The Effect of Think-Pair-Share Strategy on the Eighth Grade Students’ Descriptive Text Reading Comprehension Achievement at a Junior High School

Abstract

In teaching the English language to the students, especially in reading skills, teachers are expected to use teaching strategies to help the student become more engaged in the classroom. Think-pair-share strategy as the teaching strategy could help the teacher to facilitate students in reading comprehension, especially in the descriptive text through brainstorming, discussion, and sharing. The think-pair-share strategy was also made them more active by discussing the solution with their friend. This experimental research was intended to investigate the effect of the think-pair-share strategy on the eighth grade students‟ descriptive text reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 9 Jember in the 2019/2020 academic year. The population for this research was the entire eighth grade students of SMPN 9 Jember then the research participants were chosen based on the result of students‟ homogeneity test scores by using the ANOVA formula. Since the result displayed that the population of the research was homogeneous, the experimental and the control groups were determined by using a lottery. The number of the participants was 64 students, consisting of 32 students of VIII E as the experimental group that was taught reading by using TPS strategy and 32 students of VIII F as the control group that was taught reading by using question and answer strategy. Scores of reading comprehension achievement test, interviews, and documentation were collected from the students as the data for this research. The post-test result of the post test was analyzed by using the t-test formula. Based on the calculation of data analysis, it was proven that the use of the TPS strategy on the eighth grade students‟ reading comprehension was affected positively. It could be seen from the value of significance that was less than 0.05 (0.010) with the significant interval of 95% which showed that the result of the t-test analysis was significant. Therefore, the alternative hypothesis which was formulated: “