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IMPROVING READING COMPREHENSION SKILL OF FIRST GRADE STUDENTS OF
MAN MALANG 1 ON NEWS ITEM TEXT USING SKIMMING TECHNIQUE
Zobi
Mazhabi
Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris FKIP Universitas Islam
Malang
ABSTRACT
The
aim of this article is describing
how the way Skimming Technique can improve the first grade students’ Reading Comprehension Skill on News Item
text of MAN Malang 1. Based on the preliminary study, the reseacher found the
classroom problems of this class especially in reading comprehension
skill on News Item text of the first grade students of MAN
Malang 1. The students got
difficulty to comprehend reading texts which were given by the English teacher.
This difficulty made 80% of the students of this class failed to reach the standard minimum of the
school, which is 78.00
in their reading comprehension, and the average score of
this class was only 66.2. Thus, the students’ reading comprehension skill on News
Item text had to be improved. This study used Classroom Action Research (CAR) as the reseach design. The
subjects of this study were one class of the first grade students which consisted of 37 students. The procedures of the study covered four steps: planning,
implementing, observation, and reflection. The data gathered were in the form
of quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data were obtained from
the reading comprehension test, and the qualitative data were obtained from the
students observationand checklist and the field note of the teaching and learning process.
Key
Words: News Item Text, Reading comprehension
skills, and Skimming Technique
INTRODUCTION
In English Language teaching, the most prominent goals have to be
focused on the improvement of four language skills: listening, speaking,
reading, and writing in place of structure or grammar as language components.
Reading is the most prominent activity in any language class; reading can be
both as a source of information, pleasurable activity, way of consolidating,
and extending one knowledge of the language (Rivers, 1981). In addition, by mastering
reading comprehension skills, students are expected to enhance their knowledge
and experience to get some information taken from a reading text given to them
to be read. Reading comprehension became very prominent skill to be mastered by
the senior high school students, since it has been assessed in final
examination.
Levine (2001) explained: “one of
the most prominent skills to be mastered by the university students and senior
high school students is reading academic discourse as EFL learners”. As long as
the teaching process of reading comprehension skills, some teachers found some
obstacles which comes from the learners them selves and from the text such as
the students don not accustom to read, lack of vocabulary and don not have
appropriate strategy to comprehend the text.
In addition, the problem found by the researcher on teaching
reading process in the classroom, especially at the first grade students of MAN
Malang 1 were unable to comprehend the reading material , because they lack of
vocabulary, reading comprehension ability, seldom to read, and do not use any
strategy.
As the result, the condition influenced students’ score of reading.
The SKBM is 78.0, and the students’ mean score in MAN Malang 1 is 66.2 From
37 students that reach SKBM in the class is 20%. This score was actually good, but it was not enough because the
researcher also found that from the observation conducted by the researcher,
students’ comprehension on the text were low, they couldn’t understand the text
and some related questions given by the researcher easily. Therefore, it was
not enough since reading also aim to train students to be independent readers
and solve the problem easily.
Based on the problems above, the researcher know that reading in classroom is an activity which is
interactive, mostly directed by teacher, and the students have to find out
specific information in the text fast. Therefore, teacher should use
appropriate strategy to make the reading activities much meaningful. Skimming
technique is the appropriate way to solve the problem because it can manage the
task and activities in teaching reading process much proper and effective by
learning in peers. To
improve students reading comprehension skill, the teaching procedure will be
conducted as follows: First are Pre-reading activities in which the teacher
opens the class by greet the students and explained the objective of the
lesson, the students are divided in to nine groups, and one of the students
should be pointed as the leader of the group. Second is Whilst-reading
activities in which the students are given a text of News Item text, the
students try to understand the text given by the researcher individually, the
students share their understanding to their group member, and they discuss the
given material more deeply in their group while try to use Skimming Technique
when they read. Based on the background above, the researcher
proposed Skimming Technique as an appropriate solution to solve the problems
occurred at the first grade students of MAN 1 Malang.
