The effect of pictorial context and pre-questioning on the students' reading comprehension achievement at SMU Dapena I Surabaya

According to the 1994 SMU curriculum, the main objective of teaching English at high school is to enable students to comprehend the English reading passage well so as to prepare themselves for their further study since textbooks that are used at the University are written in English. Although reading has been taught since Junior High School until Senior High School, the writer found that many of high school students still get difficulty in comprehending the reading passages because they are unable to relate the text with their prior knowledge. In order to overcome the problem, many experts have created some new activities, one of them is by using pictorial context and pre-questioning, that can give great help for students to comprehend the text better as pictorial context and pre-questioning make use of the students’ background knowledge by relating it to the material that will be discussed. The objective of this study is too see whether there is a significant difference in the reading achievement of the first year students of high school taught using pictorial context and pre-questioning and students taught using conventional technique (without pictorial context and pre-questioning). This study is a quasi experimental study. Two classes, each comprises thirty-two students, of the first years SMU Dapena I are taken as samples for this study without randomizing. One class is as the experimental class and the other as the control class. The experimental class is taught with pictorial context and pre-questioning, while the control class with the conventional technique (without pictorial context and pre-questioning). The data are obtained from two times reading tests, and counted by using t-observation calculation. The data of this study shows that the mean of the experimental group, that is the group which was taught by using pictorial context and pre-questioning, is higher than the control group. In reading I, the mean of the experimental group is 69,0, while the mean of the control group is 59,8. In reading II, the mean of the experimental group is 70,1, while the mean of the control group is 53,9. Based on the data, it can be said that pictorial context and pre-questioning as activities to teach reading comprehension enables students to comprehend the passage better than conventional technique (without pictorial context and pre-questioning). After collecting and analyzing the data, the writer proves that teaching reading by using pictorial context and pre-questioning yields a significantly better result than using the conventional technique (without pictorial context and pre-questioning). The result shows that a 5% level of significance, t-observation is higher than t-α. It proves that students who were taught by using pictorial context and pre-questioning can understand texts significantly better than the students who were taught by using the technique previously used by the school teacher, conventional technique (without pictorial context and pre-questioning). Realizing that pictorial context and pre-questioning can improve the students’ reading achievement better than conventional technique (without pictorial context and pre-questioning), so the writer here would like to recommend the English teacher to use pictorial context and pre-questioning in teaching reading comprehension. Pictorial context and pre-questioning can help students understand the reading texts given by activating their background knowledge and relate it to the text that will be read