23 TEACHING READING NARRATIVE TEXT BY USING WINDOW NOTES STRATEGY TO THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SMP MUHAMMADIYAH 4 PALEMBANG ARIESCA LENNY MARZULINA UIN Raden Fatah Palembang e-mail: Ariescaququ@yahoo.co.id ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to find out whether or not there is a significant difference on the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension who were taught by using window notes strategy and those who were not at SMP Muhammadiyah 4 Palembang. The population of this study consisted of 140 eighth grade students of SMP Muhammadiyah 4 Palembang in Academic Year of 2014/2015. There were fifty eight students taken as sample. Each class consisted of twenty nine students from class VIII A as experimental group and twenty nine students from class VIII B as control group. The sample of this study was taken by using purposive sampling method. In this study, the researcher used pretest-posttest non-equivalent group design. The instrument used in collecting the data was reading comprehension test in the form of multiple choice. The test was administrated twice, as the pretest and posttest for both experimental and control group. The result of the test were analyzed by using IBM SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) Statistics 22. The result showed that “there was means significant difference from students’ posttest scores in experimental and control groups, it was found the p-output (Sig.2-tailed) was lower than 0.05 level and t-value (4.324) is higher than t-table (1.673). So, the Ho (the null hypothesis) was rejected and Ha (the alternative hypothesis) was accepted. It means that there was significant difference on students’ reading comprehension achievement taught using window notes strategy than those who were not. Keyword: Reading Comprehension Achievement, Window Notes Strategy Introduction Language is practically defined as a characteristic of the human being. It has an important role for human life because through language people can express their ideas, emotion and desires. As one of the international languages, English has been considered as the actual universal language without any doubts. According to Crystal (2003, p. 1) English is as a global language, which is widely used in various countries and in various fields. It can be at least understood almost everywhere among scholars and educated people. As the matter of facts, in TEFL, there are four language skills that should be mastered, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. One of the language skills, reading is an important skill mailto:Ariescaququ@yahoo.co.id 24 that needs to be developed in learning and teaching activities because people get many knowledge and information by reading. Medina (2012, p. 81) says that for academic purposes, reading is important because it is one of the most frequently used language skills in everyday life to get the information. Reading also has important function for the students in education field. In relation to teaching reading comprehension, some genres of the texts are usually applied by the teachers, especially for the teachers of the eighth grade of SMP in second semester and one of them is narrative text. According to Wahidi (2009, p. 7), narrative is a text focusing specific participants. Its social function is to tell stories or past events and entertain the readers. Narrative deals with problematic the events which lead to a crisis or turning point of some kind, which in turn finds a resolution. Many students have problems in comprehending the reading text, especially the narrative texts. Based on preliminary study conducted on February 8th, 2015, it was found out that the eighth grade students of SMP Muhammadiyah 4 Palembang had difficulties in learning the narrative text. Through observation and interview, the researcher find out that the students cannot find the main idea, or get the information from the narrative texts, and as well as guess the meaning easily, because they don’t know a lot of vocabularies. That is why, it tends to make them confused to complete the narrative text reading exercises. Moreover, they were not really enthusiastic in following the lesson given only some of them were active. Besides that, they had poor vocabulary, that is why, they couldn’t understand the content of the text and find the information inside the text easily. These are the reasons why the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension score is quite low. To overcome these problems, it is suggested that a teacher has to use a good and interesting method in teaching learning process. One of the methods is window notes strategy. Silver, Strong, and Perini (2007, p. 207) state that window notes strategy is the strategy in which students use a powerful note of framework that helps them deepen comprehension by thinking as they read and learn, and it is used to develop the capacity to reflect on and improve their performance. 25 Concept of Teaching In every school and educational institutions there will be a teaching and learning process which always happens as the initial part of the activity. Teaching is considered the process of explaining and transforming material that is related to the topic while the process of teaching and learning take place. According to Brown (2000. p.7), teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, setting the conditions for learning. Brown (2007, p. 8) states that teaching is showing or helping somenone to learn how to do something, giving interaction, guiding in the study of something, providing with knowledge. It is supported by Q.S. Al-Alaq verse: 4 means that God teaches human to read everything that can increase human’s science. In order they know about something that they never know before. From those definition above, it can be assumed that teaching is the process of transfer the knowledge, share the information, and guide the learner to do something between teacher and students, in order to help students understand and develop their ability in learning process. Concept of Reading Reading is one of important skills in English which needs to