IMPROVING THE VIII-C STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT AND THEIR ACTIVE PARTICIPATION BY USING DIRECTED READING-THINKING ACTIVITY (DR-TA) STRATEGY AT SMPN 5 TANGGUL IN THE 2010/2011 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

Reading in ELT (English Language Teaching) is one of the skills which cannot be separated from the other skills. The students are expected to know not only the particular skill such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing, but also they must know the language in all the skills. This is in line with the 2006 curriculum (KTSP) (Depdiknas, 2006: 277) which states that those four language skills are used to respond or create the discourse in society. So, English is taught to develop those four skills in order that the graduate students finally can communicate using English in a certain level. A preliminary study was done to class VIII-C English teacher of SMPN 5 Tanggul. It was done to know the condition of learning English in the VIII-C students of SMPN 5 Tanggul. Based on the informal interview, it was known that the curriculum used in that school is 2006 curriculum (KTSP). Besides, the teacher said that the VIII-C students of SMPN 5 Tanggul still experienced difficulties in reading comprehension skill. He said that most of the students felt difficult in comprehending the reading text especially in getting the idea from the text. The difficulty was caused by some factors such as their less comprehension about connecting the idea from paragraph to the other paragraphs in a text and their little interest in understanding reading texts. Related to the problem, Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DR- TA) strategy was used to improve the students’ reading comprehension achievement. By applying DR-TA, the students are encouraged to think as they read and to make prediction what comes next in the reading text. The purpose of this research was to improve the students’ reading comprehension achievement and improve the students’ active participation on the VIII-C students at SMPN 5 Tanggul in the 2010/2011 academic year. The design of this research was classroom action research. It was begun fromfinding the problem, constructing lesson plan and research instruments, teaching reading by using DR-Ta strategy, administering reading comprehension test, and the last is analyzing the test result. The area of this research was the VIII-C students at SMPN 5 Tanggul. There were four classes of the eighth grade students. This class was chosen based on the preliminary study that the students in this class still had problems in comprehending reading text and it needed to be improved. The research result showed that teaching reading by using DR-TA strategy improved the students’ reading comprehension achievement. It was improved by the fact that the percentage of the students who got the score of least 70 increased from 56,41% in Cycle 1 to 66,67% in Cycle 2. Besides, the use of DR-TA strategy also improved the students’ active participation in the reading teaching learning process. This can be seen from the fact that the percentage of the students who are actively participated in classroom activities increased from 51,28% in the first meeting to 69,23% in the third meeting in Cycle 1. In line with this, the students’ active participation increased from 71,79% in the first meeting and 82,05% in the third meeting in Cycle 2. Based on the explanation above it was concluded that “The use of DR- TA strategy can improve the VIII-C students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 5 Tanggul in the 2010/2011 Academic Year” and “The use of DR-TA strategy can improve the VIII-C students’ active participation at SMPN 5 Tanggul in the 2010/2011 Academic Year. Thus, it is suggested to the English teacher and the students to use DR-TA strategy in the teaching learning of reading since it can improve the students’ reading comprehension achievement and their active participation.