TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION THROUGH COOPERATIVE LEARNING BY USING THINK – PAIR – SHARE TECHNIQUE AT SMAN 1 BANDAR SRIBHAWONO LAMPUNG TIMUR

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By

DESMA HARI YANTI

SMA curriculum states that reading was focused on comprehending certain texts. In order to get information from the text, the students should comprehend the text, and they must answer the questions related to the text. Ironically, they were lazy to read long text. Beside that, their lack of vocabulary mastery limited their comprehension. So, the teacher should be creative in choosing certain technique in teaching reading in the class. 

Cooperative Learning can encourage the students to be more responsible to their duty. Every students have crucial contribution for the success of their own groups. This responsibility makes their group working better. Five elements of Cooperative Learning can support the students’ improvement in order to finish their duty (Positive interdependency, Face-to-face interaction, Individual and group accountability, Interpersonal and small-group skills, and Group Processing).

Think – Pair – Share (TPS) technique was applied in this research in order to know the increase of students’ reading comprehension achievement. She used two classes. One class was as an experimental class (X1, used TPS technique), and one class was as a control class (X2, used Discussion, the ordinary teacher’s technique), in SMAN 1 Bandar Sribhawono, Lampung Timur. The material was focused on Narrative text. The treatment was done in two meetings, in both of classes. Instrument used in this research was objective tests which were administered in pretest and posttest. The data gained from this research were statistically analyzed by using Independent T – test through SPSS 10.0.

The result of the research showed that there was no significant difference of students’ reading comprehension achievement between those taught through Think – Pair - Share (TPS) and those taught through Discussion. The value of two tail significant was p = 0.164. The mean of the two classes decreased after the treatment. Although there was no significant increase of the students’ reading comprehension achievement in both of classes, the students’ results in the experimental class was better than in the control class. It could be seen from the difference of the students’ total decrease. The experimental class total decrease was 0,24 while the control class was 0,32.

After applying Think – Pair – Share (TPS) technique in the experimental class, there was no significant increase of the students’ reading comprehension achievement. The hypothesis test also showed that the value of two tail significant was p = 0.926. So, the H^o was accepted. It could be concluded that teaching reading through Cooperative Learning using TPS technique did not increase students’ reading comprehension achievement in this school.

Key words: reading comprehension, cooperative learning, think – pair – share.