Improving Reading Comprehension Through Think-Pair-Share ( TPS ) Technique Students of STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang

The objectives of this study were to find out : (1) the significant improvement on the third semester students’ reading comprehension before and after being taught using Think-Pair-Share technique at STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang, South Sumatera, Indonesia; and (2) the significant difference on students’ reading comprehension between the students who were taught by using Think-Pair-Share technique and those who were not. The population of this study was all the third semester students of STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang which consist of 56 students in academic year 2018/2019. The sample of this study was taken by using total sampling. Thus, the total number of the sample was 56 students. The sample was the third semester students at D.III Nursing Study Program (experimental group) which consist of 28 students and the third semester students at S1 Nursing Study Program (control group) which consist of 28 students. The test was given twice to both experimental and control group. True experimental design was used to analyzed the data. To verify the hypotheses, the data used only posttest design to analyzed by using paired sample t-test and independent sample t-test was 0.005 which was lower than 0.05.The result of this study showed that Reading Comprehension by using Think-Pair-Share technique gave significant improvement on the students’ reading comprehension and gave significant difference between students’ who were taught by Think-Pair-Share technique and those who were not.


INTRODUCTION
English as a foreign language is one of the most important subjects in most schools.Nowadays, English teaching in Indonesia is based on the genre the type of test.It has been begun since Competence-Based Curriculum was applied in 2004, then continued to School-Based Curriculum in 2006 and now 2013 Curriculum.The materials are delivered to students in contexts English is a global international language since it is communicated in all aspects of life (Putra & Marzulina, 2015).In the modern world, reading is one of the most important skills to acquire knowledge.Most of sciences have been spread through electronic or printed media, such as: TV, internet, books, and journals.According to Sharon (in Abdillah, 2003, p.1-2), 70%-95% of teaching and learning activities in the classroom depends on written texts like textbook.This means that learners should be good readers in order to comprehend what they read from text.In relation with teaching English as foreign language (TEFL), English teacher should motivate their students to read English text using appropriate strategies in teaching reading in order that the learners can comprehend what they read in the target language.The appropriate strategies in teaching reading comprehension, therefore, should be implemented by the English teachers in learning activities especially for the EFL learners, because applying good strategies in teaching and learning process may improve students' reading comprehension achievement.Reading is an important skill and a key success for a student to learn.It is one of the four main skills of language learning.It is a process of getting comprehension of written text.It is a complex process of decoding symbols which purposes to gain understanding.Through reading a students can increase vocabulary, improve memory and enhance knowledge.Since, it gives information about everything such as ideas, values and data which could be important to support their study.The success and failure of a student depends on his or her reading habit or on how many written texts students read.According to Richard (2002) there are many reasons for students reading of a second or foreign language: they went to able to read for information and pleasure, for career, and for their study purposes.That is why reading as a key for student's success and a fundamental skill for learning.To develop their academic ability students should read a lot.Academic activities such as studying, writing, discussion, and presentation need reading.Tasks, assignment, exercises, reports and tests can be completed by reading written texts such as notes, text books, journals, scientific reports etc.According to Gebhard (2000) reading includes discovering meaning in print and script, within a social context, through bottom-up and top-down processing and the use of strategies and skills.Snow (2002) states that reading activity is done for several purposes such as completing assignment, recording important information, increasing knowledge and for having pleasure.Through reading a lot students can solve their academic problem and it should be their routine daily activity.Beside reading a lot, students should also have an interest in reading.
According to Fuerstein (1995), there are two approaches in teaching reading comprehension, that is, traditional and current approaches.Traditional approach sees the product in which the students are expected to understand a text and have the ability to answer the question provided by a text.In other words, this approach focuses on the students' performance after reading.In contrast to the traditional approach, the current approach of teaching reading emphasize the process of reading than the product.This means that the process is viewed as an interactive between the reader and text.In other words, current strategies focus on what the reader actually does while reading.
Reading plays an important role to help people develop their knowledge and broaden their horizon (Djiwandono,1996).Some researchers state that reading literature was essential to learning to write because reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a writing (Gocsik, 2004).Reading is similar to driving in that the brain, from processing pages of text, develops a variety of strategies and connection that facilitate efficient comprehension (Zwiers, 2004).In reading, comprehension is an important part.
English teacher in teaching and learning process should apply good techniques to makes students realize the pleasure of reading which can increase students' reading comprehension Nowadays, people, particularly the students should like to read something because it can increase their knowledge and they seek information.
