THE EFFECT OF DIRECTED READING-THINKING ACTIVITY (DRTA) AND CONTEXT CLUES METHODS ON READING COMPREHENSION

There are many problems faced by teachers in teaching reading comprehension to
the students. It's not an easy task to make the students comprehend the reading
material in a given time. The problems is because most teachers are not aware of
this and they are not motivated to find the applicable method/s to be applied in the
teaching. Related to this, the writer conducted a research on the effect of teaching
methods on reading comprehension. The objectives of this study are to investigate
whether Directed Readi.ng-Thinking Activity (DRTA) and Context Clues
significantly affect on reading comprehension, and which of these methods is the
most significantly effective. Quantitative approach was carried in experimental
design. The samples was taken from the second year students from Methodist
Tanjung Morawa who were in the 2004/2005 school year. The Cluster sampling
was used with 105 students who were divided into three groups (two experimental
groups and one control group). In the process of collecting the data, first the
researcher administrated a pre-test for the three groups, then two groups were
treated with DRTA and Context clues methods, and one group was taught using
traditional method. After the treatments, the post~test was administrated to tHe three
groups. For the analysis, the data were analyzed applying One Way-ANOV A The
result of the anatysis showed that the F observed is greater than the F table
(9.64>3.09). Further more, to prove which group was the most effective method,
the NEWMAN~KEULS fonnula was applied and the result showed that from the
two experimental groups DRTA was the most effective method in teaching reading
comprehension (mean=60.80), followed by Context Clues method (mean=59.25).
In &eneral, it is concluded that the DRTA method and Context Clues method give
significant effect on reading comprehension.