THE COMPARISON BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE STUDENTS’ READING ABILITY IN NARRATIVE TEXT
Yuda Ramdan Kurniawan
e-mail :
English education study program language and arts department
Sekolah tinggi keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (STKIP)
Siliwangi bandung
ABSTRACT
Language is a tool of communication to help human to interact. People communicate and interact with others using language. In some communities English has become an international language. In teaching reading, teachers know their students ability, who is male or female students. Every student has different ability each other, because male and female has different ability to do activity. The objective of this research entitled “The Comparison between Male and Female students’ reading ability in narrative text at eighth Grade Of SMPN Taruna Mandiri cimahi” was to find out whether or not there is a significant different between male and female students reading ability in narrative text.The writer used quantitative method, namely Causal comparative design. The sample was VIII A and VII B. Each class consisted of 20 students. The collecting data the writer used SPSS V.16. The data analysis showed that mean of female students is 80.50 and male students is 78.25. it means female students is higher than male students, It also meant that female students is better than male students in reading ability in narrative text. But the difference of both is not significant. Based on test of normality the data is normal because sig of both gender is more than 0.05, the null hypothesis was accepted. In other word, there is no significant difference between male and female in reading ability.
Keywords: Gender, Reading ability . Narrative text
A.INTRODUCTION
1.Background Research
Language is a tool of communication to help human doing interaction. People communicate and interact with others using language. In some communities English has become an international language. Most of the communities in the whole world use English to communicate with others who have different languages. Because of that English is very important to be taught and learned by the students.
In teaching reading, teachers know their students ability, who is male or female students. Every student has different ability each other, because everyone has different ability to do activity. According to Smith & Wilhelm in The Educational Alliance (2007:6), a research about gender differences in reading achievement found that male and female students have different ability in understanding the type of the text. Females are better than males to understand expository and narrative texts, while males are better than females to understand the text related information. Females are better than males in expository and narrative text because in these texts the topic is related with humanities topic and use familiar words so they can easy understand the text. The other way, males are better than females with the text is related information because in this text like this most of the content about sciences that many provides information.
Through interview and observation in school, it is showed that in this school there is a little different between male and female comprhension in almost all language skill. Female students level to be better compared to the male students. More over, females are more confident in showing their language ability. Beside that, males students have fewer than 2 hours for self-study of language. While females devote more time to language studies, it is probably cause the lower capacity of male compared to female.
From the problem above. the researcher intended to find out whether or not there is a significant different between male and female students reading ability in narrative text of the second grade of SMP Taruna Mandiri. Considering the ideas above, the writer will conduct a research entitled “ The Comparison Between Male and Female Students Reading Ability in Narrative Text”.
2.Research Question
Based on the background, the writer will do the research based on the problem under the following question :
a. is there any different ability between male and female students in reading ability in narrative text ?
3.Research Objective
The objective of this research is to find out the different ability between male and female students’ reading ability in narrative text.
4. Limitation of the Problem
The limitation of this study is that the writer wants to analyze whether gender differences and reading ability are correlated to each other, and the writer restrict to the thinking ability among the male and female students of Junior High School
5.Research Benefits
This research is expected to give a positive contribution to all who are involved in education, such as teachers, students,the writer self and other.
1. After reading the research result, the writer hopes that the teachers can give more attention to develop student’s ability in learning english language, especially in reading comprehension. So that they can create an educational product which has high quality not only female but also male.
2. After knowing the result or this research, they are expected to know their ability in reading comprehension.
This research is expected to be useful information for the lecturers that conduct and teach reading. At least, that they know that males and females read differently.