understand the meaning that provided in text. According to Wallace (1992, p. 5), reading is so much a part of daily life for those of us who live in literate communities that much of the time we hardly consider either the purposes or processes involved. Like other experts, Medina (2012, p. 81) states that reading is an interactive process in which the writer and the dialogue interact through a text. For academic purposes, reading is important because it is one of the most frequently used language skills in everyday life. In addition, Pang, Muaka, Benhardt, and Kamil (2003, p. 6) state that reading is about understanding written texts. It is a complex activity that involves both perception and thought. Concept of Reading Comprehension According to Klinger, Vaughn, and Boardman (2007, p. 8), reading comprehension is a multicomponent, highly complex process that involves many interactions between readers and what they bring to the text (previous knowledge, strategy use) as well as variables related to the text itself (interest in text, understanding of text types). 26 Comprehension is the process of deriving meaning from connected text (Pang et al., 2003, p. 4). They state that the reader actively engages with the text to construct the meaning. Therefore, comprehension could not be separated from reading. On the other side, Snow (2002, p. 11) states that, reading comprehension as the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language. We use the words extracting and constructing to emphasize both the importance and the insufficiency of the text as a determinant of reading comprehension. In short, reading comprehension relates to the students’ understanding about the text given by the teachers that they read and they try to analyze the texts and the meanings inside. Concept of Narrative Text According to Wahidi (2009, p. 7), narrative is a text focusing specific participants. Its social function is to tell stories or past events and entertain the readers. Narrative deals with problematic of the events which leads to a crisis or turning point of some kind, which in turn finds a resolution. Moreover, Gamble and Yates (2002, p. 20) state that narrative text relates a sequence of events. Narrative is not an aesthetic invention but the basic way in which we make sense of our experiences. On the other side, Zaida (2009, p. 82) explains that narrative consists of several parts: 1. Orientation, this part introduce characters and sets the scene (when/where); 2. Complication, in this part, the main character is faced to a problem; 3. Resolution, this part tells how the problem is resolved, for better or worse. From the explanations above, it can be assumed that a narrative paragraph is a story that is created in a constructive format that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events. Narrative is a text which contains about story and its plot consists of climax of the story (complication) then followed by the resolution. Concept of Window Notes Strategy In teaching reading, there are many strategies that can be applied by the teachers. One of them is by using window notes strategy that can help the students with a powerful note making framework that helps them deepen comprehension by thinking as they read and learn. According 27 to Silver, Strong and Perini (2007, p. 207) this strategy provides students with a powerful note making framework that helps them deepen comprehension by thinking as they read and learn, develop the capacity to reflect on and improve their performance as reader. This strategy can give easy way for students in understand text. Silver, Jackson and Moirao (2011, p. 13) state that window notes is derived from task rotation in that it applies the power and benefits of thinking in all four styles to the note making process. Meanwhile Waterman (2010, p. 109) says that this strategy may motivate students to record information from a variety of learning styles. This strategy of note making asks students to focus on the facts and concepts embedded in the information (mastery), how they feel about that information (understand), what questions they have about it (interpersonal), and what ideas come to their minds that they might draw to remember the topic (self expressive). It means that this strategy not only about how the students understand and explain their opinion into four specific areas but also this strategy asks students to use their power of thinking to express their self so that the students can combine between the opinion and their learning style that rising big ideas. From the explanation the researcher can conclude that window notes strategy is strategy used by teacher to teaches in reading comprehension in order to the learners more active act, engagement of mind. This strategy asks students what they think and let them have their own opinion. The learner can organize the text based on their think into feels, facts, questions and ideas. Teaching Procedures Using Window Notes Strategy Silver, et al., (2007, p. 211) states the using this strategy involves the following steps: a. Introduce and model window notes by showing students how you collect facts, questions, ideas, and feelings related to a particular topic or text. b. The teacher asks students to divide a blank sheet of paper into a window-shaped organizer of four quadrants. c. The teacher introduces the text or topic to be learned. Have students collect different kinds of notes and responses on their organizers as they read the text or learn about the topic. 