IMPROVING THE STUDENTS' READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY THROUGH SQ3R STRATEGY

Abstract

Reading is needed as a means of learning variety of sciences. Success in reading is very important for the students. However, the result of preliminary study conducted at MAN 2 Madiun showed that the students' ability in comprehending the text was not satisfactory yet. Their achievement was still under the minimum standard of learning success (KKM). Thus, this action research was done as one of the solutions to overcome the students' problem in reading comprehension. For that reason, the teaching and learning of reading comprehension through SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review) strategy was developed to improve students' reading comprehension. The research design was collaborative classroom action research in which the researcher and her collaborator worked together on designing the lesson plans, implementing the actions, observing the effect of action, and reflecting the results of the actions. In conducting the research, the researcher was the practitioner while the collaborator became the observer. The findings of the research revealed that the appropriate model of SQ3R strategy in teaching reading consisted of eleven procedures, those are: (1) activating the background knowledge before reading, (2) providing some pictures or real objects (3) finding the meaning of the unfamiliar words, (4) formulating list of questions to make prediction, (5) reading the introductory and concluding paragraphs, (6) answering the previously formulated questions, (7) keeping the information in the long term memory, (8) recalling the kept information, (9) doing re¬port, (10) doing verification to the report by rereading text, and (11) writing the result of verification. Furthermore, the finding also indicated that SQ3R strategy improved students' reading comprehension ability. The improvement can be seen from the students' reading scores which fulfilled the mini- mum standard of learning success (KKM). The mean scores were 64.5 in test 1 and 78.7 in test 2. In other words, there were merely 33.3% of students who were considered successful in preliminary test, 50% who were successful in Cycle 1, and 86.7% who succeeded in Cycle 2. Besides, the finding indicated that SQ3R strategy was successful to empower students' motivation to be actively involved in the instructional process. The improvement on the students' participation were 59% in Cycle 1 and 79% in Cycle 2. Key words: SQ3R strategy, improvement, reading ability