314 comprehending text is not a new phenomenon. Tannen (1990: 8) has compared gender differences in language as more similar to ‘cultural’ differences. Comparing conversational goals, she argued that males have report style, aiming to communicate factual information, whereas females have a rapport style, more concerned with building and maintaining relationships. Most studies show that, on overage, females do better in school than boys.
Lehto and Anttila (2003: 136) found specific differences in listening comprehension, which, according to theses researchers, can be a good predictor of an individual’s skills in reading comprehension. Second-, fourth-, and sixth-graders listened to six passages read on a compact disk. Then, participants listened to 12 sentences related to the passages and were told to mark on their answer sheers whether each sentence was correct or incorrect. Females’
listening comprehension scores were significantly higher than boys’ scores, and the difference was comparable to those typically found for females in reading comprehension.
While doing teaching practice, the researcher also found the fact that females students are higher than boys in English language class. When, the researcher asked the students to do reading comprehension, she found that the result of students reading comprehension were different one another. It was caused since every students had their own way to interpret the meaning of the text. Furthermore, female students often did their work in reading well and felt interested in reading text, while male students were not so interested and did it perfunctorily. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the learners reading strategies that high school students currently use in order to find out what reading strategies the students need to use in reading strategies, to comprehend what they read, to develop reading skills, and to unconsciously inrease their vocabularies and syntactic knowledge.
II.Literature Review
315 Global Reading Strategies
Global reading strategies possess 13 items and are those purposeful, intenly planned techinuques by which learners are taught how to informant or manage their reading. It refers to pre reading activities such as having a purpose in mind before reading and thinking about what one already knows about the material before reading. They are: (1) Read with a purpose in mind, (2) Take notes to help in understanding the text, (3) Think about what I know to help me understand what I read, (5) Over all view of the text to see what it is about before reading Decide whether the content of the text fits the reading purpose, (6) Review the text first by noting characteristics including length and organization, (7) When reading decide what to read closely and what to ignore, (8) Use tables, figures, and pictures in the text to increase understanding, (9) Use context clues to help better understand the reading, (10) Use typographical features like bold face and italics to identify key features, (11) Critically analyze and evaluate the information, (12) Guess what the content of the text is about when reading (13) Check to see if guesses about the text are correct
Problem Solving Strategies
Problem solving strategies contains 8 item. It includes function and mannes that readers use when they meet difficulties in comprehending textual information. It refers to functions like as reading hard to understand text and adapting one’s reading rate to the difficulty level of what they are reading. They are: (1) Read slowly and carefully to make sure I understand what I am reading, (2) Try to get back on track when distracted or lose concentration, (3) Adust reading speed according to the reading material, (5) When text becomes difficult, pay closer attention to the material, (6) Stop from time to time and think about the reading, (7) Try to picture or visualize information to assist in remembering, (8) When text becomes difficult, re-read to increase understanding, (9) When reading guess the meaning of unknown words or phrases.
Support Reading Strategies
Support reading strategies comprises 9 items. English language learners need to know that there are other support materials available to them, further to the teacher and the text. It presents the use of producing outside reference materials from the text such as notes in the margins, summarizing, or simple underlining of important information. They are: (1) Take notes while reading to assit in understanding, (2) When text becomes difficult, read aloud to assist in remembering, (3) Summarizing to reflect the important information, (4) Discuss with other to check undestanding, (5) Use reference materials (dictionaries, etc), (6) Underline or circle information in the text to help me remember it, (7) Paraphrase/restate to better understanding, (8) Go back and forth in the text to find relationship among ideas, (9) Ask self questions to find answers in the text
Previous Relevant Studies
The research has found some relevants study which related to this research. A journal was from Mohammad Salehi et al in Iran on August 2014. The title of their journal is The effect of gender and genre on language learners’ reading comprehension ability. They investigated the effect of gender and genre on text comprehension. to this end, three texts from different genres were labels and signs, informal letter and newspaper. After administering the reading tests, the participants’ mean scores were computed and the results showed that altogethers females were better text comprehenders than males. The instrument of this study was reading test which chosen from Test your reading, Dean, M., 2002, Pearson Education. The result was females’
scores were not very different in different genres, generally they were better text comprehenders than males.
