the reader. Besides,
Grellet (1981:3) says that reading understanding writing text means extracting
the required information from it as efficiently as possible. It means that in
getting information and knowledge, the students are expected not only
understand the text but also can find massage that hidden in the text.
Reading comprehension is an
interaction between the writer and reader on the text to understand of information
or knowledge. In this study of reading comprehension, the researcher will be
focus on the student’s ability in understanding the reading text. The students
are hoped to be able comprehended the words, sentences and paragraph, and text
when they are reading. According to
Carrel, Davine and Eskey (1988:56) reading comprehension is the process of
interaction that occurs between the reader and the text, an interpretive
process. From this opinion, the main purpose of reading is to get the
information through the process of constructing, understanding the ideas and
receiving the massage from the reading text.
On December 8, 20113 studies had been done from
class X of MAN Genteng. Base on the informal interview, the teacher said, most
of the students had difficulty in comprehending the text. It was cased by some
factors such as less motivation and participation. They have less motivation
caused they do not really understand what is important English for. And because
of the theme that actually they do not interest in. The time allotments that
use in this class was twice meeting in a week and in one meeting consist of 2 x
40 minutes. From these descriptions, there was found a problem with the time
allotment and the manners of the students about reading. They just had little
interesting in reading because of the teacher would give better mark than the
one that not and not because of they want to try to understand in understanding
reading text and they did not participate actively in reading activity. That's
why the student’s average score of reading comprehension test was less than 70
from 30 students. And only 40 % from 30 students get 70 above. Whereas the
standard score minimum of English was 70
To solve the problem above, the researcher try
to discussed with the teacher what is the best strategy that would be
appropriate to overcome the student’s problem in reading comprehension. Related
to the problem, the researcher proposed Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA)
Strategy. It was used to improve the students reading comprehension
achievement. It was caused by some advantages of this strategy as in the
follows: gives more attentions and guides the students to inquiry more
information, and create students experiences in predicting and finding the
content of the text that they have already read. So, it engaged the students in
step-by-step process that guides students through understanding and thinking
about text. In this strategy also taught
the students to acquire and active their own purpose for reading and developing
their reading. It is appropriate strategy related to the student’s problem and
it is also can motivate their active participation. Some researcher like
Bongratz., 2002; Cramer, Fate & lueders, 2011 found that reading strategies
are beneficial in helping readers improve their comprehension skills.
Therefore, this study attempts to build student’s comprehension through the
implementation of collaborative and individual Directed reading-Thinking
Activity (DR-TA). From the explanation above, it can make easier for the
students to comprehend the text and it also will increase their ability in
reading skills.
Based from the statement that explain, the
researcher decide to used Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA) to conduct
the classroom action research to improve the students reading comprehension
achievement. Therefore, a classroom action research was done with the title
“Improving the X student’s reading comprehension achievement by using Directed
Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA) Strategy at MAN Genteng in the 2014/2015”.
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