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Wiked (as cited in Jumeidar, 2011)
explained that reading comprehension skills is a technique for improving
student’s successful in interacting useful knowledge from a text.
From the
definition above, it can be concluded that reading comprehension aims to
understand a written text. Reading comprehension is a process in grasping
information and meaning from written language including sentences, main idea, and
supporting ideas of paragraph with a reader’s own prior knowledge and
background. It requires a reader or student to read through comprehension skill
that the students should achieve if they want to be successful readers.
Reading
is a thinking activity process in which the process includes catching meaning
from the printed word or symbol mean while, comprehension
is the fulfillment of a particular purpose through the use of appropriate
material that is read in particular way (Durkin, 1979).
There
are three levels of reading comprehension:
First, Literal comprehension is the lowest level of comprehension.
According to Smith and Robinson (1980), literal comprehension is getting the
meaning of a text only on its surface.
The
second level of reading comprehension
is interpretative comprehension which is higher than literal comprehension. Interpretative
comprehension involves reading between the lines or making inferences. Readers
are deriving ideas that are implied rather than directly stated in the text
(Burns et. al1984).
Interpretative reading requires skills in: (1) inferring main ideas of a passage in which the main ideas are not directly stated, (2) inferring cause and effect relationship when they are not directly stated, (3) inferring referents of pronouns, (4) inferring referents of adverbs, (5) inferring omitted words, (6) detecting the author’s purpose in writing, and (8) drawing conclusion.
Interpretative reading requires skills in: (1) inferring main ideas of a passage in which the main ideas are not directly stated, (2) inferring cause and effect relationship when they are not directly stated, (3) inferring referents of pronouns, (4) inferring referents of adverbs, (5) inferring omitted words, (6) detecting the author’s purpose in writing, and (8) drawing conclusion.
Third level of reading comprehension is Critical comprehension is
the highest level of reading comprehension. It requires readers to think
critically of what was written in the text. Burns, Roe, and Ross (1984:190)
define critical reading as evaluating written material, i.e. comparing the
ideas discovered in the material with known standards and drawing conclusions about
their accuracy, appropriateness and timelines. The critical reader must be an
active reader, questioning, searching for facts, and suspending judgment until
he or she has considered all of the material. Critical reading depends upon
literal comprehension on interpretative comprehension and grasping implied
ideas.
Smith
and Robinson (as cited in Ennins, 1980) explains the lists twelve aspects of
critical thinking: (1) grasping the meaning of a statement, (2) judging whether
there is an ambiguity in a line of
reasoning, (3) judging whether certain statements contradict each other, (4)
judging whether a conclusion follows necessity, (5) judging whether a statement
is specific enough, (6) judging whether a statement is actually the reaction of
a certain principle, (7) judging whether a statement is reliable, (8) judging
whether an inductive conclusion is warranted, (9) judging whether the problem
has been identified, (10) judging whether a definition is adequate, (12) judging
whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable.
In addition, Rubin (1982) stated that reading had better to be understood
as total integrative process that involves three domains. Those are (1) the
affective; the affective domain correlated to emotion and feeling during how we
feel to something will affect what we see from the text as the stimuli, (2) the
perceptual; the domain or area is in relation to our perception, the technique
to give meaning to stimuli depends on our background knowledge, and (3) the
cognitive; this domain includes the area of thinking in which if someone got
difficulty in thinking will also get handicap in understanding a text of
reading. All of these styles are classified into three general types, bottom-up,
top- down, and interactive.
According to Silberstein (1994) bottom-up (or text-based)
processing occurs when linguistics input from the text is mapped against the
reader’s previous knowledge. In relation to that, Harmer (2001) states that in bottom-up
processing, the reader or listener focuses on individual words and phrases, and
achieves understanding by stringing these detailed elements together to build
up a whole. Furthermore, Brown (2001) defines that in bottom-up processing,
readers must first recognize a multiplicity of linguistic signals (letters,
morphemes, syllables, words, phrases, grammatical cues, discourse markers) and
use their linguistics data-processing mechanisms to impose some sort of order
on these signals.
