Text Mapping Technique as Effort to
Improve the Poor Students’ Reading Comprehension Skills
Arwan
Zuairi
This study is intended to
observe whether text mapping technique can help or improve the students in
comprehending the English text. In other words, in general the main objective
of this study is done in order to investigate the combined effect of technique
of teaching and the students’ level of reading comprehension skill on the
students’ achievement of English reading comprehension, especially the students
of non English department in this case the students of Economic Department.
To be more explicit, this
study is:
Considering some factors which
made the researcher impossible to apply true experimental design, in this study
Quasi-experimental design was utilized. The subjects of this study were the
students of STIE Koeswara Malang.
They were freshmen students and they were in the first semester. The choice of
the first semester students were under the following reason; (1) this study was
conducted to the subject when they were in the first semester of academic year,
(2) all of them were freshmen so that they were assumed to have relatively
equal English language background knowledge or academic capacity in general,
and (3) at last they graduated from state of private senior high schools, so
their ages were relatively the same. In addition to the design, each group was
also divided into two group. Those were high and low
skill in comprehend a reading text. As the design implies, the experimental
group received text mapping technique whereas the control group received
ordinary technique. Twelve sessions were preformed during a semester and then
post testing was administered at the end of semester.
The result of test of variant
heterogeneity (Equality of variances) showed that there were different variance
between two groups, control group and experimental group. F= 6.390 and p= 0.013
which was smaller than 0.05. It could be
justified that the groups were not homogeneous. Moreover, because the two
groups were not homogeneous, t-test for Independent sample was employed in
analyzing the difference between all experimental and control groups.
After calculating all the data
collected, it was found that mean score of the control group was 16.23, while
the mean score of experimental group 17.34. It could be inferred temporally
that after having been trained for about 12 meetings by applying text mapping
technique the experimental group performed better achievement in reading
comprehension than the score of control group. Moreover, by using t-test for
independent sample it turned out that the t significance was – 1.33 while the
figure of p was 0,189. Because the result p is greater that p.0.05 it is concluded
statistically that the different mean between all control groups and all
experimental group was not significant. As the objective of this study not only
observed the different mean between all control and all experimental groups but
also investigated and compared the mean scores between within group division,
high-skilled and low skilled readers of each group, another statistical
analysis (the so called ANCOVA) was performed as well. In this case, ANCOVA
adjusted one sub-variable either high-skilled or low skilled readers. In other
words, both of them became covariant accordingly.
From the analysis, the
research found out that F=0,541; and p=0.468 in which the figure was greater
than that for rejecting null hypothesis (p=0.05), it could be judged that the
mean score of high skilled readers between control group and experimental
groups was not significantly different. Therefore, the value of significant F
could not reject the null hypothesis. It means that the high skilled readers
who are taught by text mapping technique do not perform significantly better
achievement of reading comprehension than the high skilled readers who are
taught by non text mapping technique. Second, the result of analysis ANCOVA
with High Skilled group as Covariant. From the analysis, this study found out
that F=7.507; and p=0.010 in which the figure was smaller than that for
rejecting null hypothesis (p=0,05), it could be judged
that the mean score of low skilled readers between control group and
experimental groups was significantly different. In other words, the value of
significant F could reject the null hypothesis which said that the low skilled
readers who are taught by text mapping technique performed significantly better
achievement of reading comprehension than the low skilled readers who are
taught by non-text mapping technique. Consequently, This
study accepted the operational hypothesis which stated that the low skilled
readers who are taught by non text mapping technique. In sum, it could be
inferred that the text mapping technique was more effective to teach the poor
students in comprehending a text of reading.
Based on the finding of
this study, it is recommended that the technique of teaching reading
comprehension by text mapping be used in teaching reading comprehension in
non-English department especially for the poor readers. Finally, it is also
recommended that further study be carried out by suing better instrument,
larger population, and longer time of meeting.
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Zuairi, A. (2002, March). Text mapping technique as effort to improve the poor students’
reading comprehension skills. Paper presented at the national
conference on Autonomy,
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