Cognitive Strategies in Teaching Reading Comprehension

Increasing Students’ Reading Comprehension through Cognitive  Strategies of the Tenth Grade Students of SMA Negeri 1 Tompobulu Gowa

By

Hasyim

Abstract

This research is a quasi experimental research at the objective of finding the increasing students’ reading comprehension achievement through the cognitive strategies (rehearsal, organization, and elaboration) and to what extent these cognitive strategies influence the students’ reading comprehension achievement. The subject of the research was the tenth grade students of SMAN 1 Tompobulu Gowa which consisted of 50 respondents into two classes; each class consisted of 25 respondents, one class as a control class and another class as the experimental one.

The data were collected through the reading comprehension test in pretest and posttest and the observation checklist during the teaching and learning process. The test consisted of 45 items of test from three kinds of texts (news item, descriptive, and narrative text). The observation checklist consisted of four statements for rehearsal strategies, three statements for organization strategies, and one statement for elaboration strategy.

The research findings showed that the students’ reading comprehension increased for both groups from pretest to posttest. The experimental group was higher than the control one (60.6>50.1) and the t-test was greater than the P – value (0.05>0.007) which means that there was a significant difference after giving treatment to the experimental group. The application of cognitive strategies also influenced positively to the increasing students’ reading comprehension achievement. So, it was concluded that the use of cognitive strategies (rehearsal, organization, and elaboration) is useful to increase students’ reading comprehension in teaching and learning process.

Key words:

Increasing cognitive strategies (rehearsal, organization, and elaboration), reading comprehension, students’ achievement, influence

A. Introduction

Language teaching plays a central role in intellectual, social, and emotional development that supports students’ success in learning all of science knowledge. It is included in senior high school level. In the National Education Standard (2006) book (BSNP), English for Senior High School or Madrasah Aliah (SMA/MA), aims at giving students skills on communication competence in the forms of spoken and written in the level of functional literacy. One of these competences coverage is students’ ability to comprehend a course which is implemented in four skills, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Unfortunately in facts, it is still far from the achievement of competence expected. Most of students still get difficulties to learn English. It is proved by the low level of students’ mean score at SMA Negeri 1 Tompobulu in Gowa district in the summative test where this research was conducted.

The low level of students’ mean score may be caused by their lack of strategies in learning, such as cognitive strategies. Gagne (1975) states that cognitive strategies are one of teaching objectives that must be taught and trained to students. If students learn much more strategies, there would be a lot of chances for them to become the independent learners. Djamarah (2000) states that cognitive strategies are the internal organized skills which are necessary to remember and think in learning. The competence on the cognitive strategies is different from the intellectual competence because it is for the world outside that cannot be reached by doing it at once. It needs improvement continually.

The division of cognitive strategies is rehearsal, organization, and elaboration (Weinstein and Mayer, 1986, in O’Malley et al., 1990:44). Rehearsal cognitive strategy means learners memorize by means of learning the important ideas or concepts, underlying the important ideas, or writing some parts of text. Organization cognitive strategy means learners arrange materials into a frame order, a stock of words which are remembered by learners are ordered into meaningful categories. The relationships between facts on text are arranged into tables. The other ways are to underline the main ideas or concepts of each paragraph, then arranging its concepts into new organization. And elaboration cognitive strategy means students connect anything that is going to be learned with any other things which are available. In learning prose, for example, students make paraphrase, summary, notes, or formulate questions with their answers (Dahar, 1988:168). Weinstein and Mayer (1986) in O’Malley et al. (1990:44) state that elaboration strategies also include inferencing, summarizing, deduction, imagery, and transfer.

Based on the above three cognitive strategies mentioned, this research will be focused on how to increase students’ achievement in reading comprehension through applying those cognitive strategies. This research aims at finding out whether or not those strategies can increase students’ reading comprehension achievement and how much those strategies influence the students’ reading comprehension achievement during teaching and learning process.

B. Theories of Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is defined as the power of understanding or an exercise aimed at improving or testing one’s understanding of a language, whether written or spoken (Oxford Dictionary, 1995). To comprehend means the process of understanding meaning from a piece of text, connected text in any written material involving multiple words that the words form coherent thoughts (Royer, 2000). Phrases, sentences, or paragraphs are examples of connected text that can be read with comprehension. Nuttal (1996:52) exposes that understanding of reading is “getting out of the text as nearly as possible the message that the writer puts into it.”

            In the case of understanding the language, the psycholinguistics has a function to help people describing the processes of people normally use in speaking or understanding language. By the role of psycholinguistics any one may know how the language processor works, why one is failure to comprehend tricky sentences, how the tip of the tongue phenomena, or one can understand the speech errors. One may also know how children acquire the language that is what the mechanisms involved in language development.

