The effects of Student Teams and Achievement Divisions (STAD) technique on the SMA students' reading comprehension achievement

The main objective of teaching English at SMA, according to the 2004 English curriculum is to increase and develop the students’ reading ability. The graduates of SMA are expected to be able to comprehend English texts related to their further study since most of text books used at higher education are mostly written in English. Although the teaching of English at SMA emphasizes on the importance of reading, the reality shows that most of SMA students often get difficulties in comprehending English passages, as a result they cannot get the writer’s massage in the passages. Besides, the students do not have any motivation to read the reading passages. The problem occurs because there is a gap between the content of reading material and he process of instruction or the way of teaching reading. The way the reading teacher teaches the lesson affects the students’ achievement on the reading comprehension. In teaching reading class the teacher usually stresses on grammatical pattern and vocabulary in the text. The teacher may not teach reading but vocabulary and structure. As a result the students’ reading comprehension ability cannot develop well. The teacher also sometimes dominated the class; it means that there is a little opportunity given to students to understand the English text. In order to overcome the problems, the writer, in this study, suggested cooperative learning using Students Team and Achievement Division (STAD) technique that bridges the gap between the content of reading material and the process of instruction or the way of teaching reading. STAD technique is based on raising students’ motivation for learning by focusing on cooperation of members within each team, followed by competition among teams in the class. The students are divided into groups based on their base score, so each group is composed of students with different level of achievement. During the teaching learning activity the students should learn together in their team and tutor each other. In this study, the writer would like to find out whether cooperative learning using STAD technique affects the students’ comprehension achievement. To carry out her study, she used two classes of the first year students of SMA Negeri 15 Surabaya as the subject of her study and three different themes of reading passages namely, Clean Environment, Family Life, and Health. In order to know the effects of STAD technique the writer gave a pretest and a posttest. The writer found out that STAD technique can improve the students’ reading achievement, especially in answering comprehension questions (factual questions, inference question, subject matter question, main idea question and structural question). The writer also found that STAD technique improves the students’ reading comprehension and gives strong motivation to read English texts better than the conventional technique