Harmer (2001) states that in top-down
reading model, the reader or listener gets a general view of the reading or
listening passage, in some way, absorbing the overall the picture.
In conclusion, top-down reading model is
a reading model with which readers make hypotheses and predictions about the
text and confirm the efforts by working them down into the smallest linguistic
units. In the top-down model the readers begin the process of reading
comprehension from their understanding on the reading material as a whole then
to the part of the text. The readers actively construct the meaning from the
reading material by guessing or predicting. The linguistics aspects and
language components are cues for the readers in the construction of the
meaning.
Teaching of reading for the foreign language
to the students is necessary. Besides giving students opportunity to read and
widen their knowledge about the world, teaching of reading will also provide
the students with good strategies of comprehending a reading passage.
The purpose of equipping the high school
students with particular reading comprehension is to train them to get general
and specific information from the text. Students are also asked to practice the
academic skill of finding the main idea, making inferences, and drawing conclusion
Zukowski and Faust (as cited in Korniaty, 2008).
Language teaching literature widely accepted ‘technique’
as a super ordinate term to refer to various activities that either teachers or
learners perform in the classroom (Brown: 2001). He also adds that technique
includes any of a wide variety of exercises, activities, or tasks used in the
language classroom for realizing lesson objectives. In other words, technique
includes all exercises, tasks, and activities in the classroom.
The techniques of teaching reading used by the
teachers are one factor that may determine the success of interaction. Richard
and Rogers (1980) said that selecting techniques is very important in
presenting the materials to attract the students’ attention: the teacher should
be considering the student’s characteristics and the materials, which are going
to be taught. Besides, Lau & Chan
(2003) stated that student’s motivation was influenced by the strategy that use
by the teachers in conducting teaching and learning processes.
Dealing
with the techniques, Reading
process is very prominent, for it can improve taught and active cognitive
processes such as, inferring, categorizing, arguing, and predicting. In
addition, this method requires an over all point of view in order to find out
general content and ideas of written material (Grellet’s1981). Also, Skimming
is practiced through the reading material quickly to know the way the text is
organized and to get an idea of the intention of the writer. Besides, Maxwell
(1969) defined that “Skimming is obtaining the main idea or main information
quickly in written text when the students improve the ability to infer”.
Cross (1991) explained that there are
some ways can be used to help students understands a text more easily. These ways are consist of combining
sentences, filling the gaps, completing tables and graphs, selecting summary,
matching noun and verbs, comparing version, and identifying fact.
As a matter of fact, Skimming Technique has some
advantages as what had been explained on Gerllet (as cited in Kartika, 2010) as
follows: Skimming can help the students go through the reading material quickly
in order to get gist of the text, can help the students to know the way the
text is organized, can help the students to get an idea of the tone or
intonation of the writer.
After selecting the
appropriate technique, we have to work based on the rule of technique had been
selected in order to get success in our research. According to Spache and Berg, (2013) the
use of Skimming Technique covered some steps: first, follows a preview of
material. Having read the opening and closing sentences of each paragraph, the
reader returns to pick up quickly the facts and ideas offered else where in
each portion. He then skims rapidly through the body of each portion to identify
the significant phrases or key words. A second method of Skimming is to read
rapidly the first part of each line. The reader hugs the left-hand margins (or
sometimes the right-hand margin) and reads about a third of each line
throughout the page. A third method of Skimming is quite similar to
margin-hugging. In this method, however, the reader reads only the central
third of each line. Thus, a portion of every line is read. A fourth method is
to look only for key words or phrases set off by numbering, italics, quotation
marks, capital letters, underlining, or some other typographical sign. A fifth
method of Skimming is to move down the page in a more or less diagonal pattern.
METHOD
The researcher employed Classroom Action Research (CAR) as the
design of this study. According to Latief (2003:104) classroom
action research for English subject is to develop a strategy or English
learning technique in the learning and teaching process in order to solve the
problems that the teachers and
students get in the classroom.
The subject of this study is the first grade student of MAN 1 Malang,
for the average score of Students at first grade students of MAN Malang was
under the minimum standard of MAN 1 Malang, so the researcher selected this
class as the place to conduct his research, in order that the problem which was
faced by the class is solved.
