USING RECIPROCAL TEACHING (RT) TO IMPROVE THE READING COMPREHENSION OF GRADE VIII STUDENTS OF SMP N 13 YOGYAKARTA

The objective of this action research is to improve reading comprehension of Grade VIII students of SMP N 13 Yogyakarta in the academic year of 2012/2013 through reciprocal teaching (RT). This action research was conducted in three cycles. The actions involved reciprocal teaching method which included in reciprocal teaching stages, they are predicting, clarifying, generating questions, and summarizing. It also involved a discussion activity as the reciprocal teaching activity. The complement activities of the main activity of this research were holding a team teaching and giving reward to the students. The participants of this research were the researcher, the English teacher, the collaborator and the students of grade VIIIB of SMP N 13 Yogyakarta. The data of this research were qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative data were obtained by observing the teaching learning process, interviewing the English teacher and the collaborator, interviewing the students, holding discussions with the English teacher and the collaborator, and taking pictures. Meanwhile the quantitative data were obtained by holding a pre-test and post-test to see the improvement of students’ reading comprehension. The instruments of this research were the observation guidelines, interview guidelines, reading comprehension test, camera, and recorder. The validity of the data was attained by applying democratic validity, dialogic validity, process validity, outcome validity, and catalytic validity. Meanwhile, to make the data trustworthy or become reliable, it were used time triangulation, investigator triangulation, and theoretical triangulation. The research results show that reading comprehension of most students improved after the reciprocal teaching (RT) was conducted. First, students made improvement of some aspects such as predicting the content of the text, finding details information or important information of a text, guessing meaning of the difficult word, finding main idea of a paragraph, made conclusion or summary of a text. Second, students were enthusiastic in the reading activity. The activity motivated them to learn. Third, students became more confident in doing the reading activity and reporting their work. Fourth, the interaction among the students and between the students and the teacher improved after the implementation of the group discussion and class discussion. The last, students’ reading comprehension improved. It was indicated of the increase of the mean of students’ reading comprehension score in pre-test and post-test (4.63 to 6.30)