28 d. Invite the students to share their notes with the class, and conduct a discussion on what students have learned about the content and their personal preferences as note makers. e. The teacher assigns a task that requires students to use their notes. f. If the over time, teach the students how to use the strategy independently, as a way to help them break new learning up into meaningful sets of information and as a way to help them pay attention to the inner working of their own minds. Research Method In this study, quasi-experimental method was used. Fraenkel, Wallen and Hyun (2012, p. 275) explain that quasi-experimental designs do not include the use of random assignment. In this study, one of the quasi experimental designs, the pretest-posttest nonequivalent groups design was used. Cohen, Lawrence and Keith (2007, p. 283) formulate the design as follows : Where: : Dash line indicated that the experimental and control group have not been equated by randomization. O1 : Pretest in experimental group O2 : Posttest in experimental group X : Treatment to experimental group O3 : Pretest in control group O4 : Posttest in control group This study included two groups mainly experimental group and control group. The experimental group was taught by using window notes strategy while the control group was not taught by using window notes strategy. Population and Sample The purposive sampling was used, Class VIII A and VIII B were selected as the sample of the study. Class VIII A and VIII B were chosen based on observation and interview to English Treatment : O1 X O2 Control : O3 O4 29 teacher, VIII A and VIII B have the same background knowledge and difficulties of reading ability. After the pretest, the result of class VIII B was higher than class VIII A. Therefore, class B was selected as control group and class VIII A as experimental group. The total sample of the this study is fifty-eight students out of 140 populations. Findings and Discussion Validity Test Validity refers to the appropriateness, meaningfulness, correctness, and usefulness of the inferences a researcher makes. Fraenkel, et. al. (2012, p. 147) state that validity is the most important idea to consider when preparing or selecting an instrument for use. a. Construct Validity According to Fraenkel, et. al (2012, p. 148), the construct validity refers to the nature of the psychological construct or characteristic being measured. The researcher asked her lecturers Eka Sartika, M.Pd as Validator I, Beni Wijaya, M.Pd as Validator II and Mgs. Sulaiman, M.Pd as Validator III to estimate her instruments. Based on the assessment carried out by validator II and III, the instrument can be used without revision and based on validator I it can be used with a few revision. It means that the research instrument can be applied in this research. b. Validity of each question item To find out the validity of the test question items, the researcher analyzed the items of the tests by conducting a try-out in order to find out the validity of each question items. The instruments of the test was tested to 31 students (VIII 3) of eighth grade students of SMP Nurul Iman Palembang. The result of the test was analyzed by using Pearson Correlation coeffecient formula. The result of significant score of Pearson Correlation was compared with r table (0.355), it means that the item is valid. From Pearson Correlation Formula, it was also found that there were only forty-one test items out of sixty were valid. Pearson Correlation in SPSS 22 showed that there were 19 questions were considered invalid since the score of significance are lower than 0.355. Then, 41 questions item were considered 30 valid, since the score of significance are higher than 0.355. Since there were 41 questions are considered valid, the writer just took 40 valid questions item. c. Content Validity Content validity refers to the content and format of the instrumental (Fraenkel, et. al, 2012, p. 148). In order to judge whether or not a test has content validity, a specification of the skills or structures should be made based on the curriculum and syllabus. The instrument of the test was taken from Junior High School books. There were forty questions with narrative reading text used in this study. Reliability Test To know the reliability of the test used in this study, the researcher calculated the students’ score by using Spearman-Brown Prophecy Formula found in SPSS 22 (Statistical Package for the Social Science) program. The scores of reliability are obtained from tryout analysis which is done once using the instruments test. The school where the tryout conducted is different from the school where the research study were conducted. Therefore, split-half test method is used to obtain the scores of tryout analysis. To measure the reliability test using split half method, it was found that the p-output of Guttman Split-half Coefficient is 0.734 from the score it can be stated that the reliability of reading test items is reliable since the p-output is higher than 0.70 with sample (N) is 31 students. Normality Test Normality test is used to measure whether the obtained data was normal or not. The data can be classfied into normal when the p-output is higher than 0.05 (Basrowi, 2007, p. 85). In measuring normality test, One sample Kolmogorov Smirnov is used. The normality test is used to measure students’ pretest scores in control and experimental groups, and students’ posttest scores in control and experimental groups. 31 Homogeneity Test According to Basrowi (2007, p. 106), homogeneity test is used to measure the scores obtained whether it is homogen or not. He stated that the score is categorized homogen when the p-output is higher than mean significant difference at 0.05 levels. In measuring homogeneity test, Levene Statistics in SPSS is used. The homogeneity test is used to measure students’ pretest and posttest scores in control and experimental groups. Hypothesis testing In this study, in finding out a significant difference between student’s posttest scores in control and experimental groups, the researcher used independent sample t-test through SPSS version 22. A significant difference is found whenever p-output is lower than 0.05 and t-obtain is higher than t-table (1.673). Conclusion Based on the findings and interpretation in the previous chapter, the researcher assumed that there was a significant difference on the eighth students’ reading comprehension achievement who were taught by using Window Notes strategy and those who were not at SMP Muhammadiyah 4 Palembang. This condition mean that teaching reading comprehension through window notes strategy could improve their knowledge about reading comprehension. REFERENCES Basrowi and Soenyono. (2007). 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