In this study, the researcher used another
English teacher as the collaborator to help him observe how the teaching and
learning process occurred. The collaborator observed the process of teaching
and learning since the first meeting of the first cycle up to the last meeting
of the cycle of this research by bringing observation checklist which needs to
be fulfilled.
In addition, this study covered four steps: planning the action, implementing the action, observation, and reflection.
The data gathered were in the form of quantitative and
qualitative data. The quantitative data were obtained from the reading
comprehension test, and the qualitative data were obtained from the
students observationand checklist and the field note of the teaching and learning process.
For the test, the researcher made by him self, and he was helped by the
English teacher of MAN 1 Malang as the expert.
He used examples of News Item text which were taken from Jakarta
Post.com and London UK Evening Standard.com
The quantitative data in this study was
analyzed by using the average score
Formula which was taken from Ary and
Donald (1979) whereas, the
Qualitative data was analyzed by
interpreting the data directly.
FINDING AND
DISCUSSION
Based on the data obtained from the instrument of
this research, the researcher found that teaching reading comprehension skills
using Skimming Technique could improve the students reading comprehension
skills. It could be seen from the result of the test that mean score of the
students’ reading comprehension in the preliminary study was 66.2 with the
lowest score 40 and the students’ means score on the second test was 84.8 by 95
was the highest score, and the percentage of the students who did not reach the
criteria of success is 6% from the whole students of class XE.
The researcher assumed that
all activities of teaching reading comprehension skill using Skimming Technique
could improve their activity and their reading comprehension skills. It could
be seen from the result of the instruments that the researcher used; they are
(1) observation checklist which measured the students activity and feeling
during the implementation of the action, (2) Field note which could help the
researcher to take notes of the problems of good points occurring since the
action was implemented, and (4) Test which could measure the students’ reading
comprehension skills improvement since the action of this cycle was
implemented. From the data that had been obtained by
the instruments above, the researcher assumed that the use of Skimming
Technique could improve the students’ activity, motivation and score. The
students had positive attitude of their activity, and their score was improved
that the mean score of preliminary study was 66.2 and after the implementation
of the action, the mean score was 84.8 from the positive improvement above, it
could be concluded that all of the criteria of the study had been achieved.
Therefore, the researcher did not need to continue the next cycle.
CONCLUSSION AND
SUGGESTION
The result of this
research dealing with improving students reading comprehension skills on News
Item text can be concluded that the use of Skimming Technique in the classroom
has to go trough these steps as follows: First, the
researcher taught students by
directing them to understand the concept of News Item text and introduce to
them the steps of how to use Skimming Technique in comprehending a text.
Second, the students were taught by adding group discussion on the teaching and
learning process in order to make the teaching and learning process interested
to them. They were directed to use Skimming Technique to understand the text
given by the researcher. Third, the researcher reviewed the materials of
previous meetings and the students were being taught to understand the text
given by the researcher in form of group discussion in which they competed to
get many scores for their own group by answering the question when the
tournament was being started in each group. Last, the researcher
used this meeting to review the previous materials and to know students reading
comprehension skills on News Item text toward the use of Skimming Technique.
The researcher
achieves the criteria of success of this research successfully. The criteria of
success are obtained when 75% of the whole students score in reading
comprehension is ≥ 78.
In fact, the result of the test demonstrated that after the use of Skimming
Technique in teaching and learning process, the students’ score has increased. Based
on the finding above, the researcher recommended some suggestion that were
addressed to:
The suggestion for
the teacher: the teacher of senior high school is suggested to use Skimming
Technique in teaching reading comprehension skill. It is suggested because Skimming
Technique can solve the problem founded on teaching and learning process, for
one of the appropriate technique to teach reading comprehension skill is
Skimming.
The future researcher that will conduct
similar study, he or she has to consider the use of Skimming Technique in
improving students’ reading comprehension in skill in order to make more
innovation for the next research findings; moreover, this research can be
experimented.
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