TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION BY USING STUDENTS TEAM ACHIEVEMENT DIVISION (STAD) TECHNIQUE TO THE NINTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMP NEGERI 2 BATURAJA

TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION BY USING STUDENTS TEAM ACHIEVEMENT DIVISION (STAD) TECHNIQUE TO THE NINTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMP NEGERI 2 BATURAJA

1.  Background

            English is one of the important languages that is used all over the world whether as the first, second or foreign language.  English as one of the subjects is taught from elementary school to university in Indonesia.  English teaching covers four skills, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing.  All these components are taught in integrated ways.  At schools in Indonesia, English subject aimed at developing communication competence in oral and written form (Depdikbud, 2004:6).  This means the students have progress in listening, speaking, reading and writing.

            It is very important for the students to be able to read.  By reading, the students’ can acquire valuable information that can improve their thinking to generate: ideas and solve problems (Wood, 1995:5 in Nurtina, 2004:1).  For instance by having the reading ability, the students can increase their knowledge, do assignment, make notes, write letters, and many other things.  Saleh (1997:41) adds that reading is the skill which they may often use and is retained the longest.  It concerns not only with assigning the English sounds to the written words, but also with the understanding of what is written.

             The students may have problems in understanding passages.  It is the teachers responsible to minimize the students’ failures bay using the appropriate technique in teaching reading so that the students can understand what they read in target language.  By applying appropriate teaching technique in teaching and learning process, the writer hopes can improve the student reading comprehension achievement.

            The application of Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD) is one of the teaching techniques that can be done in teaching reading comprehension.  This technique makes the students tow work together to learn and responsible for their team mates as well as their own (Slavin, 1994).  

2.  Problem of the Study

             To make the problem clear, the writer will present the limitation of the problems and the formulation of the problems.

2.1 Limitation of the Problems

             The limitation of the problem that will be investigated in this study is that the text that will be used in this study entitled “Public Services” which will be taken from the students’ text book on page 75.

2.2 Formulation of the Problems

             The formulation of the problem is “Is it effective teaching reading comprehension by using students team achievement (STAD) technique to the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 3 Baturaja?

3. The Objective of the Study

            Based on the problem of this study, the main objective of this study is to find out whether or not teaching reading comprehension by using students’ team achievement (STAD) technique is effective?

4.  The Significance of the Study

            The writer hopes that this study would give the beneficial contributions to the writer herself, for the students, for the teacher of English, and for the other researchers.

(1) For the Writer Herself

      By conducting this study, it would increase the writer’s own knowledge on how the reading comprehension is taught to the students and how to measure the students’ achievement on their reading activity. 

(2) For the Students

      By conducting this study, it would give the students some inputs so they could have reading comprehension activity well, and also would give them motivation to study English especially in learning reading comprehension.

(3) For the teachers of English, the writer hopes the result of this study would be useful at least for giving information to the teachers in teaching the students reading comprehension by using STAD and to get some experiences in conduction this study..   

(4) For the Other Researchers, it would give information about the teaching reading comprehension that there is another technique which is by using students’ team achievement (STAD) so that they could improve it for the future.