B. LITERATURE REVIEW
1. READING
a. The Definitions of Reading
Reading is considered as important skill by many teachers, textbook writers, and language test constructors. It is often claimed that sets of reading components provide useful frameworks on which to base course design, teaching, and test development. Language ability is identified by some as a set of language skills. A great deal of teaching and testing materials are organized around one such proposal, that of the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and the four skills model still remains pedagogically useful today, though it lacks support of empirical findings.
b.Reading Strategies
Many reading strategies can be employed by students in order to be more
Succesfull reader and to improve their reading performance. Brown (1994:292) provides some strategies for reading comprehension. The strategies are :
1) Identify the purpose in reading
2)Use graphemic rules and pattern to aid in bottom up decoding
3) Use efficient silence reading technique for relatively rapid comprehension for intermediate to advanced.
4) Skimming
5) Scanning
6) Semantic mapping or clustering
7) Guessing
2. GENDER
a. The Definitions of Gender
Gender is defined as a set of characteristics or traits that are associated with a certain biological sex (male/female). These characteristics are generally referred to as “masculine” or “feminine. Gender comprises a range of differences between male and female extending to the biological to the social. Biologically the male gender is defined by the presence of a Y-chromosome, and its absence in a female gender. However, there is debate as to the extent that the biological difference has or necessitates differences in gender roles in society (Manstead, 2000:30).
b.The Differences Between Male and Female
1). Differences in language ability
A great deal of research has demonstrated that female outperform males in language arts, females read earlier than do males, have fewer reading problems, and respond more easily to reading instruction (Allred, 1990:187 and Hyde & linn, 1988:53). Girls also spell more words correctly and recognize more correctly spelled words than do boys during the grade school years. Further, these differences seem to persist throughout schooling; females continue to outperform males on measures of vocabulary and reading comprhension through high school (Hogrebe, Nest, & Newman, 1985:716).
2).Differences in Science
Females enroll in substantially fewer science courses than do males, beginning in high school and continuing through college (steinkamp & Maehr, 1983:369). And in this academic domain, in contrast to language arts and mathematics, there are substantial gender difference in ability. In an analysis of 42 studies examining gender differences in science ability, Becker (1989:141) found that males significantly outperform females. Moreover, this gender difference occurs at all grade examined, and there has been no decrease in the gender difference over time. Gender differences are largest for physics and biology, with only small or insignificant gender differences for geology, chemistry and earth sciences. Although this is one academic domain in which the strongest gender effects have been found, no one has posited a biological explanation for this difference. Rather, most researchers agree that the gender gap in science is attributable to differences in socialization.
3).Differences in Academic Values
The final aspect of Eccles’s (1987:135) model that we shall consider is the value that females and males place on various academic discplines. Closely related to this question is the relationship between academic achievement and self concept. As discussed in many other chapters in this book, female seem to have a relationally oriented self concept and males have an individuated self concept. Females seem define themselves in terms of their social relationships, whereas males seem to define themselves in terms of their individual achievement and this difference may become particularly strong during adolescence as individual identity becomes an important psychological issue (Roberts, Sarigani, Peterson, & Newman 1990:159)..
4).Differences in Gender Understanding
both boys and girls know more about their own gender than the other gender, girls know more about males than boys know about females. Because stereotypically male behaviors and activities are more highly valued in our culture, girls may pay more attention to male- relevant information than boys pay to female-relevant information. Recall that both boys and girls pay more attention to a male model than to a female model (Slaby & Frey, 1975:849).
3.NARRATIVE TEXT
a. The Definition of Narrative Text
Narrative text is one of English text types. According to Anderson (1997), narrative text is a text that has a purpose to entertain the reader or listener. However, narrative can also be written to teach or inform, to changeattitudes or social opinions and to show the moral of a story.
b. The Purpose of Narrative Text
The Purpose of Narrative Text is to amuse or to entertain the reader with a story.
c. Generic Structures of Narrative Text
Generic structure :
According to Indaryati (2010:22), the generic structure of narrative text are :
1).Orientation
Sets the scene: where and when the story happened, introduces the participants of the story: who and what is involved in the story.
2).Complication
Tells the beginning of the problem which leads to the crisis (climax) of the main participants.
3).Resolution
The crisis is resolved, either in happy ending or in sad (tragic) ending.
