The use of guided reading strategy to improve students' ability in reading comprehension: A quasi-experimental study at eight grade of SMP Laboratorium Percontohan UPI Cibiru Bandung

Reading is an important activity for students who learn English. Inaddition, reading is very important because generally the students are just introduced how to learn more about reading than read it as it was found at SMP Laboratorium Percontohan UPI Cibiru. There are several strategies that can be used to solve the problem. One of them is Guided Reading Strategy (GRS). The purposes of this research are to find out 1) The students’ ability in reading comprehension before using GRS; 2) The students’ ability in reading comprehension after using GRS; 3) How significant is the improvement of the students’ ability in reading comprehension. This research is a quantitative research with a quasi-experimental design. The instruments used in this research were reading narrative pre-test and post-test by guided reading strategy (GRS) and they were analyzed by using statistical analysis. It confirms there is a significant difference between the students’ ability in reading comprehension after being taught by using guided reading strategy. It can be seen in the t-test data that ttable is 3.38 while tcount is 24.11. the calculation shows that tcount > ttable, and can be concludee from the investigation that the students’ ability in reading comprehension using guided reading strategy (GRS) is more than those who learn without using guided reading strategy (GRS) in the eight grade of SMP Laboratorium Percontohan UPI Cibiru. In conclusion, it is clearly found that the use of guided reading strategy (GRS) in reading narrative text increases students’ ability in reading comprehension. Based on the result in this research, the thing must be concerned about the teaching using guided reading strategy (GRS) to improve students’ ability in reading comprehension is that alternative activity for the students must be prepared while a pair or group of their friends performance in front of the class to present new words they found. It can make the students keep focusing themselves on activities