THE IMPLEMENTATION OF RECIPROCAL STRATEGY IN TEACHING READING NARATIVE TEXT

This study investigates the effectiveness of employing Reciprocal Strategy to improve students’ ability in comprehending narrative texts. This study is conducted at an Islamic Senior High School (MAN) in Medan. The participants involved in this study are the first year students in that school. Two questions are formulated as research questions: 1) reciprocal strategies can improve student’s reading comprehension of English Narrative text. 2) the students’ attitudes toward the application of reciprocal strategies in reading instruction. Using true experimental study, the data are collected through pre-test and post-test, both are addressed to the experimental group and control group. A treatment, the use of reciprocal strategy is given to the experimental group, whereas the control group is taught using the three phase techniques. The obtained data from pretest and posttest are statistically calculated using t-test to investigate whether there is a significant difference between the test scores of both groups, experimental and control group. Besides using tests, this study also uses another way of conducting data to answer the second research question, i.e. questionnaire. The data concerning students’ attitudes towards the application of reciprocal strategy is presented in a condensed body to describe their opinions about the effect of the implementation of the strategy for their reading ability. This study identifies that reciprocal strategy can significantly improve the students’ reading ability in comprehending narrative texts. With the level of significance 0.05, the value of the t-obs is higher than t-table. The result describes that there is a significant difference between pretest and posttest scores obtained by the experimental and control group. This indicates that the implementation of Reciprocal strategy can improve the students’ reading comprehension in narrative texts. Regarding the second question, the data from questionnaires show that, in general, the students of experimental group show their positive attitudes toward the reciprocal strategy, while the students in control group show their negative attitudes toward the three face techniques. It appears that reciprocal strategy is more preferable than the three phase techniques. It helps them developing their reading ability and increase their motivation or interest in reading narrative texts