TEACHER’S STRATEGIES IN OVERCOMING STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN READING COMPREHENSION OF NARRATIVE TEXTS.

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TEACHER

’

S

STRATEGIES IN OVERCOMING STUDENTS’

DIFFICULTIES IN READING COMPREHENSION OF

NARRATIVE TEXTS

(A Case Study at a Boarding School in Bandung Regency)

A Research Paper

Submitted to English Education Department, Faculty of Language and Literature Education, Indonesia University of Education as a partial

fulfillment for the requirement of Sarjana Pendidikan degree

Yulia Vera Wati

(0807303)

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE EDUCATION

INDONESIA UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION

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ABSTRACT

The research entitled Teacher’s Strategies in Overcoming Students’ Difficulties’ in Reading Comprehension of Narrative Texts is a case study research conducted at the eighth grade of a boarding school in Bandung Regency.

This research aims to find out what difficulties faced by the students in reading

comprehension of narrative text and what strategies used by the teacher to

overcome those difficulties. The research was conducted in a class which

consisted of 20 participants and 15 of them were taken as the samples. The data in

this study were obtained from task-giving, interview and observation. The

findings revealed that the students faced some difficulties in reading

comprehension of narrative texts; limited vocabulary knowledge, problems with

processing information, and problems in recalling information after reading. To

overcome those difficulties, the teacher used some strategies; repeat the word,

describe and support with visual, connected words to students’ lives. Based on

this research, it is suggested that those teacher’s strategies can be used at school to

improve students’ reading comprehension.

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents the introductory section of the study. It covers

background of the study, research questions, aims of the study, scope of the study,

significance of the study, research methodology, clarification of terms, and

organization of the paper.

1.1. Background of the Study

Reading, as one of four language skills that should be mastered by the

students, is the most stable and durable of foreign language modalities (Barnhart,

1991:259). Reading is also a gateway to get information and knowledge.

Furthermore, it provides opportunities for all students to think, write, or discuss

what they have already read. “With good reading skills, students will make great progress and attain great development in all academic areas” (Anderson, 1999:21).

The ultimate goal of teaching reading is comprehension. It means that the

students need to have the ability to understand the text. Furthermore, based on the

National Curriculum (2013), students of junior high school are expected to be able

to comprehend texts and develop their ability both oral and written to achieve

informational level which they are capable of accessing language ability in daily

and academic context.

There are five text types which are taught in the Junior High School, one

of which is Narrative Text. It is a text that tells a written story in order to gain

readers’ interest by entertaining them. It is supported by Anderson & Anderson

(2003:8) who states that narrative is a piece of text which tells a story and, in

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Based on the writer’s teaching experience, most of the students face

difficulties in learning reading, especially in learning narrative text. It is difficult

for them to find both the main ideas and the supporting ideas in a text or

paragraph. Likewise, they are quite unfamiliar with synonym in the text. Most of

the students think that learning to read is simply reading, but actually reading in

this context is more than just to read a paragraph or texts and it involves

understanding or comprehending the meaning of the text.

The most fundamental problem found in most Indonesian school is

mastering vocabulary. Most of the students easily forget the word meaning since

they do not use English as a routine. And also there are only few activities that can

support and help the students establish their vocabulary. Furthermore, the students

have been very much thinking that learning to read English text is a distressing

task. The students do not seem to understand what they read. Their lack of

exposure in acquiring English words and grammars made them were not ready

enough to deal with text genres, especially narrative. .

To solve the problem, teachers’ strategy plays a very important role in

helping students to overcome the students’ reading difficulties. The teacher needs

to find the right technique to make the students understand a text such as the

ability to recognize and infer meanings of unfamiliar words, the ability to

understand the text structure, and the ability to recognize relations of meanings

through the use of cohesive devices.

There have been a number of research projects concerning on reading

difficulties. One of them was a case study conducted by Prahara (2010) to find out

students’ difficulties in answering multiple-choice questions in narrative text. This study focuses on the difficulties faced by the students in the National Exam. It is

found that the students’ difficulty is their inability to access the content in a text

and the most challenging type of task in the worksheet is questions about word

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Previous research as mentioned above was investigated students’ difficulties

in answering multiple choice question, however, there is no strategy offered by

the teacher to help them. To enrich the reference about the methodology in

teaching reading, the present research focuses on teacher’s strategy in overcoming students’ reading difficulties. Thus, the aims of this research are both to see what

difficulties faced by the students in reading comprehension of narrative text and to

find out what kind of strategies used by the teacher to overcome the difficulties.

