Improving Students’ Reading Comprehension Ability in Recount Text by Using KWL (Know, Want, and Learned) of the Eight Grade at SMPN 1 Durenan Trenggalek in the Academic Year 2013/2014

Keywords: improving, reading comprehension, recount text, KWL (Know, Want, and Learned). Reading is one of the important skills in English and it gives many benefits for us. The ability to read opens up new words and gives opportunities for us. It is enables for us to gain information and enjoy any kinds of literature that can make us rich of knowledge. It enables us to gain information and enjoy any kinds of literature that can make us rich of knowledge. Reading comprehension is an instrument that can facilitate. The eight grades students of SMPN 1 Durenan Trenggalek face some problems in reading. Most of them found difficulties in comprehending text, especially recount text. Therefore, the researcher uses KWL (Know, Want, and Learned) technique to solve the problems. By using this technique, the students are expected to be interested in learning reading and active in the class. As a result, their reading comprehension ability can improve well. The formulation of the study problem is how the modified of KWL (Know, Want and Learned) can improve the ability in reading comprehension recount text at the eight grade students of SMPN 1 Durenan Trenggalek? And then the purpose of the study is to know whether students „ability of a reading comprehension recount text by using KWL (Know, Want, and Learned) technique in teaching and learning process at the eight grade students of SMPN 1 Durenan Trenggalek. Research Method: 1) the research design in this study was classroom action research model from Kemmis and Taggart especially collaborative action research design, 2) the subjects of this study was eight grades students of SMPN 1 Durenan Trenggalek, and the setting of this study was at SMPN 1 Durenan Trenggalek, 3) the research was conduct in two cycles, every cycle had three meeting ,the research procedure of every cycle consisted of four steps which were planning, implementing, observing and reflecting, 4) the criteria of success of this study is 75% of the students were able to answer reading comprehension‟ questions in the recount text with score ≥ 75 (equal or above KKM score) which were known using reading comprehension test, 5) the research instruments were observation checklist, interview, and reading comprehension test, 6) because the data of this research were not only in the form of numbers but also in the form of words or sentences, the data analysis was done by studying the whole data from many sources which were observation checklist, interview, questionnaire, and reading comprehensions test. viii The result of the study showed that the students‟ mean score of reading comprehension test in the preliminary study (pre-test) was 60. Then the students‟ mean score of reading comprehension test in cycle 1 was 69 and in cycle 2 was 80. In addition, in the preliminary study, there were 32% of the students who passed the test and 68% of the students who failed in the test. Then, in cycle 1, there were 59% of the students who passed the test and 41% of the students who failed in the test. As a result, the criteria of success had not been achieved yet because the students who passed the test were less than 75% of criteria of success so that cycle 2 was needed to be conducted. In cycle 2, the criteria success which was 75% could be achieved by the students because there were 85% of the students who passed the test, and there were only 15% of the students who failed in the test. It means that the action research was successful so that the researcher stopped the research in this cycle. Based on the result of the study above, it could be inferred that the implementation of KWL (Know, Want, and Learned) technique was successful in this research, and the KWL (Know, Want, and Learned) technique could be an alternative to improve the students‟ reading comprehension especially recount text