CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A. Background

Language is a tool of communication. It is used to express ideas,

feeling, suggestion, creation, or emotion that will be much easier to express it in

our mother tongue. Trouble comes when we are asked to express ourselves in a

foreign language. English as an international language has four mayor skills that

widely used and spoken all over the world. They are listening, speaking, reading,

and writing. In teaching English, the students are encouraged to use English for

communication and to read the books and references written in English.

Reading is one of the main skills in English that plays important role.

Reading can be defined as an active cognitive process of interacting with the

print and monitoring comprehension to establish meaning and through reading

we can get much knowledge, study new words, comprehend ideas, study the

word are used, how to implement the grammatical rules, and gain the

information.

Most of students have many problems in reading book or passage. One

of them is to find main idea of the text they read. They can read the words well

but they cannot get the main idea. That is why sometimes they feel sleepy in

class because they get no any comprehension about the text they read. At the

end, they cannot answer the questions based on the text perfectly. This problem

occurs because the teacher only asks the students to read the text and answer all

the questions without giving any explanation that help the students in

comprehending the text well.

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 It can be seen from Hafsah (2005:35) who stated that the students find

some difficulties to comprehend such as they don`t understand the content of the

material, what the text about, and they hard to find main idea of every paragraph.

And also from the researcher`s experience after taught many students, found that

those condition becomes a reason to run the teaching and learning process better

in classroom.

Based on the explanation above, the teacher should give more attentions

to this problem to increase the student ability in reading comprehension. One of

way is using one strategy namely Question Answer Relationship (QAR).

In this strategy, the students are given short passage to be read from the

textbook. As finish reading it, they are asked question and point out the

differences each question and the kind of answer it requires. The teacher must

use questioning in measuring the students` comprehension of given text.

According to Duke & Pearson (2002) comprehension activity has a longer or

more pervasive tradition than asking students questions about their reading,

whether this occurs before, during, or after reading. Questioning has long been

used by teachers as a way to guide and monitor student learning. L.

Armbruster& Osborn (2001) stated that questioning is effective for improving

comprehension because it gives the students a purpose for reading, focuses

attention on what must be learned, helps develop active thinking while reading,

helps monitor comprehension, helps review content, and relates what is learned

to what is already known.

By this strategy the students are encouraged to be an active reader, a

creative thinker, and also to be a strategic reader while answering questions of

the text or passage that given.

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 Because of the important of comprehending text, the researcher offers

the use of QAR in teaching reading, because it can motivate students to read

more and it can bring the students to interact with text.

Based on the explanation above, the researcher is interested in carrying

a research entitled “Improving the Students’Reading Comprehension of

Narrative Text through Question Answer Relationship (QAR) Strategy At the

??????.”

B. Problem Statements

Based on the background above, the researcher formulates the problem

statement as follow: “How is the students` Reading Comprehension of Narrative

text improved through Question Answer Relationship (QAR) Strategy?”

C. The Objective of the Study

The purpose of the research is to improve the students’ reading

comprehension in giving conclusion of the text through Question Answer

Relationship (QAR) Strategy.

D. Significance of the Study

The result of the research is expected to be essential information for the

language learning and teaching by expecting that the students` reading

comprehension can be increased through this strategy.

E. Scope of the Study

The research is limited in improving the Students’ Reading

Comprehension especially in deciding the main idea and giving

conclusionThrough QAR strategy at the ???????????