Microsoft Word - BW Research5.1.3.docx Beyond Words Vol. 5 No. 1. May 2017   Peer Tutoring with QUICK Method vs. Task Based Method on Reading Comprehension Achievement Sri Indrawati marysriindrawati@gmail.com Petra 3 Senior High School Surabaya, Indonesia Abstract This study is a quasi-experimental research analyzing the reading comprehension achievement of the eleventh graders of Senior High School in Surabaya. This experimental research is comparing the effects of peer tutoring with QUICK method and task-based method to help the students to increase the students’ reading achievement. Besides for increasing the students’ reading achievement, this study has the main purpose to give a variation in teacher’s teaching reading techniques. This study uses independent samples t-test and paired samples t-test to indicate the students’ significant difference in achieving the reading comprehension in peer tutoring with QUICK method and task based method. Keywords: Peer tutoring with QUICK method, Task-based method, T-test, Reading achievement. Introduction Reading, one of the four language skills, is important for students to learn.Through reading, students can get all information to support their learning process at high school level. Casper, Catton and Westfall (1998) say that the main purpose for reading is to comprehend the ideas in the material. Without comprehension, reading would be empty and meaningless. In the implementation of teaching learning activities, the students of Senior High School Surabaya, who are taught English as a foreign language, always show difficulties to comprehend the reading passages. The writer has also found out that the students can read aloud with good pronunciation but they still cannot comprehend the reading passage well. The gist of the reading passage is difficult to be understood by the students though it is important for students to develop their reading comprehension skill and vocabulary. The writer found students are capable of reading the words, but they have much difficulty in understanding the main ideas or the information of the passages. Therefore, they give wrong answers to the reading text. The writer assumed that most of students lack the understanding of the reading passages. Armbuster, Anderson, Armstrong, Wise, Janish and Meyer (1991) have mentioned the two reasons why so many students have trouble with informational text. The first reason is that students do not read much informational text, so they are unfamiliar with the genre. And the second reason is that the instruction does not foster the development of a conceptual under- standing and meaningful learning. Based on the fact, the writer introduced a new method in teaching reading, peer tutoring with QUICK method, which was applied in this study. This study is not only focussing on peer tutoring with QUICK method but also focussing on task based. Task based is a teaching reading compre- hension method which is usually used in the reading class. This task based is used to be 24                                               QUICK METHOD VS. TASK BASED METHOD ON READING        compared to the new method in teaching reading.This study was conducted in the environment where English is spoken as a foreign language (EFL). The main purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of peer tutoring with QUICK method and task based method on the reading achievement of the eleventh grade students. The other purpose was to analyze which teaching reading method gives better effects on students’ reading achievement. Therefore, the writer determined a research problem which was formulated in this study: Do peer tutoring with QUICK method and task based method show a significant difference in students’ reading comprehension achievement of the eleventh grade? Derived from the statements of the problems, the writer made the hypotheses from the research questions. These hypotheses were based on the purposes of the thesis. Alternative Hypothesis: There is a significant difference between the reading achievement of grade 11 students who are taught using peer tutoring with QUICK method and the students who are taught using task based. Null Hypothesis. There is no significant difference between the reading achievement of grade 11 students who are taught using peer tutoring with QUICK method and the students who are taught using task based. This study was delimited to intensive reading focusing on reading comprehension skill focusing on the ability of students to comprehend the reading passage and on the ability of students to comprehend the reading comprehension passage and the reading comprehension questions correctly. And this study was also delimited to the students’ levels of knowledge (metacognitive). Literature Review This part presents the related theories concerning to Reading Comprehension and Reading Comprehension Methods and some previous studies conducted by other researchers. Reading Comprehension According to Jim Cummins (2008), reading comprehension involves activity in understanding the vocabulary and activity the way the words are organized in