The effect of speed reading on reading comprehension of SMA students

According to the 1987 SMA 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 most references and textbooks that are used at University are usually written in English. Although the teaching of English has emphasized more on reading, the difficulty in comprehending the reading passages still occurs because they spend much time reading the reading comprehension passage, but they still lack of comprehension. This is due to the fact that they are almost never trained to read for meaning. One of ways to enable students to read for meaning, according to E. Quinn(1980), Gerald(1976), Gloria(1987), and Gordon(1977) is to train the students to read fast. To them if the students can read more quickly, they can understand more material than before. The prime purpose of Speed reading is not only save the time but also to improve comprehension. The opinions of these experts have led the writer to investigate whether speed reading affect reading comprehension or not. One major hypothesis and four minor ones were put forth in this study. The major hypothesis is “Speed reading affects reading comprehension", where as the minor ones are (1) Speed reading improves Students’ comprehension in answering factual questions, (2) Speed reading improves Students’ comprehension in answering inference questions, (3) Speed reading improves Students' comprehension in answering main idea questions, (4) Speed reading improves Students’ comprehension in answering structural questions. To carry out her study, she used one class of the second year students of Al program of SMAK St. Louis Surabaya as the subject of her study . A set of instrument was used to obtain the required data, of which format was multiple choice. It is used in pre-test and post-test. To know the effect of speed reading on reading comprehension, the data were analysed statistically using the formula of t-test. The result of the study reveals that speed reading affect reading comprehension achievement in factual questions , inference questions, main idea questions, and structural questions. Such results were caused by the students’ ability to select important facts and details. Besides during reading a passage, the students got the meaning or idea by the unity of the text not word by word