The Effect of Using Reciprocal Teaching Strategy on the Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement

Abstract

Reading plays a significant role in improving readers’ language proficiency, especially in a foreign language setting. If the comprehension in reading failed, students would need to improve their comprehension. For these reasons, it is more important for EFL learners to have not only the ability to read written materials but also the ability to understand what they have read. So, EFL learners need to achieve comprehension in reading through applying appropriate and effective reading strategies. One of the strategies that can be applied in teaching reading comprehension is Reciprocal Teaching Strategy (henceforth RTS). It was developed in 1984 by Ann Brown from the University of Illinois and Ann Palinscar from Michigan State University. As stated by Palincsar and Brown (1984) in Oczkus (2010) that Reciprocal Teaching Technique is a scaffolded discussion technique that is built of four strategies that readers use to comprehend text: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. The core of reciprocal teaching is an instructional activity that gives an advantage among the students when reading comprehension process. The advantage activity is how the students can help each other to solve a problem in the text. This research was conducted to investigate the effect of using Reciprocal Teaching Strategy (RTS) on the students’ reading comprehension achievement in reading descriptive text at SMK Negeri 4 Jember in the 2017/2018 academic year. The area of the research was SMK Negeri 4 Jember. The research participants were determined by using cluster random sampling based on the result of homogeneity test to three classes (X AK1, AK 2, and AK 3) of the tenth grade with the materials of reading comprehension. From the calculation of ANOVA, the result showed that the population was homogenous. Therefore, the researcher took two classes by lottery as the experimental and control groups. The two classes were X AK 2 as the experimental group and X AK 1 as the control group. The design of this research was a quasi-experimental research with post- test only design. The design was based on the score of post-test only which was conducted after the experimntal treatment had been applied. This design involved two groups which received different instructional treatment. The experimental group was taught reading comprehension by using Reciprocal Teaching Strategy. On the other hand, the control group was taught reading comprehension by applying scientific approach which has been used to teach reading comprehension at the school. The post-test was given to both two groups after receiving the teaching learning process twice. Based on the output of the Independent Sample T-test in the SPSS, the result showed that the value of significant column Levene’s test (2-tailed) was 0,012 and it was lower than 0,05. Then, it could be concluded that the null hypothesis (H0) was rejected while the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted. It indicated that there was a significant effect of using Reciprocal Teaching Strategy on the tenth grade students of Accounting Department’s descriptive text reading comprehension achievement. Considering the findings of the research, it is suggested that Reciprocal Teaching Strategy be used as a consideration to help students in understanding reading comprehension text.