sentences and paragraphs to produce meaning. Chard (2008) added that strategic processing is a necessity for efficient and effective comprehension which involves using strategies to understand text, knowing when to use the various strategies, actively thinking about understanding and engaging the text during the discussions in the classroom. Besides the theory of reading comprehension, the writer also put some references supporting the theory of reading comprehension skills. They are: The goal of reading and Critical reading. The Goal of Reading. The goal of reading is to understand a reading passage by solving the decoding text. Human Resources and Social Development (2003) emphasized that the ultimate goal of reading is a reading process involving proficient decoding and skillful comprehension. In the process of decoding to attain the goal of reading, Duke and Pearson (2002) believed that there is a process of good readers which need some great deals about what good readers do when they read. Critical Reading. Critical reading is a technique for discovering information and ideas within a text. Critical reading refers to QUICK METHOD VS. TASK BASED METHOD ON READING 25        a careful, active, reflective, analytic reading. Kurland (2000) presented the goals of critical reading: (1) to recognize an author’s purpose, (2) to understand tone and persuasive elements, (3) to recognize bias. Critical reading usually appears before the critical thinking comes. Reading Comprehension Methods. There are two reading comprehension methods which the writer implemented and used in her study: peer tutoring with QUICK method and task based method. Peer Tutoring with QUICK Method. Peer tutoring involves partners who are the same age or different ages (Scruggs, Mastropieri, & Berkeley, 2010) Peer tutoring is designed to increase practice, responses and feedback for students, and peer-tutoring results in increasing students’ motivation and achievement. The writer implemented Peer Tutoring method based on QUICK (Lague & Wilson, 2011) intervention method in the peer tutoring class. The Implementation of Peer Tutoring with QUICK Method in reading, QUICK provides tutors with a simple effective framework to scaffold reading comprehension. The QUICK method consists of Questioning, Understanding new words, Imaging, Connecting and Keeping it all together. 1. Questioning. In questioning step, students may ask specific questions and tutors guide students to find the answer in the text, beyond the text, or using their prior knowledge 2. Understanding New Words. QUICK method allows students to investigate the context of the sentence to determine the meanings based on the sentence context. 3. Imaging. While the tutors read the text loud, the tutees close their eyes to form their mental pictures from the text. 4. Connecting. Peer tutors make connection models by asking the tutees to think of a time they experienced an event similar to the character and based on students’ prior knowledge. 5. Keeping It All Together. Keep it all together technique is a reminder that comprehension processes are complex and connected. The goal is to understand and gain insight from the text as a whole. Task Based According to Jing and MingJun (2013), task based focuses on the use of authentic language and on asking students to do meaningful tasks using the target language. In the implementation, there are three stages of task process and post task (Walker, 2011). Pre-Task. The Pre-Task aims to motivate, to prepare and to organize the students for the main task. There are four steps in the pre-task. Check and build background knowledge. This step is to measure the learner knowledge of the task topic, to introduce. The activities can be in mind maps, pretest, writing lists, categorizing, sorting, reading a text, listening to a text. Main Task: Task model. Through the task model, learners will hear or read the target language and emphasize on how to complete the task through passive modeling (watch, listen and demonstration) and active modeling (discussions, asking questions or taking notes). Task instructions. This seems like an obvious task process step when the learners are familiar with the given task process instructions. 26                                               QUICK METHOD VS. TASK BASED METHOD ON READING    Task planning. Learners can plan task content. Through content, learners can create in pre-task planning will be used to help them complete the main task. Post-Task: Post-Task brings the task process to a close, for example task reflection. Task reflection focuses on the content from the main task and gives the learners a chance to employ self-correction. Previous Studies Peer Tutoring with QUICK Method. This previous study was presented by Tse (2014). Tse explored and filled the literature gap of an unexplored field on how child mentors perceive their development in a peer-mentoring program. He used peer tutoring with QUICK method and he revealed that child mentors had perceived positive development. The connectedness between mentors and mentees were found to be the crucial