The Effect of Using KWL Strategy on The Seventh Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement

Abstract

Language is one of important aspects in life since it becomes a tool to communicate our thoughts, feelings, opinion, etc to the others. There are four language skill and those skill are categorized into two, receptive and productive. Reading, is categorized as receptive skill as it allows the reader to earn new information from the text. This is in line with William’s (1984) statement that said that reading is a process when someone looks at the text and gets the meaning of what has been read. In order to help student understand the text easier, there are some strategies which can be applied in teaching reading. One of those strategies is KWL strategy. KWL stands for what you Know, What you want to learn, and what you have Learned. This strategy was first introduced by Ogle (1986) to assist learner recall their background knowledge and connect it with new information they got from the text. This research is aimed to reveal the effect of applying KWL strategy on seventh grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 4 Jember. There were two out of eight classes chosen as experimental and control group. Those groups were selected after the homogeneity test was conducted. The result of homogeneity test were analyzed by using ANOVA in SPSS application. It shows that the population was heterogeneous, so the researcher chose two classes which had the closest different mean. Then, 7B was chosen as experimental group which was taught by using KWL strategy while 7D was chosen as control group which was taught by using scientific approach. Each group consisted of 30 students. The researcher collected the research data by using reading comprehension test and documentation. Reading comprehension test was used to collect the students’ score after conducting post test. Furthermore, the score of two classes were analyzed by using Independent sample t-test in SPSS application to compare the mean score. The result of analysis shows that the significance value was 0.000 which was lower than 0.05 with 95% significance interval. Moreover, it can be said that KWL strategy has given a positive impact on students’ reading comprehension achievement. Thus, the alternative hypothesis “There was a significant effect of using KWL strategy on seventh grade students’ reading comprehension achievement” was accepted. As KWL strategy was proven to be an effective strategy on seventh grade students’ reading comprehension achievement, hence, the researcher hopes that the English teacher at SMPN 4 Jember use KWL strategy in teaching reading. Besides, the future researcher can use KWL strategy to conduct further study about this strategy