Improving studens reading comprehension through intensive reading activity at MTs Negeri 3 Surabaya / Dyah Argirini

ABSTRACTArgarini, Dyah. 2008. Improving Students’ Reading Comprehension Through Intensive-Extensive Reading Activity at MTsN 3 Surabaya (Classroom Action Research). Thesis. Graduate Program in English Language Education, State University of Malang. Advisors: (I) Prof. E. Sadtono, Ph.D. (II) Dr. Roembilin Soepadi, M.A.Key words: Improving, Reading Comprehension, Intensive-Extensive Reading Activity (INEXRA)Reading, as one of the fourth skills, is necessary to be developed in English teaching. In many second language or foreign language-teaching situation, reading receives a special focus. The reason is that most of the students consider reading as one of their most significant goals. Reading enables them to get information and pleasure beside career and study purposes. It will also help the students in the process of language acquisition. Students learn to read by reading and that comprehension will take care of itself. In other words, students with certain level of ability in English can learn to read by extensive reading activity. However, it is not possible to claim that extensive reading is sufficient for most ESL/EFL students to learn to read English. Students have to know more about the language components, vocabulary, grammar and sounds, to support their language ability. Comprehension should be trained as well. Intensive reading activity is also needed to train the reading skill. It means that skills training is also necessary for EFL students. In brief, both intensive and extensive reading activities are very advantageous for the students to improve their ability in comprehending the reading text. That is why a strategy which combines those activities in reading instruction should be better constructed by teachers. This study tries to develop an appropriate strategy of Intensive-Extensive Reading Activity to improve the reading comprehension achievement of the first year students at Madrasah Tsanawiyah Negeri 3 Surabaya or to find out how Intensive-Extensive Reading Activity (INEXRA) can be implemented to improve the reading comprehension achievement of the first year students at Madrasah Tsanawiyah Negeri 3 Surabaya.The design of this study is a collaborative classroom action research (CAR). It was intended to implement the extensive reading activity to improve the students’ reading comprehension. This research was conducted through two cycles. Each cycle consisted of planning, implementing, observing, and reflecting. The result of the reflection became an input for the planning in the next cycle. In this study, the researcher worked together with one of the English teachers to apply Intensive-Extensive Reading Activity. She conducted the action in cyclical process, while the researcher’s collaborator acted as an observer. On the basis of the research findings and discussions elaborated in the preceding chapters, the researcher is able to draw some conclusions for this case. First, the appropriate model of strategy using INEXRA in teaching reading for the first year students of MTsN 3 Surabaya encompasses the following procedures: (1) leading students to the topic by giving some questions and/or showing a picture(s) , (2) asking the students to predict the topic of the text, (3) assigning the students to read the text silently, (4) asking the students to underline the difficult words while reading the text, (5) discussing the difficult words with the class, (6) reading the text clearly, aloud, and slowly and asking some students to re-read the text, (7) providing some comprehension questions and explaining the questions, (8) grouping the students, (9) assigning the students to answer the comprehension questions, (10) providing the students a text with the same topic as the previous one, (11) assigning the students to read the text and creating some questions and the answers about the content, (12) discussing the assignments with the class, (13) assigning the students to read an English reading book or magazine at home, (14) asking the students to write and present individual and group report about the materials. In comparison with the students’ reading comprehension achievements revealed in the result of the pre-test, it turned out that the use of Intensive-Extensive Reading Activity could improve the reading comprehension achievements of the students at MTsN 3 Surabaya. It can be identified that statistically, after the implementation of the action there is a significant improvement on the students’ average score in reading comprehension in every cycle. The students’ average score in the first cycle was 57.65. The increase of the students’ average score from the test in the preliminary study (43.62) to the average score obtained in Cycle 1 which less than 60.00 had not fulfilled the criteria of success yet. In Cycle 2, the students’ reading comprehension achievement was better than that in the preliminary study and Cycle 1 with the average score of 71.17. It had fulfilled the first criterion of success in term of the score improvement. Furthermore, INEXRA has successfully encouraged students to actively participate especially in the motivation and developing background, the directed reading, the skill building, and the follow-up activity as shown in the result of observation in the appendix. Nevertheless, improvement is still needed in reading report presentation. In brief, it can be stated that INEXRA has some benefit to improve the students’ reading comprehension both in the literal and interpretive comprehension. It is possible to consider it as one of various strategies to be applied by teachers to improve their students’ reading comprehension.