component contributing to the development of mentors while pro social interactions with the mentees encouraged mentors to share their wealth of experiences, despite the narrow age-gap. Task Based. This previous study was presented by Chia (2007). Her study discussed about the Cooperative Task-Based Learning approach (CTBL). The purpose of that study was to motivate low achieving readers of English in Taiwanese university. Her study elicited numerous positive outcomes from the teacher’s and the students’ perspectives and the findings support the positive aspects of application of a CTBL approach to first year university students who have low achievement status with the idea of facilitating their motivations to learn English. This part describes the research method applied in this study. The design of this thesis is a quasi experimental applying a non randomized pretest posttest control group design as proposed by McMillan (2008). The function of this design is to find the effects of different treatments on the two different samples and to find the effectiveness of the intervention. The population was the senior high school students. The students learn English as a foreign language. The population has been learning English as an integrated course. The samples of this thesis were the eleventh grade students. The writer took two intact classes of four intact classes and the writer used one intact class as the pilot group. Each intact class consists of 20 students in each class. The writer took the samples using Simple Random Sampling Method (Mueller, 1992). The variables of this quasi-experimental study are grouped in two types: independent and dependent variables. The independent variables are the peer tutoring with QUICK method and task-based method whereas the dependent variable is the students’ reading achievement. There are two different teaching methods implemented in this study: Peer Tutoring with QUICK method and Task Based method. In the implementation, each group had the same teacher and the same material applied in each meeting except the teacher applied peer-tutoring teaching with QUICK method in the experimental group and task- based method in the control group. This QUICK METHOD VS. TASK BASED METHOD ON READING 27        study needed four meetings of 90 meetings and two meetings of 45 minutes for pretest and posttest. Reading tests were used to get the data of the students’ reading achievement. The reading tests were given as a pretest and a posttest. The aim of the writer in giving two tests was to find out if there would be differences in students’ reading achievement before and after the interventions. The test consisted of 20 items with two different reading passages in multiple-choice. For the posttest, the test had been made some changes in sequence of numbers to focus on the reading question and to avoid students to remember their answer in pretest. Before conducting the experimental, the writer conducted a tryout. And the findings of the tryout were found that the reliability of the test or Kuder-Richardson 21 (KR 21) (Cooper, Pittman, & Womack, 2014) was 0.5. This meant the tryout was reliable and was able to use as an instrument for this study because the reliability was consistent, homogenous and correlated. And for the item difficulty, the p-value formula (Sabri, 2013) the p-value ranges from 0.0 to 1.00. A high p-value indicates an easy item. And the p value was found that 15% of the test was very easy, 65% of the test was ideal items, and 20% of the test was difficult. According to Heaton (1988), the discrimination indices range from +1 to -1. +1 is an item which discriminates perfectly, and through 0 is an item which does not discriminates in any way at all and -1 is an item which discriminates in entirely the wrong way. And Ovwigho (2013) has categorized the discrimination indexes for item discrimination evaluation as shown in table 3. In the result of item discrimination, it was found that 40% of the test items were very good, 40% of the test items were marginal items which need the subject to improvement and 20% of the test items were in poor items. Based on the result of item discrimination, it can be concluded that this tryout was valid and reliable for the experimental instrument. Table 3 presented the result of item discrimination in tryout. Findings To analyze and to compare the effects of the two methods, the writer used statistical software of t-test in Statistical Package for Social Science 18 (SPSS 18) program with the significant level of accuracy at the .05 level (α = .05) Independent Samples T-test Independent samples t-test evaluates the difference between means of two samples (Horn, 2016). To analyze the difference between means in peer tutoring with QUICK method group and task based group, the writer used the gain scores of each student in two different groups and classified the gain scores from the two samples, as the independent score (Lane, 2016). 