            Palinscar and Brown (1984) find that the technique such as a reciprocal teaching that taught students to predict, summarize, clarify, and ask questions for sections of a text have positive outcomes. The use of strategies like summarizing after each paragraph have come to be seem as effective strategies for building students’ comprehension. Pressley (2006) states that students will develop stronger reading comprehension skills on their own if the teacher gives them explicit mental tools for unpacking text.

            Reading is more than just assigning foreign language sounds to the written words; but it requires the comprehension of what is written. Students in comprehending the ext they are reading have differences on their native language and reappear to the second language. Therefore, reading skills in one language are not necessarily transferred to other language (Edward et al., 1977).

            Understanding the language, therefore, needs processes that are related to the certainly ways or techniques, whether top-down or button-up processing (Fromkin, 2007:365-369). Anderson (1985) in O’Malley (1990:33) states that comprehending a language there consist of active and complex processes in which individually construct the meaning from aural or written information. In reading comprehension, therefore, learners may apply some endeavored strategies to understand a certain text.

C. Cognitive Strategies

Weinstein and Mayer (1986) in Clouston (1997:2) define language learning strategies as “behaviors and thoughts that a learner engages in during learning which intend to influence the learner’s encoding process.” Mayer (1988) in Clouston (1997:2) defines more specifically that language learning strategies as “behaviors of a learner that intend to influence how the learner processes information.”

Weinstein and Mayer (1986) in Wernke (2011:22) divide language learning strategies into three main categories; those are cognitive, metacognitive, and affective strategies. These learning strategies are derived from the three divisions of Weinstein and Mayer’s (1986) educational psychology; those are cognitive, metacognitive, and affective strategies.  Weinstein and Mayer (1986) in Wernke (2011) and in O’Malley et al. (1990:44), then, divide cognitive strategies into three categories; those are rehearsal, organization, and elaboration strategies. They define that cognitive strategies are the use of basic and complex strategies for the processing of information from texts and lectures, Weinstein and Mayer (1986) in Wernke (2011:20).

Weinstein and Mayer (1986) and McKeachie et al. (1986), in Filcher et al. (2000:63) state rehearsal strategies include “repeating the material aloud, copying the material, taking selective verbatim notes and underlining the most important parts of the material.” Organization strategies associate with the process of selecting the main idea through outlining, networking, and diagramming the information. Elaboration strategies are the process by which the learner builds an internal connection between what is being learned and previous knowledge. There could some specific tactics be involved such as paraphrasing, generative note-taking, summarizing, creating analogies, and question answering.  

In line with what Weinstein and Mayer (1986) and McKeachie et al., (1986) define about rehearsal, organization, and elaboration strategies, some other experts such as Dahar (1988:88) explains that the rehearsal strategies mean also the learners memorize through learning the important ideas or concepts, underlining the important ideas, or writing some parts of text. In the activities of repeating the names of items or objects to be remembered are also included on. When a rehearsal strategy is working there may be information lost or retained. The lost information cannot arrive at the long-term memory, while the retained one will be saved, O’Malley et al. (990:46). Craik and Lockhar (1972) in Eggen et al. (1990:254) state that there are two types of rehearsal strategy commonly used; maintenance and elaboration rehearsal. The maintenance rehearsal strategy is the information repeating process over and over. It is either aloud or mentally without altering its form. It is, for example, like on listening to a piece of music. People who do it play music as written without altering its form. This rehearsal way is used to retain information in working memory until the learner chooses to something with it. The elaboration rehearsal strategy, meanwhile, is the information associating process the person wants to remember with information already stored in long-term memory. It is like the effort to know when the Civil War fought during the years 1861 to 1865. The learners may know the approximate dates by relating with Lincoln presidency because they associate him with the Civil War. These learning activities are as follows:

T: What year did we say the Civil War began? …Jane?

S: …1859?

T: Let’s back up a minute. What year did we say Lincoln was elected?

S: 1860.

T: Good and how were his election and the start of the Civil War connected?

S: The South thought Lincoln as president would take a strong abolitionist position, so they thought secession was the only viable alternative.

T: So, would the start of Civil War be before or after the election of 1960?

S: …Now I remember. It was 1861.

             (Kauchak & Eggen, 1993: 190)

Organization strategies mean learners arrange materials into a frame order, a stock of words remembering learners are ordered into meaningful categories. The relationships between facts on text are arranged into tables. The other ways of these strategies are to make underlying the main ideas or concepts of each paragraph, then arranging its concepts into new organization (Dahar, 1988:168). These strategies may also be applied by grouping and classifying words, terminology, or concepts according to their semantic and syntactic attributes (O’Malley et al., 1990:46).

The most importance features in information process is that learners organize information (Eggen et al., 1990:264-267). They state organization as the clustering process related information into categories or patterns. There are some types of organization. They are like hierarchies, graphs, tables, outlines, models, flowcharts, and maps organization.

