Reading strategies used by second grade high School students of SMA Negeri 1 Surabaya

In reading activities, there are the activities where the students as the readers bring their meaning and get the new meaning from printed or written materials then store them in their memory. Since reading is complex cognitive activities, it requires a set of processes and strategies, accordingly, it demands on students' abilities of reading. To have reading abilities, the students must have good reading comprehension since through reading comprehension, the students can understand, evaluate and utilize the information or ideas from the text. In the case of L2 students, this process takes a longer time because to achieve this level, the students should develop their reading skills and reading strategies. Therefore, this study focused on reading strategies used by students, especially second grade high school students and tried to find out the numbers of reading strategies used by good students and poor students and finally this study was intended to find out whether good students can be categorized as fluent readers and reading strategies they used. In conducting this study, the researcher took 76 students who were considered as the subjects of this study. There were four instruments that were used in this study, they were reading test, reading strategies questionnaire, reading -aloud test, and interview. The validity and the reliability of the four types of instrument above had been measured and they had shown reliable results. As the subjects of this study, the students were given the reading test. After the reading test, the subjects were given reading strategies questionnaire in order to find out subjects' reading strategies. The next instrument, reading -aloud test was given to the subjects who had been classified into good students and poor students. The purpose of this test was to find out whether good students can be categorized as fluent readers. They were twenty (20) students who sat for this test. After conducting reading-aloud test, the subjects, who were categorized as fluent readers, were interviewed in order to find their deeper strategies which facilitated them to be fluent readers. From the data given, it was found out that the students used five (5) types of reading strategies: Cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies, compensation strategies, memory strategies, and social affective strategies. The differences of the uses of these strategies were on the frequency of each strategy they used in reading activities. Cognitive strategies were used most frequently, while memory strategies were least frequently used by the students. Another finding proved that there were three (3) good students who can be categorized as fluent readers based on the result of reading-aloud test. The result of interview showed that these fluent readers used word processing strategies to facilitate them to read and understand the text fluently. From the results of this study, the researcher would like to recommend other researchers to have further research into reading strategies used by learners in different levels of schools such as elementary or junior high schools to confirm the research findings. The researcher would also be pleased if future researchers investigate further about fluent readers and their reading strategies so that this can give meaningful contributions to the learners and teachers of English