Saturday, March 28, 2015

The Effectiveness of Two Stay Two Stray Strategy in Teaching Reading Comprehension as Observed from Students with Different Learning Styles

By Rasyidah Nur Aisyah

Contextual teaching and learning (CTL) is an approach to teaching in which the materials and the activities are based on the students prior knowledge. It engages the students in significant activities that help them connect academic studies to their context in real-life situations. By making these connections, the students see meaning in schoolwork. When the students formulate projects or identify interesting problems, when they make choices and accept responsibility, search out information and reach conclusion, when they actively choose, order, organize, touch, plan, investigate, question, and make decisions to reach objectives, they connect academic content to the context of life’s situation, and in this way, they discover meaning. The discovery of meaning is the central characteristic of  CTL (Johnson, 2002, pp. 3-4).
On this ground, the researcher thinks that it is necessary to conduct a research to get a true picture of another method in teaching and learning process. And CTL has actually been promoted by educational experts since the competency-based curriculum was first implemented. CTL is an approach, the learning which includes in CTL are Direct Instructions, Cooperative learning, Problem based Instruction. Cooperative learning is one of characteristic of CTL which is learning community. There are many kinds of methods in cooperative learning. The researcher chooses two stay two stray strategies in her research.
          Teaching reading comprehension by means of Cooperative Learning Strategy requires students to talk and share the information in the text with the members of their groups. It also provides the students with analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating the written text by making referential questions, such as; “how do you know” or “why do you think so” questions. These questions stimulate the students to think critically, to share their ideas, or to agree or disagree. As a result, verbal summaries can be carried out by letting the students perform or report what they have done at the end of class.
          Respecting to Two Stay Two Stray Strategy, it is one of cooperative learning strategy which has been investigated its effects on students’ learning achievement. Empirically, Tow Stay Two Stray is a modified form from One Stays Two Stray, as well as One Stays Three Stray, and so on. One Stays Three Stray is recommended by some expert to be employed in teaching process, as Crawford et al. (2005, p. 64) stated that One Stays Three Stray can be fun for the students, because it has the students move around, and exposes them to other faces. Students enjoy being interviewed, and they also enjoy telling their table mates what they have learned when they visit the other groups. If the procedure is set up properly, students can learn to move around quickly to their new places. Jacobs et al. (1996) proposed One Stay Two Stray as the optional of group form.
Regardless of its formulation, Stay and Stray offers a low-threat forum where students can exchange ideas and build social skills such as asking probing questions. It also offers students the opportunity to learn by teaching. It gives a description that learning also can occur within the community, not just with instructor (Jacobs et.al, 1996).
          Moreover, employing Two Stay Two Stray Strategy in teaching Reading, the teacher assigned an integrated teaching and learning activity with four English skills namely reading, speaking, listening, and writing. The four skills require the students to do much reading, speaking, listening, and writing activities in one meeting. The students accomplish the four skills through four practices specifically Group Discussion, Group Exchanging, Group Work, and Individual Work. In Group Discussion, the students are divided into groups which consisted of 4 students. Each group is given different subtopic/paragraph. Every student in group read the subtopic/paragraph given then discusses the content of the text to the members of her/his group.


 

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