COMPARATIVE STUDY OF STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT TAUGHT THROUGH GROUP WORK AND INDIVIDUAL WORK

Abstract

The objectives of this research are to find out whether there is significant difference of students’ reading comprehension achievement between students who are taught through group work and individual work and to determine which one of those two teaching techniques is better for students’ reading comprehension achievement. The research design used true experimental pretest posttest design. Two classes; class X.4 and class X.5 were taken as the sample of the research. Each class consists of 38 students. The result shows that there is a significant difference of students’ reading comprehension achievement between students who were taught by using group work and individual work. The significant increase of students’ achievement in the experimental class 1 (group work) was (p<0.05, p=0.000) with the increase of mean in pretest and posttest was 19.52 points. Meanwhile, the significant increase of students’ achievement in the experimental class 2 (individual work) was (p>0.05, p=0.000) with the increase was only 7.81 points. The researcher suggests that the English teacher should apply group work techniques in teaching reading comprehension as one of the alternative techniques especially because it has been found that the technique can make the students successful in learning reading comprehension.

Keywords: Group Work,Individual Work, Reading Comprehension Achievement, and Teaching Techniques.