What I KNOW WANT to learn LEARNED
4. The Contribution of KWL (Know – Want – Learned) Strategy and Students’ Reading Attitude on Students’ Reading Speed
Reading becomes an important skill for students. In order to enhance their knowledge, it can influence their successfulness in learning process because many references are printed in English. Furthermore, the successfulness of teaching reading is really affected by the quality of the process itself, and strategy is an important component in education and instruction process. Westwood (2008:4) believes strategy as a most powerful way to solve students’ difficulties to read, write, and spell. In addition, a good teaching strategy can motivate students to learn and make them focus in the process of learning (Wang, 2007:2). One of an effective reading strategy is Know-Want-Learned (KWL) strategy.
Based on some studies and theories that have been proposed by some experts, it is assumed that Know-Want-Learned (KWL) strategy can give better effect on students’ reading speed. As in teaching and learning process through KWL strategy, the teacher will act as facilitator and let the students engage actively in reading activity. It also helps the students to get used to read on purpose. While, in Three-Phase strategy, the teacher tend to have a bigger role than the students in reading activity. Moreover, the students also cannot develop their own purpose and interest on reading material maximally since they only have to answer the given questions. So, theoretically the result of students reading speed through KWL strategy will be better than Three-Phase strategy.
Nunan (2003:79) suggests ACTIVE technique in classroom reading activity. ACTIVE stands for Activate prior knowledge, Cultivate vocabulary,
Evaluate progress. KWL strategy can cover those six components in reading activity. Through KWL, the students are led to enhance their comprehension and reading rate by activating their prior knowledge and introducing vocabularies in the beginning of the activity, verify their reading strategy on while reading activity and finally evaluate their own progress of understanding their reading at the end of activity.
As a reading strategy, KWL helps teachers engage students from the beginning of reading lesson by activating prior knowledge. KWL also helps teachers keep students interested as they think about what they want to know and what they have learned (Sasson, 2008). Accessing prior knowledge and engaging students’ interest before beginning a reading activity can improve students’ ability to make associations, enhance understanding, and increase comprehension (Fengjuan, 2010:79). In addition, the strategies that should be taught to improve learners’ reading comprehension and motivation are comprehension monitoring (metacognition), recognizing store structure, using graphic and semantic organizers, question answering, question generation, summarization (Lehr and Osborn, 2005:18-21).
Thus, developing students’ positive reading attitude is one of the important aspects for teaching reading skill on High School students. Since, most of the teacher overlooked this problem, most the students have negative attitude toward English reading. So, if the teacher want to enhance the students’ positive reading attitude, actually they also will work on improving the students’ reading skill as well. Because, the students who have positive attitude toward reading will tend to
enjoy and eager to do reading activity. Since, reading skill will not only use for English, but also can be applied for another subject or another needs in their live.
So, enhance the students’ positive reading attitude is the one thing that should be considered by the Language teacher, especially English teacher.
In addition, according to Harjasujana, (1997:67) attitude is one of the factors that influence students’ reading speed effectiveness. So, students’
intelligence is not the only factors that determine their reading speed effectiveness. Their language competence, motivation and attitude also take a role here. So, whenever the students have the same text which is readable for them, and they also have the same supported reading environment at school, the matter will only on their internal factors. In line with these, the researcher also will relate this research with the students’ reading attitude.
Theoretically, the students who learn through KWL strategy would be more active and get better reading skill than those who are taught by using Three- Phase strategy. But, the students reading attitude will also influence their reading speed progress. The students who have positive or high reading attitude will adapt to the new teaching strategy better. While, the students who have negative or low reading attitude will be the same even though they are given any new teaching strategy. In short, there will be interaction between teaching strategies (KWL strategy and Three Phase strategy) and students’ reading attitude (high reading attitude and low reading attitude) toward students’ reading speed.
Furthermore, the influence of a certain strategy will affect the students’
attitude toward English reading. In line with that point, reading attitude is also one
of the factors that influence the effectiveness of students’ reading speed.
Theoretically, positive attitude which is combined with sufficient teaching strategy and lot of practice will improve students’ reading speed. So, the strategy used in teaching reading and students’ reading attitude will influence the students’
reading speed. It is also said that the students’ reading attitude will influence the students’ interest and achievement in reading activity. The students who have high or more positive reading attitude will tend to be more eager to read rather than those who have low or negative reading attitude. So, later the students reading attitude would also influence the students’ reading speed skill.
Reading attitude is regarded as one of the factor that influences the effectiveness of students’ reading speed. So, even though the strategy that is used is the same, it may bring different effect with students with different reading attitude. Theoretically, the students who have low or negative reading attitude will tend to be less motivated to read even though they are given any kind of teaching strategy. So, teaching strategy will not give much influence toward students who have low reading attitude on their reading speed.