After the researcher administered the diagnostic tests to assess students‟
comprehension, did the analysis of the results, and did a servey to find out the resons why students did not do well in reading test, she made a reading plan to improve student‟s performace in reading comprehension. The researcher designed supplementary reading materials based on the topic of Unit 7,Unit 8, Unit 9 in the new text book for grade 10th students and asked her students to do regular reading practice at home. The researcher paid much attention to students‟ reading performance in terms of factual questions, vocabulary in context questions, inference questions, reference question and overview questions.
Observation sheets were taken during the intervention with a view to getting direct feedback from students and observe the students‟progress. The reseasercher took notes on how students react to the released activities. Fortunately, the observation sheet indicates that most of the inserted reading materials in class draw the attraction of the students in her class and they played an important role in getting positive outcomes.
Thanks to the observational data, the effects of using supplementary reading materials on improving students‟ reading comprehension skills will be illustrated in terms of five main types of reading questions: factual questions, vocabulary in context questions, inference questions, reference questions and overview questions.
For example, after teaching getting started, language and reading (APPENDIX 2) of Unit 7, the author designed 4 reading passage of the same topic with different types of multiple choice questions for her students to do regular practice at home. The author collected all the 4 reading passages respectively to mark and give comment on each reading material and took note of the
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students‟result of the reading passage according to types of reading questions, which is illustrated in the following chart.
Chart 3: The result of Unit 7 a. Factual questions
Basically, each reading passage contains a lot of facts, fingues, etc, so it is important that reader scan the text to find specific information so that he/she can have better understanding of the text. Therefore, in every reading passage, the author selected some factual questions to help her students practice and improve scanning skill. For example, in Unit 7, when teaching students about cultural diversity, the researcher designed 4 passages (APPENDIX 3), of the same topic with 7 questions, including 2 factual questions in each passage. After collecting and marking the first passage, the author find out that the number of students who get the correct answer of factual questions is quite low (only 5 out of 40 students get the correct answer). After that, the researcher instructed her students to do the factual questions again and asked her students to pr actice more at home. Day by day,
5
3
6
1
3 15
10
18
9
12 25
20
25
18
21 38
30
39
32
35
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
Factual questions
Vocabulary questions
Reference questions
Inference questions
Overall questions
Types of reading questions Reading passage 1 Reading passage 2 Reading passage 3 Reading passage 4
The number of correct answers
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this activity has tremendous effect on stundent‟s ability to do factual questions.
Actually, at the end of the lesson, it is amazing that her students could do factual questions quite well ( 38 out of 40 students get the correct answer). Later on, in the next lesson, most of the students can do factual questions in the reading passage quite well, which can be inferred that students‟ scanning skill has been improved.
b.Vocabulary in context questions.
It is apparent that predicting skill is one of the most important skills of efficient readers. Predicting uses knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension as well as knowledge of the text type and purpose to make prediction about discourse structure. Next, it uses knowledge about the author to make predictions about writing, style, vocabulary and content. In fact, students‟ predicting skill was evidently improved thanks to regular reading practice. For instance, when designing reading passages of Unit 7, the researcher required her students to do 2 vocabulary questions in each passage. In reality, after checking the first reading passage, the researcher interpreted that most of her students whose language competence is low can not do vocabulary questions (only 3 out of 40 students get the correct answer), so the researcher instructed her students to guess the meaning of the words in contexts and asked her students to practice regularly at home. After checking four passages (APPENDIX 3) on the topic of cultural diversity, the researcher realized that most of her students have improved predicting skill (30 out of 40 students get the correct answer).
c. Inference questions and reference questions
Inference means making use of syntactic, logical and cultural clues to discover the meaning of unknown elements. If these are words, then word- formation and derivation will also play an important role. When dealing with a new text, it is better not to explain the difficult words to the learners. Students should be encouraged to make a guess at the meaning of the words they do not know rather than look up them in a dictionary. If they need to look at the dictionary to get the
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meaning, they should only do so after having tried to work out a solution on their own. Hence, it is very essential to develop the inference skill.
In fact, most of the students do not do this kind of questions well. For example, in Unit 7, in the first checked passage, there were only 1 out of 40 students could get the correct answer to inference questions and 6 out of 40 dtudents could get the correct answer to reference questions. However, at then end of the lesson, after doing regular reading practice, there was an increase in the number of students who get correct answer in inference questions ( 32 out of 40 students get correct answer to inference questions and 39 out of 40 students get correct answer to reference questions).
d. Overview questions
Over view questions involves critical thinking to determinine the meaning and significance of what is observed or expressed, or, concerning a given inference or argument, determine whether there is adequate justification to accept the conclusion as true. Moreover, over view questions are about summarizing the main ideas of the the reading passage. By regular checking and asking students practice reading at home, the researcher realized that regular checking and practicing reading contribute a lot to improving students critical thinking skill and summarizing skill. In fact, in unit 7, the number of students who get correct answer to the overall questions has increased from 3 students in the first passage to 35 students in the forth one.
After 8 weeks, the researcher realized that her students made much progress in reading skills named skimming, scaning, predicting, inference, critical thinking and sumarising through factual questions, inference questions, inference questions and overview questions.
To sump up, the teacher‟s observation result indicates that most of the reading materials help students improve reading comprehension by regular practice at home.