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PROPOSAL (CLASSROOM ACTION RESEARCH)1. Title : Improving the Achievement of the Second Years Students of SMP Negeri 2Tegallalang in Reading Comprehension Through SQRW in Academic Year 2009/2010. 2. Introduction : Reading comprehension is an essential skill for learners of English. For most of learners it is the mostimportant skill to master in order to ensure success in learning. With strengthened reading skills, learners of English tend to make greater progress in other areas of language learning. Reading should be an active,fluent process that involves the reader and the reading material in building meaning.Teaching students how to utilize the skills and knowledge they bring from their first language, developvocabulary skills, improve reading comprehension and rate, and monitor students’ improvement are just someof the elements that teachers must consider in preparing for an English language reading class. Learning toread in a second or foreign language is a process that involves learning skills, learning new vocabulary andpatterns, and cultivating the ability to transfer skills from the classroom to the real world, where English may beused.In Indonesia, English has been taught as a foreign language both as local current subject for elementary school students and as compulsory subject for junior and senior high school students. The 2006School Based Curriculum or Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan, KTSP, gives opportunity for every schoolto develop their own curriculum that taking account the standards designed by the government. According tothe 2006 curriculum or KTSP, student of English are expected to master in language skills namely listening,speaking, reading, writing and to have communicative competence in using it. Having communicativecompetence means students have competencies in understanding and producing discourse in spoken andwritten under meaningful context which influenced by situation and culture.The basic competency of reading skill mentioned in KTSP of SMP for the second year students is tocomprehend transactional discourse and dialogue leading to interpersonal meaning and/or oral monologue inthe forms of descriptive, narrative, recount, and report. The achievement indicator the students must gain isbeing competent in the sub reading skill, including comprehending main idea, specific information, wordmeaning and textual reference of the text.However, the thing that many students find difficulties in reading activity is to comprehend or under standing the information of the reading material. The fact of the students’ problem in comprehendingreading text above also become the problem encountered by the second year students of SMP Negeri 2Tegallalang. Almost student have a problem in comprehending reading text, in the four reading sub skills. Thereading class is bored them because of the English teacher in teaching reading only involve tasks in the textbook, read the text, and answer the questions following the text.In line with the above reality, it is important to take a consideration in order to solve the problem and toimprove the students’ achievement in reading comprehension. One thing that must be taken into account isthe strategy in teaching reading. The strategy will use in this study call SQRW, a Reading strategy mostlyused in reading books. (CLASSROOM ACTION RESEARCH) Reading Comprehension ThroughSQRW The writer conduct this study for the purpose of improving the second year students in readingcomprehension, especially in comprehending main idea, specific information, word meaning and textualreference of a text using SQRW. 2.1. Statement of the Problem 2.1.1. Major ProblemCould SQRW strategy improve the second year students of SMP Negeri 2 Tegallalang incomprehending reading text?2.1.2. Minor Problem1) Could SQRW strategy improve the achievement of the second year students of SMP Negeri 2Tegallalang in finding out the main idea of reading text?2) Could SQRW strategy improve the achievement of the second year students of SMP Negeri 2Tegallalang in finding out the specific information of reading text?3) Could SQRW strategy improve the achievement of the second year students of SMP Negeri 2Tegallalang in finding out the word meaning of reading text?4) Could SQRW strategy improve the achievement of the second year students of SMP Negeri 2Tegallalang in finding out the textual referent of reading text? 2.2. Objective of the Study 2.2.1. Major ObjectiveThe major objective of the study is to improve the achievement of the second year students of SMP Negeri 2 Tegallalang in comprehending reading text through SQRW strategy.2.2.2. Minor ObjectiveThe minor objective of the study is:1) to improve the achievement of the second year students of SMP Negeri 2 Tegallalang in findingout the main idea of reading text through SQRW strategy.2) to improve the achievement of the second year students of SMP Negeri 2 Tegallalang in findingout the specific information of reading text through SQRW strategy.3) to improve the achievement of the second year students of SMP Negeri 2 Tegallalang in findingout the word meaning of reading text through SQRW strategy.4) to improve the achievement of the second year students of SMP Negeri 2 Tegallalang in findingout the textual referent of reading text through SQRW strategy. 2.3. Scope of the Study This study is focus on finding out if the SQRW strategy could improve the students’ achievement onreading comprehension, especially on the four sub reading skills, or not. The genre of the reading text will usein this study is in the form of narrative and is limited to the class A of the second year students of SMP Negeri2 Tegallalang in academic year 2009/2010 2.4. Hypothesis The hypothesis of the study is that SQRW strategy could improve the achievement of second year students in class A of SMP Negeri 2 Tegallalang in comprehending reading text, especially in finding out themain idea, specific information, word meaning and textual referent. 