The Effectiveness of Generating Interaction between Schemata and Text (GIST) Strategy on Reading Descriptive Text Comprehension Ability of the Seventh Grade Students
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
This chapter presents background of research, research problem, research objective, research hypothesis, research significance and the scope of the research.
A. Background of Research
Reading skill is needed by students to improve their knowledge and other English skills and components. Reading enables people to find out information from a variety of texts, written or printed information in the forms of newspapers, magazines, advertisements, and brochures. Reading is a complex process both on its teaching and learning. Reading is one of the language skills which is important for academic success. Reading is the process of reconstructing the writer’s idea written in a text or printed symbols based on the reader’s background knowledge and experience.
Reading comprehension is a complex activity to understand the meaning of words. In reading activity, we are not only reading the text, but also trying to understand what we are reading. Moreover we do not only want to get some information or knowledge but also an enjoyment. Ability or skill of comprehending a message in the text is the goal of reading in a language instruction. However, comprehending a text message is not easy, especially in English. It can be seen from the students’ reading comprehension that is still far from what is expected. At seventh grade students in Junior High School there is serious problem for them. From my experience in conducting a teaching practice or PPL in the academic year 2013/2014 the seventh grade students of Junior High School still got difficulty in comprehending descriptive text. When I taught them about reading descriptive text they were still confuse to understand the meaning and the content of text. The unsatisfactory result of students’ reading descriptive text comprehension might be caused by the following problems.
The first problem is the students’ vocabulary is not sufficient. Students are not able to understand the texts when they encounter words that have actually been taught or told to them. Second, teachers tend to emphasize more on students’ reading result, not on the learning process. Teachers usually do not pay attention on the learning process but the result of the learning. Third, the reading teaching and learning activities are more teacher-centered in a way that the reading instruction is based on what the teachers tell. Fourth, the strategy of the teachers employ is still conventional, meaning that the students sometimes read text silently or loudly, and after that the teacher translates the text for students.
Fifth, the reading teaching and learning process is sometimes boring, students are not motivated to do it and sometimes they just keep silent listening to what the teacher is reading. Finally, students are seldom engaged in cooperative and an interesting activity. Practically, students work competitively and individually which triggers them to give up when it deals with the difficult tasks. As a result, they end up feeling bored and unmotivated.
To minimize those problems, the teacher must have an appropriate strategy of teaching to help the students learn English, especially in reading and to make the teaching learning process more interesting. One of the teaching strategies that is considered useful and it involves students’ prior knowledge, synthesizing and generalizing cognitive operation is Generating Interaction between Schemata and Text (GIST) strategy, proposed by Cunningham in Wolley (2011:221). This strategy is said useful to identify or generate main ideas, connect the main or central ideas, eliminate redundant and unnecessary information, help students remember what they read, and record a summary of the material they just read.
Cunningham stated that a GIST (Generating Interactions between Schemata and Text) is a summarizing strategy used to assist students’ comprehension and summary writing skills. Students use higher-order thinking skills to analyze and synthesize what they have read. The summary is usually limited to no more than fifteen words; therefore, the students must analyze ways to delete non-essential information and use their own words to summarize the main idea or “the gist” of the selection. Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading, to condense this information, and to put it into their own words. Thus, the meaning may be vary from one reader to another. It is believed that by having a good strategy in reading the students are facilitated to meet their own individual needs and they are given more chances to actively construct their own meaning. Because many problem in reading comprehension exactly in descriptive text at seventh grade.......(Baca Selengkapnya)