4).Re-orientation
This is a closing remark to the story and itis optional. It consists of moral lesson, advisor teaching from the writer.
d. Features of Narrative Text
According toIndaryati (2010:22), the significant features of Narrative text are:
1).Focus on the specific and usually individualized participants.
2).Use behavioral (action verb) and verbal process (saying verbs)
3).Use relational process to describes characters and setting
4).Use mental processes to describe mental process
5).Use temporal conjunctions and temporal circumstances to sequence the story.
6).Use of past tense
7).Use of past continues tense
8).Use conversation
C.RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
1.Research Design
According (Tavakoli 2012: 546-7 in Kaswan and Dasep Suprijadi 2013: 9) a research design is the arrangement of conditions for collecting and analysing data in a manner that aims to combine relevance to the research purpose. In fact, the research design is the conceptual structure within which research is conducted. It constitutes the blueprint for the collection, measurement, and analysis of data. As such, the design includes an outline of what the researcher will do from the formulation of the research questions and hypotheses to reporting the research findings.
2.Research Method
Quantitative research designs can be classified into one of four broad research methods: 1) experimental method, 2) correlational method, 3) causal-comparative method, and 4) survey method (Creswell,2012; Fraenkel, Wallen, Hyun, 2012).
The method of the research is Causal comparative research. Causal comparative research refers to “a type of ex post facto research in which the investigator sets out to discover possible causes for a phenomenon being studied, by comparing the subjects in which the variable is present with similar subjects in whom it is absent (Tavakoli, 2012: 50).
The basic causal comparative design involves selecting two or more groups that differ on a particular variable of interest and comparing them or another variable or variables. No manipulation is involved. The groups differ in one of two ways : one group either posses a characteristic (often called a criterion). That the other does not, or the groups differ on known characteristic. (Kaswan and Dasep Suprijadi, 2013 : 28).
3. Population and Sample
Saleh (2001: 50) states that population is a group of people or objects whose conditions are going to be discovered through the investigation.In conducting the research, the writer took the eighth grade students of SMPN Taruna Mandiri Cimahi as the populations. The class samples are VII A with 20 male students’ and VII B with 20 female students’
4. Instrument
In this research the writer gave same topic for pre-test and post-test. In the pre-test and post-test the topic is about” Narrative text” based on the syllabus and lesson plan. For male and female students, they have the same topic to measure their achievement in test of Reading ability in narrative text.
5. Data Collection Techniques & Analysis
a.Data Collection
In collecting data the writer gave pretest and posttest to both male and female students
b. Data Analysis
After collecting the data, the writer analyzed the data. In analyzing the data the writer used SPSS v.16
D. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
1. Results
a. Data of the Pretest and Posttest Result of male and female students
The data of the pretest and posttest result of male and female students was described in the following tables:
The Students’ Score of Reading test
Table 4.1
1.Male Students’
NO / NAME / Pre test / PostestMale
1 / STUDENT 1 / 55 / 85
2 / STUDENT 2 / 60 / 80
3 / STUDENT 3 / 45 / 80
4 / STUDENT 4 / 55 / 65
5 / STUDENT 5 / 60 / 75
6 / STUDENT 6 / 75 / 90
7 / STUDENT 7 / 70 / 85
8 / STUDENT 8 / 45 / 75
9 / STUDENT 9 / 45 / 70
10 / STUDENT 10 / 60 / 80
11 / STUDENT 11 / 50 / 80
12 / STUDENT 12 / 60 / 75
13 / STUDENT 13 / 55 / 75
14 / STUDENT 14 / 45 / 70
15 / STUDENT 15 / 35 / 70
16 / STUDENT 16 / 55 / 75
17 / STUDENT 17 / 65 / 85
18 / STUDENT 18 / 75 / 90
19 / STUDENT 19 / 65 / 85
20 / STUDENT 20 / 65 / 75
S / 1.140 / 1.565
Mean / 57 / 78.25
The Students’ Score of Reading test