The Effects of DRA and DR-TA Methods on Students’ Reading Comprehension for State Islamic Senior High School

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the comparison between the use of Directed Reading Activity (DRA) and Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DR-TA) methods on students’ reading comprehension. The research design was a quasi-experimental study by comparing two strategies of two experimental groups and one control group pretest - posttest design. It involved 94 participants that consisted of two experimental groups and one control group of the students of State Islamic Senior High School (MAN) Pekanbaru of Riau province. Three research questions and nine hypotheses were posed in this study in order to find out the significant difference between DRA and DR-TA methods on students’ reading comprehension. Pretest and posttest were administered in this study and independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test were used to analyze the data. The research finding showed that there was no significant difference of post-test mean scores between the experimental class 1 using DRA method and the experimental class 2 using DR-TA method on students’ reading comprehension. DRA method contributed the effect of improvement on students’ reading comprehension 76% while DR-TA contributed 72%, and on the other hand the control class contributed 49%. At last, it can make an inference that both DRA and DR-TA methods can be applied in teaching reading comprehension especially at State Islamic Senior High School Pekanbaru of Riau province, and generally in Senior high school level in Indonesia.