28                                               QUICK METHOD VS. TASK BASED METHOD ON READING        Table 4 showed the different between peer tutoring technique with QUICK method and task based technique to the students’ reading achievement. In table 4, the mean’s difference of the two samples indicated that the students in task based group had better progress in their reading achievement. The difference between the means of the two samples was 2.75 percent. From the means’ difference, the writer concluded that the null hypothesis was rejected. According to Berg (2014), the significance of equal variance was .028 < .05, it means the null hypothesis of equal variance is rejected. The t-test for equality of means indicated the mean difference of two samples was in – 2.750. It meant that the students who learnt using peer tutoring with QUICK method showed 2.75 percent less progress than the students who learnt using task based method. The finding of independent t-test presented that the alternative hypothesis was -2.750 < .05 or -3.25 percent different between peer tutoring with QUICK method and task based method. In another word, there is a negative relationship between peer tutoring with QUICK method and task based method in teaching reading comprehension methods which the result showed that task based method gave better effects than peer tutoring QUICK method. From the findings in the independent samples t-test and in the paired samples t-test, the writer concluded that task based method and peer tutoring with QUICK method are significantly different. The result of independent samples t-test presented that task based method gave better effect than peer tutoring with QUICK method. The result showed that there was a mean difference of the t-test for equality was less than 0; the mean difference of the t-test for equality was in – 2.750. However the Ha = -2.75 < .05 indicated that there was a negative relationship between peer tutoring with QUICK method and task based method in teaching reading comprehension. Discussions In the findings, the writer obtained that the students tend to have the English lower level which focuses on the using language to achieve an outcome; the task instructions that the teacher gave to the students help the students familiar to do the tasks. As a result, students accept the task based method better than peer tutoring with QUICK method. Task based method gave a better effect than peer tutoring with QUICK method because it was supported that the teacher explored the topic of the reading passages with the creative tasks. According to Jane Willis (1996), it is of great importance for the learners to rely on the model of the tasks which was modified by the teacher creatively. And the teacher gave the tasks which required the students to emphasize on meaning and to attain the objective of the reading achievement. The writer noticed the treatments and found that task-based had scaffolded the students’ performance in affective and cognitive (Ellis, 2006).  QUICK METHOD VS. TASK BASED METHOD ON READING 29        The writer also discussed why the students in peer tutoring with QUICK method group showed less progress in students’ reading achievement. The result of independent samples t-test affirmed that the mean difference of peer tutoring with QUICK method was -2.75. The writer put some reasons why students in peer tutoring with QUICK method group showed less progress. The first main reason was the teacher just knew the peer tutoring with QUICK method from the writer. This made the teacher did not master the application of peer tutoring with QUICK method well. Besides, peer tutoring with QUICK method is a new method for the teacher, the implementation of this study was not enough for students to improve their reading achievement in peer tutoring with QUICK method. And the third reason is there was a possibility for not every tutor understood the context or the information of the reading text well while the teacher only had limited time to give the tutor small course before the reading class began. Conclusion The objective of this study was to compare the difference between peer tutoring with QUICK method and task based method on students’ reading comprehension achievement. This study showed that task based method gave the eleven graders improvement in reading comprehension achievement. Indeed peer tutoring with QUICK method is quite effective to give the students to scaffold their reading comprehension. The peer tutoring with QUICK method was able to give the experimental students to be critical in reading and more critical in thinking (Paul & Elder, 2006). The finding of the independent t-test presented that the alternative hypothesis was -2.75 < .05 and this value showed a negative relationship between peer tutoring with QUICK method and task based method. The findings proved that task based method gave better effects than peer tutoring with QUICK method. Based on the findings of independent samples t-test, the reason of peer tutoring with QUICK method showed less progress than task based method; it was because the peer tutoring with QUICK method was conducted for the first time. The reason why task based method showed better effects on students’ reading achieve- ment is because the creative tasks developed the students’ attention and the students’ language development. Through creative tasks, students are supported to scaffold their cognitive and their affective competences since the students focus on the teacher’s instructions. © Sri Indrawati Peer Tutoring with QUICK Method vs. Task Based Method on Reading Comprehension Achievement Suggested reference format for the article: Sri Indrawati started her career in teaching English for high school in 2001. She loves teaching. In 2004, she was nominated and became the winner of the Instructional Media Competition conducted by Microsoft Indonesia. In 2012, she took her master degree and graduated in 2016. Now she teaches English for senior high school in Petra 3. 