Abstract:
Language is an important communication tool and one of the international
languages in this world is English. That's why English is taught in all levels of
education. In understanding a language in the classroom, there are 4 aspects that
must be mastered, as follows: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Reading is
one aspect which is important in language teaching-learning. Success or not of a
teaching-learning may be caused by the strategy of teaching given by the teachers
to the students. One of the strategies that can be used for teaching reading is KWL
strategy.
The objective of this research is to describe whether the KWL (know,
want, learned) strategy to improve the students’ reading comprehension ability in
descriptive text is effective or not at the seventh grade students of SMP N 4
Purworejo in the academic year of 2012/2013. The type of this research is
experimental research. The independent variable is the use of KWL (know, want,
learned) strategy. It is symbolized by “X”. The dependent variable is the students’
reading comprehension ability in descriptive text. It is symbolized by “Y”. The
researcher takes the seventh grade students of SMP N 4 Purworejo in the
academic year of 2012/2013 as the population of this research. The researcher
uses purposive sampling. Here, the researcher takes 2 classes as the sample to be
analyzed, and the number of sample is 64 students. They are VII E as
experimental group and VII G as control group. The experimental group was
given treatment by using KWL strategy and the control group using common
strategy. The data statistic analyzed by using t-test.
The result of computation shows that KWL strategy is effective to improve
the students’ reading comprehension ability. The experimental group got better
improvement in the mean score 76.50 than the control group who got 71.13. The
value of t-test was 2.97. For the 5% significance level and 62 degree of freedom
the critical value of t-table was 1.999. The value of t-test is higher than t-table
(2.97>1.999). Based on the hypothesis testing above, it could be concluded that
Ha was accepted. Therefore, the hypothesis of this research which says “teaching
using KWL (Know, Want, Learned) strategy is effective to improve the students’
reading comprehension ability in descriptive text at the seventh grade students of
SMP N 4 Purworejo in the academic year of 2012/2013. The researcher suggests
for English teachers to use KWL as a strategy to teach reading.