Narrative text is chosen because, as stated before, it is a text type which the

Indonesian junior high school students have to learn. Moreover, narrative text is

used most commonly to describe text types (Kent, 1984).

1.2. Research Questions

This study is conducted to answer these following questions:

1. What are the difficulties faced by the students in reading comprehension of

narrative texts?

2. What are the strategies used by the teachers in overcoming students’

difficulties in reading comprehension of narrative texts?

1.3. Aims of the Study

According to the research questions, the study is aimed:

1. To investigate the students’ difficulties in reading comprehension of

narrative texts.

2. To investigate the teachers’ strategies in overcoming students’ difficulties

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1.4. Scope of the Study

This study focuses on the difficulties faced by the students in reading

comprehension of narrative texts and the strategies used by the teacher in

overcoming those difficulties in a boarding school in Bandung Regency.

1.5. Significance of the Study

This study is significant from two aspects. Theoretically, this study could

be used as a reference for research on reading skill, especially in comprehending

English texts. Practically, this study is expected to give information about

students’ difficulties in reading and strategies used by the teacher to overcome the

difficulties. This result of the study is useful for both students and teachers.

Students could be more careful and they do not make the same mistake.

Meanwhile, teachers can select and determine which strategies are helpful and

relevant for their students’ needs.

1.6. Research Methodology

This study was located in qualitative approach. Qualitative is the

collection, analysis, and interpretation of comprehensive narrative and visual data

in order to gain insights into a particular phenomenon of interest (Gay, 2006:399).

Case study is the design which is chosen. According to Gillham (2000:1), case

study is one which investigates to answer specific research questions and which

seeks a range of different kinds of evidence to get the best possible answers to the

research questions.

In this study, the data were collected through task-giving, interviews, and

observation. The task-giving and students’ interview is given to find out students’

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observation are used to find out teacher’s strategies to overcome those difficulties.

The participants of the study are an English teacher and fifteen students of eight

grades in a Boarding School in Bandung Regency.

The collected data were then analyzed in some steps. The first step was to

check the students’ task giving. The second step was to analyze the transcription of students and teacher’s interview. The last step was to analyze the field notes of

observation. The interview and observation was analyzed using descriptive

analysis

1.7. Clarification of Terms

In order to avoid misinterpretation in understanding this writing, some

terms are clarified as follows:

1. Teachers’ strategies: an effort, initiative or plan from the teacher to

achieve expected learning objectives by using skilful way (Mintzberg,

1994).

2. Overcoming: find the answer or way to problems and difficulties (Oxford

Advance Learners’ Dictionary, 2003). What is meant by overcoming in this study is how the teachers find the ways to help their students to solve

their reading difficulties they encounter.

3. Difficulties: a thing or situation that causes problems (Oxford Advance

Learners’ Dictionary, 2003)

4. Reading comprehension: the ability to understand information in a text and

interpret it appropriately (Grabe and Stoller, 2002:17)

5. Narrative text: a piece of writing which has purpose to entertain. It deals

with problematic events that lead to crisis and turning point (Gerrot &

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1.8. Organization of the Paper

This paper will be presented into five chapters. The chapters will be

divided into subtopics to elaborate the issue given as follows:

Chapter I is an introduction. It presents the background of the study,

research questions, aims of the study, scope of the study, significance of the study,

research methodology, clarification of terms, and organization of the paper.

Chapter II provides the theoretical frameworks which are relevant to this

study including reading, reading comprehension, teacher’s strategies, and

narrative text.

Chapter III contains the methodology used for the study to answer the

problems which is included the design of the study and how the data were

collected and analyzed.

Chapter IV is findings and discussion which reports the result of the study.

The result will explain to answer of the research questions.

Chapter V is conclusion and suggestion. It shows some conclusions of the

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CHAPTER III

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This chapter presents the methodological aspects of the study. It covers

research design, research site, participant, data collection, and data analysis.

3.1. Research Design

The research design of this study is qualitative design and case study is

used in this research. According to Richards (2003:20), case study is a design

which focuses on a particular unit or set of units – institutions, programs, events,

etc – and the aim is providing a detailed description of the units. In addition,

Nisbet and Walt’s (1984, cited in Cohen et al., 2005:184) point out that case study: (1) can be done by a single researcher without needing a full team; (2) is

strong on reality; (3) gives insight into similar situations; (4) catches specific

elements and unexpected events; and (5) has results which are easily understood

by the reader and immediately intelligible as they speak for themselves.