The organization which is effective, for example, makes learners understand the organizing principles and connections. The learners can use them to form the valid schemas. But when the information does not make sense to them, they may reorganize it in order that the organization structure make learners are able to encode and retrieve that information.

Elaboration strategies mean students connect anything that is going to be learned with any other things which are available. In learning prose, for example, students make paraphrasing, summarizing, notes taking, or formulating questions with their answers (Dahar, 1988:168). The elaboration strategies are the efforts to link ideas contained with the new information or to integrate new ideas with known information, to relate new information to prior knowledge, to relate different parts of new information to each other, or to make meaningful personal association with the new information (O’Malley et al., 1990: 46& 120).

The elaboration processes may include other strategies that relay at least in part upon knowledge in long term memory such as inferencing, summarizing, deduction, imagery, and transfer (Weinstein and Mayer, 1986, in O’Malley et al., 1990). In reading comprehension activity, for example, O’Malley et al. state that elaboration means to link ideas that contain new information or to integrate new ideas with known information.

Anderson (1983) in O’Malley et al. (1990:49) states that the strategy like images is one of the three ways – images, temporal strings and propositions - in which information is stored in memory. Anderson describes that images is concerned primarily with topics such as the ability of individuals to match patterns similar to an original figure, perhaps rotated or segmented, and to identify patterns with and without supporting organization or context. That is why the importance of images in comprehension processes is that they may assist in recalling verbal materials. One of the examples is in learning vocabulary with using loci method. This loci method is used by imagining a fixed path through a familiar area such as ‘home to school’ and imaging that the items to be remembered such as ‘vocabulary words’. They are then interacting with well-known fixed objects along the path.

Like the imagery strategy, inferencing contributes on comprehension made by prior knowledge (schemata) or on the characteristics of text that make it ambiguous instead of on inferencing strategies learners can use to deal with ambiguity. Sternberg (1985), Sternberg, Powell, and Kaye (1982) in O’Malley et al. (1990:50 – 51) states that inferencing has rich possibilities in comprehension tasks. Inferencing is using available information to guess meaning of new items, predict outcomes, or fill in missing information. Summarizing is making a mental, oral, or written summary of new information gained through listening or reading. Deduction is applying rules to understand or produce the second language or making up rules based on language analysis. Imagery is using visual images – mental or actual – to understand or remember new information. And transfer is using previous linguistic knowledge or prior skills to assist comprehension or production (O’Malley et al., 1990: 119 – 120).

There was a high correlation found between tests of vocabulary and intelligence may result from the fact that vocabulary tests are indirect measures of the ability to acquire new knowledge or the ability to infer meanings unfamiliar words from context.

Anderson points out three strongest contributions on cognitive strategy applications in elaboration with meaningful texts. Those are elaborated memory structures which are powerful aids to recall the exert of their influence through spreading activation. The influence may occur by 1) redirecting activation away from interfering path and toward paths which lead to the target concept, 2) spreading activation toward concepts that were part of the study concepts, and 3) enabling a reconstruction of the original text through inferences based on information available at the time of recall.

Relating to language learning strategies, this research employed what Weinstein and Mayer’s theories about language learning strategies that are based on their category of cognitive strategies. How the rehearsal, organization, and elaboration strategies are applied in teaching and learning process. How these strategies influence the students’ reading comprehension achievement.

D. Findings

It was found that the application of cognitive strategies (rehearsal, organization, and elaboration strategies) can increase students’ reading comprehension achievement more significantly at the tenth grade students of SMA Negeri 1 Tompobulu Gowa than non-cognitive strategies. The mean score of pretest of the experimental and control group was not significantly different. While the mean score of posttest of the experimental and control group was significantly different. The mean score of posttest of the experimental group was higher than the control one (60.6 > 50.1) and the t-test was greater than the P-value (0.05 > 0.007) that means that there was a significant difference after giving the treatment to the experimental group.

E. Conclusion

It was concluded that the use of cognitive strategies is useful to increase students’ reading comprehension in teaching and learning process.

The influence of cognitive strategies (rehearsal, organization, and elaboration) to students’ reading comprehension achievement was in positively correlation for the increasing of students’ achievement. On every increasingly students’ point in the independent variable, it was also followed by the increasingly point in the dependent variable. It occurred in vice-versa.

F. Suggestion

It is suggested that 1) teaching reading comprehension at the level of SMA, a teacher should consider a lot of ways as the alternative teaching and learning process such as the cognitive strategies (rehearsal, organization, and elaboration) in order that the students taught have the creative thinking to cope with their problem; 2) The further research needs to conducted to explore more about the effectiveness of the use of cognitive strategies particularly on how the rehearsal, organization, and elaboration strategies affect the students’ thought.

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