Improving Students reading skill using team assisted individualization (TAI) (An action research conducted at the eight grade students of SMP 1 Jaten karanganyar in academic year 2011/2012)

Oleh :
Isyak Cahyani - X2207055 - Fak. KIP

This research is aimed at finding out: (1) Whether the implementation of TAI to the eighth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Jaten can improve the students’ reading skill; and (2) What happens to the class situation when TAI is implemented in improving student’s reading skill. The method used in this research was a collaborative action research. The research was conducted in two cycles at the VIII C grade students of SMP Negeri Jaten from January 18th to February 9th 2012. There are two kinds of data: qualitative and quantitative data. The qualitative data were collected by using observation, questionnaire, and interview. Then, the quantitative data were collected by using test. Qualitative data were analyzed by using 5 stages suggested by Burns (1999: 157- 159) as follows: assembling the data, coding the data, comparing the data, building interpretation, and reporting the outcomes. The quantitative data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics. The research findings show that the use of TAI could improve students’ reading skill and classroom situation of English class. The improvement of students’ reading skill includes: (1) The students are able to get the main idea of the text; (2) The students are able to get the explicit information from the text; (3) The students are able to guess the meaning of word (vocabulary); (4) The students are able to get implicit information of the text; (5) The students are able to determine referent of pronouns of the text. Besides, the improvement of students’ reading skill can be seen from the improvement of the mean score of pre–test, post–test 1, and post–test 2, those are 55.31, 62.71 and 80.20. The improvement of classroom situations includes: (1) The students became active in teaching learning process; they did their tasks, answered the researcher’s questions and responded researcher’s instruction, (2) The students’ behavior changed; they did a few useless activities during the lesson and focused more to do their jobs, (3) They actively participated in teaching learning process; they shared their ideas to their friends and gave opinions or questions in the class without command, (4) The students were interested in reading class with their group and encouraged to ask the researcher directly while they were facing problems, and (5) The students became more independent to solve their problems by discussing with their partners in group. TAI can be applied in reading teaching learning process. By implementing TAI, the students can improve their reading skill. The researcher hopes what the researcher has done will inspire the English teachers to conduct TAI in their classroom.