316 Mei-Ling Lee in 2012, Taiwan. The title of her journal was A study of selection of Reading strategies among Genders by EFL college students. The purpose of her study was aimed to probe the question whether the foreign language reading strategies ise among EFL college fresmen differ according to different genders and the differences of frequency using types of reading strategies. Results indicated that the differences between male and femal students on the types of reading strategies were significant, male students reported greater strategy use than their female counterparts regarding memory, cognitive, compensation strategies, while fewer males than females used strategies of meta-cognitive and social- affective while reading. The instrument of this study was 39-item questionnaire called
“Strategy Inventory for EFL Students’ Reading”. Based on the findings, metacognitive and cognitive strategies were most correlated with overall strategy use; these two types best predicted college EFL students’ strategic behaviors of reading. Significant gender effects were found in the use of individual strategies; females significantly employed more underlining and highlighting strategies as noticing subheadings and topic sentences of an article and tried not to translate word-for-word while reading, namely, females were employed more bottom-up strategies and were better in practicing from top to bottom and from bottom to top in their interaction with the reading passages.
Among the five types of reading behaviors, participants in either male or female students showed the use of social-affective reading strategies more frequently, followed by meta-cognitive, and memory reading strategies, with cognitive and compensation reading strategies being the least two employed. However, Females use metacognitive strategies and social/affective strategies more often than males do. It indicated that EFL learners not only knew how to interact with others or self-assurance, or go through the processes of questioning, cooperation, self-talk, and self-reinforcement, but also became aware of multiple strategies using both word analysis and contextual clues to determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Namely, implementing both top-down and bottom-up strategies to facilitate thaeir English learning.
Ahmmad Mousa AL-Dawaideh & Ibrahim Abdu Al-Saadi did their research in Jeddah.The tittle is Assessing Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategy use for students from the Faculty of Education at the University of King Abdulaziz. Their research aimed to Investigate the metacognitive reading used by students from the faculty of Education at the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. They also determined whether the strategies varied with gender, area of specialization and academic achievement variables. They use MARSI to achieve the objective of the study. The inventory consisted of 30 items distributed into 3 subscale categories, namely problem solving strategies, global-reading strategies, and support reading strategies. The sample of the study consisted of 550 randomly selected undergraduate students, comprising 269 male and 281 female participants, aged 19 to 22 years. The result demonstrated that female participants read more, and performed better academically, and these results were statistically significant. The overall strategy use explains that both male and female students more frequently use problem-solving reading strategies, the male students (n=269) had a mean of M = 3.96 and a standard deviation of SD = .475; the female students (n=281) had a mean of M = 4.25 and a standard deviation of SD = .422.
These findings consistent with the results of previous studies based on gender, that indicated female participants use strategy more frequently than the male participants. The mean difference of the problem-solving strategy approaches statistical significance in favor of the female students. The global reading strategy also approaches statistical significance in favor of the female students, whereas the mean difference in use of the supporting strategy between male and female students is not statistically significant and the mean difference of global strategy between male and female students was not statistically significant.
317 III.Research Methodology
A. Research Design
As stated in Problems of the research, this research was conducted to describe students strategies in comprehending news item text. Thus, in this research, the researcher uses descriptive qualitative research method. Ary, Jacobs, Sorensen & Razavieh (2010: 322) stated that “descriptive qualitative research method is used to obtain information about existing conditions and have widely used in educational research”. The aim of descriptive research is to describe “what exist” with respect to variables or conditions in a situation. The researcher used this method because it was appropiate to the objectives of the research which focuses on describing the differences between female and male students’ reading strategies in comprehending news item text and possible causes of the strategies used in comprehending news item text by female and male students. The result of this research emphasized more toward the data intepretation founds in the field.
B. Subjects of the Research.
The subjects of the research were students at Grade XII at SMA N 4 Pematangsiantar.
There were twelve classes of grade XII. Eight classes were science class. The researcher analyzed four classes (XII Science 4, XII Science 6, XII Science 7, XII Science 8) which consists of 30-34 students. The researcher choose 84 students randomly and divide them into 42 male and 42 female students.