2.5. Definition of Key Term. 2.5.1. Achievement Achievement is defined as the act of achieving or something achieved especially by great effort or persistence quoted by Merriam-Webster, in Juniari (2003:6). Achievement in this study is somethingthat is achieve at the end of a lesson using a test. In other words, it refers to the scores the studentsgain in the test of reading comprehension.2.5.2. Reading Comprehension Gillet and Temple in Juniari (2003:8) stated that reading comprehension is a search for meaning,actively using our word knowledge and the text to understand new things we read. We needknowledge of the world to understand new things, need to be familiar with various text structureencountered and need to be active in seeking meaning to rise up from the passage.2.5.3. Narrative reading text According to Tonjes, et al. (1990), as citied in http://cps.uswp.edu/courses/EDUC310/Texstruct/narrativetext [http://cps.uswp.edu/courses/%20EDUC310/Texstruct/narrativetext] narrative text is the text used to entertain, to tell a story, or to provide as aesthetic literary experience.They also said that narrative text is based on life experience and is person-oriented using dialogueand familiar language.2.5.4. SQRW StrategySQRW is a four-step strategy for reading and taking notes from chapters in a textbook. Each letter stands for one step in the strategy. Using SQRW will help you to understand what you read and toprepare a written record of what you learned. The written record will be valuable when you have toparticipate in a class discussion and again when you study for a test. It is an effective reading process,related to some techniques that usually help the readers not only to enjoy their reading but also toread and remember the main point. 3. Review of Related Literature3.1. Reading Comprehension Comprehension, a complex cognitive process, is central to acquiring a new linguistic system. Inputmust be decoded in some comprehensible fashion for second language acquisition to occur. In the case of aforeign language reading comprehension, the reader uses previous knowledge to construct and integratemeaning from text. During reading there is simultaneous cognitive processing involving pattern recognition,letter identification, lexical access, concept activation, syntactic analysis, propositional encoding, sentencecomprehension, activation of prior knowledge, information storage, and comprehension monitoring. Accordingto connectionist models (e.g., Koda, 2005, 2007; Nassaji, 2002. in Diana Pulido and David Z. Hambrick) thegeneric knowledge structures, or background knowledge, that are accessed during reading are largely determined by the quality of the text base that the learner constructs. Text base quality is affected by theindividual’s text processing efficiency (i.e., ability in lower-level processes, such as word recognition andsyntactic parsing) and working memory.Gillet and Temple in Juniari (2003:9) stated that reading comprehension is a search for meaning,actively using our word knowledge and the text to understand new things we read. We need knowledge of theworld to understand new things, need to be familiar with various text structure encountered and need to beactive in seeking meaning to rise up from the passage.Simanjutak (1998), as citied in Raharja (2004:9), agreed on reading as a cognitive process of makinginteraction with print and monitoring comprehension to establish meaning which involves the process of identification (the ability of the reader to identify or determine what the text says) and the process of interpretation (the readers’ activity to make sense or to draw out the meaning of the reading text they read).Reading comprehension is process of understanding written text or information presented by theauthor and affected by many factors. Those are factors within the readers, factor within the written message,and factors within the reading environment (Pearson Johnson, in Gipe (1991:156).Comprehension processes and second language acquisition processes, although somewhatoverlapping, are also distinct. For example, comprehension involves constructing a mental representationfrom the propositional content for the purpose of understanding the message. However, in order for alinguistic system to be developed through comprehension activities, additional input processing must occur.Such processing entails making form-meaning connections from the input, or focusing attention on new formsand associating them with their functions or referents. 3.2. Narrative Text Depdiknas (2003:80) stated that narrative text learned by the students of junior high school relatedwith problematic events whose social function are to amuse, entertain, and deal with actual or vicariousexperience in different ways.Narrative text is reading for story. It is often called fiction in which the values are used to describe,explain human behavior (citied in http;//www.ksde.org/outcomes/texttype.doc).Meanwhile, Tonjes, et al. (1990), as citied in http;//cps.uswp.edu/courses/EDUC310/textstruct/narrative.asp, stated that narrative text is the text used to entertain, to tell a story, or toprovide as aesthetic literary experience. They also said that narrative text is based on life experience and isperson oriented using dialogue and familiar language. 3.3. SQRW SQRW, it might sound sort of complex but its actually quite simple and straight forward. SQRW is afour-step strategy for reading and taking notes from chapters in a textbook. SQRW is a four-step strategy for reading and taking notes from textbooks that will help you better prepare for exams, better prepare for classdiscussion, improve your reading comprehension and help you learn better using textbooks. SQRW stands for Survey, Question, Read and Write. Survey : The first step in the SQRW reading strategy is Survey. Before you actually start reading achapter you first survey the chapter. You read the chapter title, introduction, headings and thesummary or conclusion at the end of the chapter. When you survey you should also review anypictures, graphs, maps, or tables in the chapter and the caption (text explanation that goes with
