THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING KWL (KNOW, WANT, LEARNED) STRATEGY 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

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.