“The Effect of Using Shared Reading Strategy toward Reading Comprehension of the Second Year Students at SMPN 1 Perhentian Raja”

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

1.1    Background of the Problem

Strategies refer to ways that students use to learn. This ranges from techniques for improved memory to better studying or test-taking strategies. It involves making associations between facts to be remembered and particular locations. In order to remember something, you simply visualize places and the associated facts. Some learning strategies involve changes to the design of instruction. For example, the use of questions before, during or after instruction has been shown to increase the degree of learning.

One of the strategies is shared reading. Shared reading is an interactive reading experience that occurs when students join in or share the reading of a big book or other enlarged text while guided and supported by a teacher or other experienced reader. It is can be used to improve students’ reading comprehension ability. It allows students to observe an expert reading the text with fluency and expression. Through shared reading, the readers are ordered to demonstrated what they have read. In Shared reading, readers participate in reading, learn critical concepts of how print works, get the feel of learning and begin to perceive themselves as readers.

Reading comprehension is very important subject that should be learned by all students. It is one of the language skills to get information, for pleasure or for interest. It is an interactive process that goes on between the reader and the text.  It is the process to understand written texts. It is a complex activity that involves both perception and thought. Reading consists of two related processes: word recognition and comprehension. Word recognition refers to the process of perceiving how written symbols correspond to one’s spoken language. Comprehension is the process of making sense of words, sentences and connected text. Readers typically make use of background knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, experience with text and other strategies to help them understand written text.

In addition, reading comprehension is an activity with a purpose. A person may read in order to gain information or verify existing knowledge, or in order to critique a writer's ideas or writing style. A person may also read for enjoyment, or to enhance knowledge of the language being read. The purpose for reading guide the reader's selection of texts

Reading comprehension is also taught in SMP N 1 Perhentian Raja. SMP N 1 Perhentian Raja is located on Hangtuah Central Street in the Hangtuah village, Kampar Regency. In the school, KTSP (Education Unit Level Curriculum) is implemented. In the KTSP, reading is taught 2 meetings x 40 minutes in a week. It is taught relate to the syllabus, based and standard competencies.        

In the syllabus, reading has at least three basic competences. The first is responding the meaning of functional short text accurately, fluently and accepting the relation to closest environment. The second is responding the meaning and step of rhetoric accurately, fluently and accepting a simple essay of closest environment in descriptive and procedure text, and the third is reading aloud that have a meaning of functional text, descriptive and procedure short essay with utterance, intonation and pressure accurately, (Depdiknas, 2006:25).

Reading comprehension is one of the language skill that taught at the second year students of SMP N 1 Perhentian Raja. Based on the writer observation at the second year students of SMP N 1 Perhentian Raja found that the students have many problems in reading comprehension such as, the problems those come from the teacher, such as the methods or strategies that used in teaching reading. Usually, the teacher only uses reading aloud and translation method such as the students are ordered to read the text loudly then translate the texts into Indonesian language. This method make students bored in reading material. Finally, the students are lazy to read.

Furthermore, the problems come from students are the first, they always are not able to comprehend the text such as they are not able to find main idea in the texts or pessages, they also have difficulties to identify locating reference, making inference, finding factual information and identifying supporting idea from the texts or pessages. These conditions affect the students’ score in English because reding comprehension is one of the skills that should be learned by the students when they are lerning English. Second, the students cannot read loudly by using correct pronunciation. Third, the students always feel bore when learing reading comprehension. Fourth, the students are lazy to read English texts.

The reasons of choosing this title becuase the writer wants to help the students in reading comprehension by using shared reading strategy. By using shared reading strategy, the writer hopes that it allows students to enjoy materials that they may not be able to read on their own. It ensures that all students feel successful by providing support to the entire group. Students act as though they are reading. It also helps novice readers learn about the relationship between oral language and printed language. It also supports students as they gain awareness of symbols and print conventions, while constructing meaning from text read.

The writer believes that this research differs from the others. The others used graphic orgnizer, picture series, skimming, scanning, etc. to improve students’ reading comprehension but in this research, the writer will use shared reading strategy to improve the students’ reading comprehension especially in identifying main idea, finding supporting idea, identifying locating inference, making inference and indefiying synonym or anthonym of the vocabuary in the descriptive texts or pessages.

According to Moustafa (2002:351), shared reading is an interactive reading experience that occurs when students join in or share the reading of a big book or other enlarged text while guided and supported by a teacher or other experienced reader. Students observe an expert reading the text with fluency and expression. The text must be large enough for all the students to see clearly, so they can share in the reading of the text. It is through shared reading that the reading process and reading strategies that readers use are demonstrated. In Shared reading, children participate in reading, learn critical concepts of how print works, get the feel of learning and begin to perceive themselves as readers.

In relation to the explanation above, shared reading is a time when the entire class gathers together to share a variety of literacy experience by reading and discussing a variety of texts. Many of the text are enlarged so that all the children can see the print and pictures anf thus talk more easily about them. Furthermore, the researcher is very interested in carrying out a research entitled: “The Effect of Using Shared Reading Strategy toward Reading Comprehension of the Second Year Students at SMPN 1 Perhentian Raja”.