Teacher must understand how to teach strategies and deliver content to English language learners in strategic ways that make the concept comprehensible, there are many reading strategies that can help students improve their reading comprehension achievement, such as think-pair-share (TPS).Using thinkpair-share strategy one of the efforts to improve reading comprehension.It is learrner-centered approach that emphasizes on all students' success, so that not only high-achieving students succeed but also average and lowachieving students.
Olsen and Kagan, as cited in Richards and Rodgers (2001) acknowledge: cooperative learning is group learning activity organized so that learning is dependent on the socially structured exchange of information between learners in groups and in which each learner is held accountable for his/ her own leaning and is motivated to increase the learning of others.Learning model think-pair-share a learning model that provides an opportunity for groups to share results and information according to this structure proceeds as follows: (1) teacher poses a question(usually a low consensus question), (2) Students think of a response, (3) Students use interview procedure to share the answer.
Based on the observation, thinkpair-share (TPS) is not widely applied at the STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang.Therefore, it seems to the writer that English teaching learning STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang should be modified from traditional to more current ways.Based on the observation the writer conducted most of the thirs semester students of STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang are still poor in reading comprehension.The writer assumes that the weaknesses in reading comprehension may be caused by the method of TEFL, particularly the technique in teaching reading used at the study program.The traditional technique used at the study program are : (1) the teacher asks directly their students to read their reading materials, (2) the teacher sometimes reads the text orally, (3) the teacher asks the students whether they found some difficult words in the reading text, (4) the teacher asks the students one by one to read the reading text loudly paragraph by paragraph and translate it into Bahasa Indonesia, (5) the teacher explains the function of grammar that is found in some sentence of the reading text, and (6) the teacher asks the students to answer the reading comprehension questions.It seems that the traditional English teaching strategy is not so effective to improve the students' reading comprehension.Due to the weakness of traditional technique in reading comprehension, the writer wishes to try to applying the think-pair-share strategy in teaching reading comprehension.The writer assumes that strategy will help students to improve their reading comprehension.
The objectives of this study were to find out : (1) the significant inprovement on the third semester students' reading comprehension before and after being taught using Think-Pair-Share technique at STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang, South Sumatera, Indonesia; and (2) the significant difference on students' reading comprehension between the students who were taught by using Think-Pair-Share technique and those who were not.
According to Roe and Ross (1990), reading is the ability to understand or get meaning from printed symbols.Someone's ability and understanding meaning from printed symbols should be supported by reading skill such as spelling, phonemic awareness, vocabulary and writing skills, and comprehension skills.Meanwhile, Gebhard (2000) states that reading includes discovering meaning in print and script, within a social context, through bottom-up and top-down processing and the use of strategies and skills.Moreover, Carrell (1987) mention that both bottom-uo and topdown strategies operate interactively in the process of reading.According to Everett et al (1999), the act of reading comprises two basic processes: decoding the written symbols and comprehension of the message presented by the written form.It relates to the visual process which they consider as vital component of reading process.Visual process is movement of eyes across the text.Furthermore, he mentions that when someone reads his or her eyes move across the text.It means they are progressing through in the series of fixations and saccades.Fixation occur when they eyes are stationary and saccades occur when the eyes move.Along these processes the information from the reading text or material is send through the nerve to the brain and enables the readers to extract the information which results comprehension.
According to Lapp and Flood (in Cheek at al, 1989) According to Olsen & Kagan (as cited in Richard & Rodgers, 2001), cooperative learning is group learning activity organized so that learning is dependent on the socially structured exchange of information between learners in groups and in which each learner is held accountable for his/her own but also other members in the groups.Based on the theories above, it can be concluded that in cooperative learning students are involved in small group activities formed by teacher, where each group has the same aim to tackle the problem given by the teacher, and in order to embark this purpose, everyone in each group is responsible for the success not only his/her own but also other members in group.
The think, pair, share strategy is a cooperative learning technique thatencourages individual participation and is applicable across all grade levels and class sizes.It is developed by Lyman (1985) to provide students with "food of thought" on a given topics to formulate individual opinions with their pairs and share the ideas with other students.
According to Lyman (1985) Think Pair and Share is a simple model of cooperative learning.This is a technique that gives the opportunity for students to work independently an in collaboration with others, and it advantages to invite students participation.Oktaviani (2013) also explains that think pair and share can be widely used and highly effective of group learning because it can be used productively in developing specific higher-order thinking skills.Besides, it allows students to privately formulate their thought before sharing them with others.
Steps of think pair and share according to Arends (2008) are as follows: Think.Teacher gives a question and problem which is related to materials and asks students have to think freely about the questions given, give their own ideas and students to think or talk or not.
Pair.Students form groups and look their partner of what they think.This step students give their ideas or opinion from each other.