This study is categorized as case study because of several reasons. First, it

is conducted in a small scale for a single case (Stake, 1985 as cited in Emilia,

2008), and it is similar with this study focusing on a small scale, namely one

English teacher and fifteen eight grader students in a Boarding School in Bandung

and concerning with students’ reading comprehension considered as a single case.

Second, case study investigates phenomenon within its real context (Yin, 2003)

and this study also investigates the teachers’ strategies to overcome students’

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3.2. Research Site

The place where this study was conducted is a boarding school in Bandung

Regency. It is dedicated for elementary up to senior high school students. The

school has been chosen as the site of the research because the school provides the

necessary data that the researcher needs.

3.3. Participants

The participants involved in this study were an English teacher and a class

consisted of 20 students of second grades in Junior High School. From the

participants, 15 students were taken as the sample and they represented the three

categories of low, middle, and high achiever. The students have been chosen as

the participants because they have learned narrative text.

3.4. Data Collection

The data were collected through task giving, interview, and observation.

From the task giving, the data were in form of students’ answer sheet. Meanwhile,

from the interview the data were in form of transcription. Then data were

crosschecked with observation. Each technique of the data collection is described

thoroughly below.

3.4.1 Task Giving

The students were given 20 questions about narrative text in form of

multiple-choice question to be answered. A set of question titled Soal-soal

Narrative Text taken from http://www.belajarbahasainggris.web.id then was

utilized. The task was given twice. The first task was given without any treatment

to get information about students’ difficulties from answering the questions. And

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how to answer each type of questions. The second task is aimed to find out

academic year 2010-2011 published by Indonesia Department of National

Education. Students’ reading comprehension was tested through seven indicators,

which were: identifying main idea (IMI), identifying detailed information (IDI),

identifying implied information (III), identifying word reference (IWR),

identifying word meaning (IWM), arranging jumbled sentences (AJS), and

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After giving those tasks to the students, the writer noticed that there were

five easy numbers, 10 moderate numbers, and five hard numbers of questions. The

data of their TDR were served as follows:

Table 3.1 Task Difficulty Rate

No TDR Numbers Percentage

1 Easy 5 25%

2 Moderate 10 50%

3 Hard 5 25%

We can see from the table above showing that 25% of the question number

(1,2,7,8, and 12) was considered to be easy. Then about 50% of question number

(3,4,9,13,14,16,17,18,19, and 20) was considered to be moderate. Meanwhile,

25% of question number (5,6,10,11, and 15) was considered to be hard. Having

seen the data, the writer believed that the TDR for the task was quite proportional.

It almost went along with Hasan and Zainul (2001).

3.4.2 Interview

Another method of collecting data in this study is interview with the

participants. Hancock and Algozzine (2006:39) mention that interviews are

frequently used in case study research. Interview is a method to get specific

information which is taken from direct interaction between interviewer and

interviewee (Cohen and Manion, 1994:271). Interview is needed to collect

information which was not covered in task giving.

The interview used in this study was open interview where the interviewer

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teacher’s interview. In students’ interview, group interview was chosen because it

the conversation communicative and natural. Audio-taping is required in this

study to avoid losing important information provided by the participants, as

suggested by Creswell (2007:134).

These are the following questions of the interview:

Questions for student:

1. Menurut kamu bagaimana soal-soal yang telah dikerjakan? Mudah atau

sulit?

ketika mengerjakan soal. Bagaimana tanggapan anda mengenai hal

tersebut?

(From the students’ task result and interview, it is found that there were

some difficulties faced by your students when they answered the

questions. What do you think about that?)

2. Menurut anda, apakah ada kesulitan lain yang membuat mereka tidak bisa

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(In your opinion, are there another difficulties which made them fail to

answer the question correctly?)

3. Bagaimana cara anda membantu mereka menghadapi kesulitan tersebut?

(How did you help them to overcome those difficulties?)

3.4.3 Observation

Observation is an instrument of collecting data that can be used to obtain a

comprehensive picture of situation (Ary, 2010:47). Thus, in order to crosscheck

the strategy which is used by the teacher in overcoming students’ difficulties in

answering each type of questions and to determine whether or not that strategies

effectively, the study employed observation. The observation was equipped by

field notes to crosscheck the data from the interview before.

