Abstract
The current study aimed at justifying that updating or upgrading the mastery on discourse markers (DMs) could improve the students’ reading skills. It is arguably true that DMs do facilitate readers to comprehend texts in terms of the logical and grammatical relation. Therefore, an action research involving 21 students randomly selected as the subjects of the study were conducted in Reading Classes. Pre-test, Post-test 1 and Post-test 2 were administered to generate the data consisting of the progress of their reading skills. Theoretical insights on DMs (function and uses) were also highlighted including the teaching procedures to support the findings of the classroom action research. It turns out that despite the fact that there are 4 types of DMs, only three of them were mostly used in the reading texts, namely contrastive, elaborative and inferential markers. Updating or upgrading DMs proves effective to improve the students’ reading skills as there were increases in scores to indicate improvements.
 Key words: discourse markers, action research, reading skills
Highlights
Reading skill has become a major concern over the past decades since it has come to be known that reading is the mother of learning
UPDATING THE STUDENTS’ MASTERY ON DISCOURSE MARKERS TO IMPROVE THEIR READING SKILLS – ENDANG YULIANI R., SUGENG PURWANTO – DBB V14 N1 JANUARI 2019 37 helped by the mastery of lexical items, an individual or student might get facilitated in comprehending a text by making the best use of discourse markers as a guide line to construe the essential meanings of a text. 3.1 Unit of Analysis
Each student was assigned to identify the discourse markers in the text, which were classified in the four categories, namely (1) topic change markers, (2) contrastive markers, (3) elaborative markers and (4) inferential markers
Summary
Reading skill has become a major concern over the past decades since it has come to be known that reading is the mother of learning. A student cannot write a single sentence for his or her essay assignment without ever reading references related to the topic of the assignment. He or she will keep mute (silent) in a classroom discussion without prior reading activities of the materials under discussion. Reading inspires both writing and speaking activities. An individual reproduces what he or she has read in writing and or speaking. Through reading input of knowledge will enter the thinking repertoire
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