THE USE OF WORD SQUARE TO IMPROVE
THE STUDENTS READING COMPREHENSION IN NARRATIVE MATERIALS
A.
BACKROUND
OF THE STUDY
English is an important means of
communication, which is used by many countries in this world. It plays an important role in the process of modernization as an International language. This is why the Indonesian
government chooses English as the first foreign language to be taught in
schools (Ramelan, 1992:3). By putting it
as one of the subjects in the curriculum, hopefully, students will have
an ability to use English, and when they have mastered it, the way for them to
get in touch with the International community is wide open.
Recently from kindergarten to Senior
High School (SMA), students learn English in formal and non-formal ways. They
realize how important English is in this life, so they intend to master it such
a way that they can use that language to communicate with other people. Based
on curriculum of 2004, the scope of teaching English at Junior High Schools
includes four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In
this paper, the writer will perform reading by looking at the consideration that success
in reading will be very important to
students both for academic and vocational advancement.
Although English has been taught for a
long time, the result is still considered unsatisfactory especially in reading
comprehension. It is because the Indonesian students spend little time to read
and discuss books. They think that they can get the knowledge more easily
obtained from non-book sources than from books. However, reading helps students
in their study. In other words, their study depends much on how well they read.
Practically, it is not easy for students
to read materials in foreign language than in their native language. They have
to face new vocabularies and structures that are different with that they have in their own language. They
sometimes also have to face long, difficult, boring, and uninteresting passages
both in the textbooks and in the test papers. Those things can make the
students frustrated and lose their motivation to learn English. The reason for
reading will finally simply become learning to read instead of reading to
learn.
From this situation, the teacher should
not remain passive or give up all efforts to make improvements. According to
Grabe (Simanjuntak, 1988:36), the role of the teacher is to facilitate reading,
raise consciousness, build confidence, ensure continuity and system, show
involvement, and demand performance. It means they should try to get students
to read and to develop skills aimed at improving their ability to read. He
should be able to be a good facilitator in creating and building an effective
reading class. One beginning step for him to do is by providing understandable
and interesting reading materials. An understandable text will prevent students
from translating it word by word, and it will lead them to have a contextual
understanding of a whole text, or at least on sentence by sentence.
According to Burns, Roe, and Ross
(1984:148), the objective of all reader is comprehension of what they read.
Therefore, it is clear that the goal of all reading is the comprehension of
meaning. The “word by word” translation that is usually done by students in
Indonesia will not bring them to comprehend the text’s content well.
The role of a teacher is important to
help students in determining how much and what subject they should read. The
teacher is a person who should create the world of reading in particular class. He must stimulate students’
interest in reading and support their enthusiasm for books or other reading
objects.
To enable the students master the four
language skills, English teachers should provide materials that are appropriate with the curriculum and find
suitable methods in teaching and learning process. One of methods suggested in
the approaches introduced by the government is by using word square as
technique in the classroom.
