Improving Students’ Reading Skill by Using Think-Pair-Share (TPS)  (A Classroom Action Research at the First Grade of SMP N 8 Surakarta in the Academic Year of 2011/2012)

Sari, Riska Anastiara

This research is aimed at: (1) finding whether the use of Think-Pair-Share improves the student?s reading skill oftheFirst Grade of SMP N 8 Surakarta; and (2) describing the situation whenThink-Pair-Share is implemented in the reading class of the First Grade of SMP N 8 Surakarta. Related to the purposes of the study, the research design used in this study was action research. The subject of the study was the students of class VII B of SMP N 8 Surakarta in the academic year of 2011/2012. There were 32 students as the subject. The action research was conducted in two cycles from April to May 2012. The research data were collected by using techniques of observation, interview, field note, photographs, and test (pre-test and post-test). The research findings show that the use of TPS could improve students? reading skill and class situation of English class. The improvement of students? reading skill includes: (1) Students are able to infer meaning of the words; (2) Students are able to identify the main idea of the text; (3) Students are able to identify reference of the text; (4) Students are able to find implicit information of the text; (5) Students are able to determine the explicit information; and (6) Students are able to identify communicative purpose 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. They are 65.4, 70.78, and 77.94. The class situation also improves. The improvement of class situation includes: (1) Most of students were active and communicative during teaching and learning process. (2) The students began more enthusiastic in reading class. (3) The students did not bother their friends. TPS can be applied in teaching learning process. Hopefully, by applying TPS, the students can achieve the optimum reading skill. The researcher hopes that what the researcher had done will give the English teacher inspiration to conduct TPS in their classroom.

Abstrak

Improving Students’ Reading Skill by Using Think-Pair-Share (TPS) (A Classroom Action Research at the First Grade of SMP N 8 Surakarta in the Academic Year of 2011/2012)