Improving Students' Reading Skills through KWL Strategy

KWL are the acronym, for what students already Know, Want to know, and Learned. The strategy used previous knowledge to stimulate the students’ reading thinking before beginning reading activity. This pre-experimental study was conducted to investigate whether KWL Strategy improves students’ reading skills and to explore students’ obstacle toward the implementation of KWL Strategy in learning reading comprehension at the junior high school level, the respondents consists of 20 eighth grade students used as the experimental class. Both test and questionnaire were used to elicit required data. The test result of experimental class show that students’ post test mean score (59) is much higher than the pre-test (44), indicating a significant improvement (gain: 15) of students’ skills. Moreover, questionnaire responses reveal there are some of student who still find it difficult to apply KWL Strategy, but some others find it easy and enjoy applying the technique. Then, most of students gave positive responses on using KWL Strategy while there are some of them who gave negative responses. By applying KWL Strategy they became more active and creative. In conclusion, KWL Strategy is useful and influential to improve students’ reading skills.
Keywords: Reading Skills, KWL Strategy