3.5 Data Analysis

As the data have been conducted, the next step to do is to analyze the data.

Bogdan (1975 cited in Sugiyono, 2009:334) states that data analysis is a process

of systematically searching and arranging the interview transcripts, notes, and

other materials accumulated to increase the understanding of them.

Analyzing qualitative data requires understanding how to make sense of

text and images in order to form answers to our research questions. In this study,

the writer applied six steps involved in analyzing and interpreting qualitative data

suggested by Creswell (2008), they are:

1. Preparing and Organizing Data

The first thing to do was to check students’ task and make a list of their score.

Then, made transcription of interviews (students and teacher’s interview) to make

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2. Exploring and Coding the Database

After organizing the data from task giving, interview, and observation, the

process continued to explore the whole data to find the parts related to study in

order to answer the research questions. Then, the data was coded as the process of

segmenting and labeling text to form descriptions and broad themes in the data.

3. Describing Findings and Forming Themes

The result of coding was continued by forming themes. Themes (also called

categories) are similar codes aggregated together to form a major idea in the

database. It was done by examining codes which participants discuss frequently,

difficulties in reading and teacher’s strategies, or the writer might expect to find

when studying the topic.

4. Representing and Reporting Findings

After forming themes, the findings were represented and reporting. The report

was presented in descriptive analysis, a primary form for representing and

reporting findings in a qualitative research.

5. Interpreting the Meaning of the Findings

Interpretation involves making sense of the data, or the “lesson learned” as

described by Creswell (2008). Interpretation in this study means that the writer

stepped back and form some larger meaning about the phenomena based on her

personal views.

6. Validating the Accuracy of the Findings

After being interpreted, the findings were validated. Validating finding here

means that the writer determined the accuracy or credibility of the findings

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7. Data Reduction

Data reduction means reducing the non-related data for answering the

research questions. Data reduction helped to focus on the aim of the research.

8. Data Display

Data display means taking the reduced data and displaying it in an organized,

compressed way so that conclusion can be more easily drawn. Since this study

used qualitative design, data displayed in descriptive sentence and tables.

9. Conclusion; Drawing or Verification

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CHAPTER V

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

This chapter presents findings from data analysis of students’ task transcription. These data were processed to investigate the rank of difficulties in

reading skill from the most frequent up to the rarest one.

5.1 Conclusions

This study has investigated the strategies used by the teacher to overcome students’ difficulties in reading comprehension of narrative text. Based on the data obtained from task-giving, interviews, and observation, this study formed two

conclusions related to the two questions: (1) What are the difficulties faced by the

students in reading comprehension of narrative text?; and (2) What are the

strategies used by the teachers in overcoming those difficulties? The conclusions

are stated as follow:

Firstly, there were some difficulties faced by the students in reading

comprehension of narrative text. The result was obtained through task score and

interview. (1) limited vocabulary knowledge; (2) problems with processing

information; and (3) problems in recalling information after reading. Furthermore, the lack of reading comprehension also happens because of the students’ limited knowledge in constructing main idea from specific details in the text, using hints

to draw a good conclusion, understanding pronouns, recognizing past form of

verb, and comprehending generic structures of a text. Also, the most challenging

type of task in the worksheet is questions about word meaning. This research

strengthens the fact that reading failure in Junior High School level is started from

their inability to access content at word level. It can be concluded that vocabulary

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Second, the various strategies used by the teacher to help the students to

overcome those difficulties were obtained through interview and observation.

They showed that the teacher served several ways to help students in mastering

vocabulary. Among others are: repeating words in varied context, describing

words, supporting words with visual, connecting words to students’ lives,

extending words with anecdotes, making associations, comparing and contrasting,

questioning, charting characteristics, rephrasing sentence, analyzing structure,

providing tactile examples, giving examples of correct and incorrect usage.

Moreover, to overcome the students’ difficulties in each type of question, terms of teacher’s strategies to overcome students’ difficulties in reading comprehension of narrative text.

Firstly, since this study concerns on student’s reading skill only, it is

suggested for further researcher to conduct a study with other language skills

(listening, speaking, and writing).

Secondly, for the teacher who wants to improve students’ reading comprehension, it is recommended to use those strategies in the classroom. It aims

to make them accustomed to reading and answering those types of question. So,

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