IMPROVING STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY THROUGH “WH-QUESTIONS’’ TECHNIQUE

Reading is one of the language skills that should be mastered by the students after following a set of English instruction at school. To promote positive attitude toward reading, the teacher must provide the students with reading texts that match the student level and interest. According to Nuttal (1987), developing types of question and techniques for them are essential to teach reading. It means that the teacher in teaching reading is suggested to use question to help the students to comprehend the text.

The objective of this research is to find out whether using WH-Questions technique is an effective way to improve the students’ ability in reading comprehension. The research was conducted at MAN 1 Metro. The subjects of the research were students of class X D in the academic year 2008/2009, which was taken randomly by lottery. This research is quantitative research. The research design was one group pretest posttest design. In collecting the data, the researcher administered pretest, treatments, and posttest. In analyzing the data, the T-Test was employed to reach the significant value.

The result of the students’ score before and after treatments implied that WH-Questions technique could improve the students’ reading comprehension ability. From the computation, the highest score of pretest was 72 and the lowest score was 52, with the mean score 59.15. The highest score of posttest was 84 and the lowest score was 60, with the mean score 70.

The researcher concludes that there is a significant improvement of students’ reading comprehension ability after they were taught by using WH-Questions technique. At the level of significant 0.001, it was attained that t-ratio is higher than t-table (17.86>3.55). In other word, using WH-Questions has positive effect toward the students’ ability in comprehending the text.