The Implementation of Snowball Throwing Technique to Increase 8th Graders' Reading Comprehension

AbstractIn learning English, reading is one of the most important skills to learn. Despite the importance, most of the students in year 8 (class 8.2) SMP Negeri 14 Malang had difficulties in comprehending reading text and that they were lack of motivation to participate in the learning activity. Those problems were contradictory to the 2013 Curriculum, in which students were expected to be able to read well and active during the learning activities. To solve those problems, the cooperative learning was chosen to be the ideal problem solving for it allowed students to get higher opportunity to work within group. In cooperative learning itself, some techniques were commonly used to deal with the classroom problem. One of teaching techniques from cooperative learning is Snowball Throwing Technique (henceforth STT). In order to improve the students’ reading comprehension skill and their participation in the learning activities, I applied the STT which allowed students to work in group by discussing, making questions, answering questions, and having an interesting way of learning in comprehending reading text.The result of this study shows that 25 out of 32 students or 78.13% of students have increased their reading skill as indicated by their score. It can be seen from the increase of students’ average score which is from 73.23 to 88.12. Moreover, the final result of students’ response to the implementation of STT showed a positive response. All in all, the implementation of STT could improve students’ reading comprehension because their learning participation increased.Keywords: Snowball Throwing, Cooperative Learning, Reading Comprehensio