30                                               QUICK METHOD VS. TASK BASED METHOD ON READING        References Armbuster, B., Anderson, T., Armstrong, J., Wise, M., & Janisch, C. L. (1991). Reading and Questioning in Content Area Lessons. Retrieved from www.jlr.sagepub.com Berg, R. G. (2014, September 16). Association Tests: Two Variables. Retrieved from SPSS Tutorials: http://www.spss-tutorials.com/ spss- independent-samples-t-test/ Berman, H. (2016). Hypothesis Test: Difference Between Means. Retrieved from Stat Trek: http://stattrek.com/m/hypothesis- test/difference-in-means.aspx Casper, M., Catton, J., & Westfall, S. (1998, October 2). Comprehension: Theories and Strategies. Retrieved October 2, 1998, from Dominican University of California: http://www.dominician.edu Chard, D. (2008). What is Reading Compre- hension and Why is it Important? Building Community of Reading Expert, 1-12. Chia, T. H. (2007). A Cooperative Task Based Learning Approach To Motivating Low Achieving Readers of English in Taiwanese University. Durham University. Cooper, T., Pittman, A., & Womack, S. (2014). Using Reliability, Validity, and Item Analysis to Evaluate a Teacher- Developed Test in International Business. Evaluation and Testing Research Article, 1-11. Cummins, J. (2008). Reading Instruction and Reading Achievement Among EL Students. Retrieved from assest_mgr/current Duke, N. K., & Pearson, P. D. (2002). Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension. PBS Teacherline. Ellis, R. (2006, September). The Methodology of Task Based Teaching. The Asian EFL Journal Quarterly, 8(3), 79-99. Heaton, J. B. (1988). Writing English Language Tests. London: Longman. Horn, R. A. (2016, May 18). Understanding the Independent Sample T-test. Retrieved from Introduction to Statistics: http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/rh232/courses/E PS525/Handouts/Understanding Independent Test.pdf Human Resources and Social Development. (2003). Reading the Future: A Portrait of Literacy in Canada. Retrieved from Highlights from the Canada Report: http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca Jing, W., & MingJun, L. (2013). Studies in Second Language Acquisition: Task Based Approach in Chinese EFL Teaching. Retrieved from www.conference.pixel-online.net Kurland, D. J. (2000). Critical Reading vs Critical Thinking. Retrieved from www.criticalreading.com: www.criticalreading.com Lague, K. M., & Wilson, K. (2011, March). Peer Tutors Improve Reading Comprehension. Education Digest, 56- 58. Retrieved from Kappa Delta Pi Record: www.eddigest.com Lane, D. M. (2016). Difference Between Two Means (Independent Groups). (Rice University) Retrieved from Online Statistics Education: An Interactive Multimedia Course of Study: http://onlinestatbook.com/2/tests_of_m eans/difference_means.html QUICK METHOD VS. TASK BASED METHOD ON READING 31        McMillan, J. H. (2008). Educational Research: Fundamentals for the Consumers. Virginia: Pearson Education,Inc. Mueller, D. (1992). An Interactive Guide to Educational Research. Allyn and Bacon. Ovwigho, B. (2013, December). Empirical Demonstration of Techniques for Computing the Discrimination Power of a Dichotomous Item Response Test. IOSR Journal of Research and Met, 3(2), 12-17. Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2006). Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools. Retrieved from www.criticalthinking.org Sabri, S. (2013, Dec). Item Analysis of Students Comprehensive Test for Research in Teaching Beginner String Ensemble Using Model Based Teaching Among Music Students in Public University. International Journal of Education and Research, 1, 6. Scruggs, T., Mastropieri, M., & Berkeley, S. (2010, December 9). Peer Tutoring Strategies. Retrieved from education.com: http://www.education.com/article/peer- tutoring/ Tse, Y. C. (2014, September 16). Child Mentor's Perception on Developing in Primary School Peer Mentoring Programme of Underprivileged Context. The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Education. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong ( Pokfulam, Hong Kong). Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10722/202334 Walker, M. (2011). Task-Based Language Teaching: A Classroom Framework. Research into Practice Conference, 1- 13. Willis, J. (1996). A Framework for Task- Based Learning. London: Longman.