Implementing Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) to Help Senior High School Students Gain Reading Comprehension Achievement

Abstract

English Language Education Study Program, Language and Arts Department, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Jember University. One of the basic English skills that students must master is reading as it is an activity to get meaning of what is written in a text in order to understand what the author means. The complexity of learning processes in reading comprehension requires proper instructors and reading strategies to gain the best results. Furthermore, the students tend to have difficulty in finding the main ideas of paragraphs, the meaning of words or sentences and the conclusion of a text. They also lack of motivation in comprehending the text. Due to those conditions, the use of appropriate teaching strategy in teaching reading comprehension is expected to help the students gain better reading comprehension achievement. One of the efforts to improve the students’ learning outcome is applying Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR). In doing CSR, students are engaged to apply these reading comprehension strategies; preview (before reading), click and clunk (during reading), get the gist (during reading), and wrap up (after reading). CSR engages students to work collaboratively in small groups to discuss and share ideas as well as develop their social skills. This research was a classroom action research that aimed at helping the students to gain better reading comprehension achievement by implementing CSR in teaching reading at SMA Muhammadiyah 3 Jember. The area of this research was SMA Muhammadiyah 3 Jember. This school was purposively chosen because the eleventh grade students still had problem in reading comprehension. The students were found having difficulties in finding the main ideas, in making conclusion, and in finding the meaning of unfamiliar English words. This classroom action research was done in one cycle. The cycle consisted of three meetings. The first and the second meetings were intended to implement xiv the action and the third meeting was intended to administer the reading comprehension achievement test. The success of this research was seen by the improvement of the students’ reading comprehension achievement scores and also the students’ active participation in the teaching and learning process. The result of the observation in Cycle 1 showed that the students’ active participation increased from 81,84% in Meeting 1 to 85,71% in Meeting 2. Then, the students’ score in reading comprehension also showed a significant improvement. Before the students were taught by using CSR strategy, only 10% of them could achieve the passing grade of reading comprehension achievement. However, after the researcher implemented CSR strategy, the total number of the students who got score ≥75 on their reading comprehension achievement test improved to 76,67%. Moreover, the students’ mean score also improved from 63,03 to 77,83. This research was conducted in one cycle, as the target of this research was already achieved, so that, Cycle 2 was not conducted. Based on the result of observation and reading comprehension achievement test, it can be concluded that the use of CSR could improve the students’ achievement in reading comprehension. Thus, it is expected for the English teachers to use CSR strategy in teaching reading comprehension. Moreover, it was proved that CSR strategy could improve the students’ reading comprehension achievement and motivates the students to be more interested in learning reading comprehension activity. For future researches, it is expected that the result of this research can be a reference to conduct a research that has similar problem dealing with improving the students’ reading comprehension achievement by choosing different school, different students’ level, different types of text or different meetings.