The effect of using reciprocal technique on reading comprehension achievement of 8th grade students

The objective of this research is to find out whether there is a significant difference on the reading comprehension achievement between the students who have not been taught using reciprocal technique and who have already been taught using reciprocal technique. The steps of the research were conducted within 7 meetings: 1 meeting for pre-test, 5 meetings for treatments, and 1 meeting for post-test. \nThe design of this study is a pre-experimental study. The study was conducted in one of junior high school, Surabaya. The population of the study is a group consisted of two classes of 8th grade students from in the academic year of 2016/2017. This group is selected using the purposive sampling technique from the population, i.e. Class VIII A and Class VIII B. After analyzing the students’ score from the latest final exam by using ANOVA, there was no significant difference from the four classes. So, the researcher randomly chose the group for conducting the research. \nThere were 61 students who were followed this research. The group was taught by using reciprocal technique. The instrument that was used in this research is reading test. The data are analyzed using T-test. The data of this research was quantitative data which is obtained by holding a pre-test and post-test to see the improvement score of students’ reading comprehension. The researcher analyzed the validity and reliability of the instrument. She also calculated the item difficulty and item discrimination of the instrument. There were 10 items that should be removed because they were not required to be the questions of the instrument. \nThe results of the data analysis are as follows. First, the mean score of the post-test (74.96) is higher than that in the pre-test (64.92). Second, there is a significant difference in the reading comprehension achievement between both groups indicated by the T-test results. With the level of significance at 5%, the t observation (to) was 4,38 and the ttable was 1,98. The to (4,38) is greater than ttable (1,98). Therefore, the hypothesis of this research “There is a significant difference between the students’ reading comprehension achievement before and after being taught using reciprocal technique” is accepted. Finally, it can be concluded that reciprocal technique applied in teaching reading is effective for improving the students’ reading comprehension achievement.