Share.
Student pairs share their ideas with a larger group, even students present.Often, students are more comfortable presenting ideas to a group with the support of a partner.In addition, students' ideas have become more refined through this three-step process.

METHOD
This study was conducted by true experimental design,the data used only posttest design.There were two groups in this research : experimental and control group, which both of them would then be only posttest.The experimental group was given treatment bu using think-pair-share technique and the control group was given conventional technique.
In this research, the population was the third semester students in the academic year 2018/2019.The total number of the students was 56 students who were divided into two classes The sample of this study was taken by using total sampling.The instrument which was used to collect the data.In this study, the data used only posttest design.The reading comprehension test for posttest consisiting of 40 items in the form of multiple choice.The instument taken from books and internet.In order to judge whether or not a test has content validity, The validity analyzed by person correlation product moment among the items with the total score compared with table correlation.If pearson correlation product moment scores are higher than table correlation scores so the item of the questions are valid.The result show that there are 40 items were valid.For the reliability, the writer use Alpha Cronbach Using SPSS.Reliability should be at least 0.70 and preferbly higher.The reliability obtained was 0.995, it means that the instruments of the tests were reliable.
In this study, the students in both groups, experimental and control group,which both of them would then be only posttest.The experimental group was given treatment bu using think-pair-share technique and the control group was given conventional technique.The obtain data then were analyzed by using SPSS version 20.Descriptive statistic including means and standard deviation were given to support the research.The T-test was used on SPSS program to compare the data in order to determine whether there were significant means difference between experiment and control groups after the treatment.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
After teaching reading process that was done, here are the result of reading comprehension.
the description includes mean, mode, median, standar deviation and frequency distribution followed by histogram and polygon.The writer got the data from post test, which was given after the lesson finished.
Based on the group analyzed, the descriptions of the data can be be divided into two groups, they are as follows: (1) The post-test data of reading comprehension the students of the group taught by Think-Pair-Share (Post-test experiment); and The posttest data of reading comprehension the students of the group taught by Conventional (Post-test control).
The data of each group presented below: 1.The post-test data for reading comprehension students for the group taught by Think-Pair-Share (Experiment class).
Descriptive analysis of the post-test data from experiment class shows that the score was 53 up to 70.The mean is 61.42,The standar deviation is 4.78, the mode is 60, the median is 60 The frequency distribution of the post-test data of experimental class in the following table:

The result of normality and homogenity
The result of normality test in Kolmogrov-Smirnov shows the significance value of Think-Pair-Share which was 0.091.Since the significance value of Think-Pair-Share was higher than 0.05, it could be called that the distribution sample of Think-Pair-Share was normal.Then, it could also be seen that the significant value of Conventional in Kolmogorov-Smirnov was 0.008.This significant value was also higher than 0.05.It means that the distribution sample of conventional strategy was also normal.
Furthermore, the result of normality test in Shapiro-Wilk show the significant value of Think-Pair-Share strategy was 0.180.This significant value was higher than 0.05.It could be called that the distribution sample of Think-Pair-Share in Shapiro-Wilk was normal.In addition, teaching reading by using conventional has a significant value 0.010 which was also higher than 0.05.It means that the distribution sample of conventional was also normal.The result of homogenity of variance testing indicated that the significant of p-value 0.05,the significant value was 0.041.It means that the data were homogenity in variance.It could be interpreted that the data taken from Think-Pair-Share were in homogenity variance.

Students' reading comprehension improvement and difference between those who were taught using think-pair-share and conventional technique
The tes was done by using independent sample t test.Ho is rejected if t > t table, it means that there were differences.To determine whether there is a main effect for independent variable toward dependent variable, it is necesaary to check the significance value of each variable.If the value is less than 0.05, there is a significance difference for each variable and if the value is more than 0.05 there is no significance difference for each variable.From the sig.column of the table, it could be seen that the significance value was 0.005.It means that there was significance difference in students' reading comprehension between the students' taught using think-pair-share and conventional method.
The result of paired sample t-test showed that there was significant improvement between students' posttest in experimental and control group.It can be inferred that the implementation of think-pair-share technique successfully to motivate the students in learning reading comprehension and made the students interested and active inlearning english.Think-pair-share is one of the techniques that can be applied in teaching reading because Think-pairshare technique in one potential activity that gives students feeling of freedom to understand English.It could be assumed that the use of thinkpair-share technique is affective method to improve students' reading comprehension.

CONCLUSION
Based on the data analysis, it could be concluded as follows : First,The implementation of think-pair-share to teach reading at the third semester students of STIK Siti Khadijah Palembang D.III Nursing Study Program.Each meeting id divided into three stages : pre-acivities, whilstactivities, and post-activities.Preactivities is about introducing and attracting students' attention.whilstactivities : the first step was Think; students think independently about the question that has been posed and forming the ideas of their own.The second step was Pair; students were grouped in pairs to discuss their thoughts.This step allows students to articulate their ideas and to consider those of others.And the last step was Share; student pairs share their ideas with a larger group such as the whole class.The post-activities is about giving summary and closing teaching learning.Second,There was significant difference of the effects on the students' reading comprehension between those who were taught using think-pair-share and those who were taught using conventional method.To determine whether there is a main effect for independent variable toward dependent variable, it is necesaary to check the significance value of each variable.If the value is less than 0.05, there is a significance difference for each variable and if the value is more than 0.05 there was no significance difference for each variable.From the sig.column it could be seen that the significance value was 0.005.It means that there was significance difference in students' reading comprehension between the students' taught using think-pair-share and conventional method.
, there are three types of comprehension : (1) literal, (2) inferential, and (3) critical.Literal comprehension is the ability to read or understand what is stated in the text.Some literal comprehension skills are: (a) understanding concrete words, (b) identifying stated main idea, (c) recalling details, (d) remembering stated sequences of events, (e) selecting stated cause-effect relationship, (f) contrasting and comparing information, (g) identifying character traits and action, (h) interpreting abbreviations, symbols, and acronyms, (i) following written directionsto the ability to understand what is implied from the text.Several inferential comprehension skills(  Cheek, 1989)  are : (a) predicting outcomes, (b) interpreting character traits, (c) drawing conclusion, (d) making generalization, (e) perceiving relationship, (f) understanding implied cause reaction, (i) understanding the author's purpose, (j) using signal words to understand meaning, (k) examining language pattern including capitalization and punctuation, (c) perceiving bias, (d) understanding the reliability of an author, (e) differentiating facts and options, (f) separating real and unreal