The Effects of USSR Strategy, Metacognitive Strategy, and Reading Habit on Reading Comprehension Achievement

Reading is one of the language skills which has an important role for the people because by reading people can get much information which they need. However, reading is not a simple activity. English reading is still a challenging task for Indonesian students. Therefore, a certain strategy may be used for improving students’ reading achievements. Using the USSR and Metacognitive strategies, this study aimed at improving the students’ reading comprehension achievement and finding out whether or not there was interaction among both strategies and students’ reading habit toward reading comprehension achievement. The population of this study is the tenth graders. Sixty tenth graders were selected as the sample and equally divided into experiment group 1 and experiment group 2. Next, both groups were tested before and after the treatment. Using paired sample t-test statistics, the results showed that the students’ reading comprehension achievement was significantly improved. The result of two way ANOVA showed that there was interaction (0.009).


INTRODUCTION
Reading is one of the language skills which has an important role because by reading people can get much information which they need. For the students of English as a Foreign Language (FL) or a Second Language (SL), reading is a crucial skill (De Debat, 2006, p.6).
It is because much knowledge which they need to support their learning can be gained from reading materials such as text books, newspapers and online resources. However, reading is not a simple activity because, according to Cooper, Warncke and Shipman (1988, p.7), reading deals with a process of constructing meaning that is formed by two basic components decoding and comprehending.
Decoding is the ability to decode written print into words. It leads to a word's meaning, but not to comprehending beyond the word directly (McKeown & Kucan, 2010).
According to Mikulecky and Jefries (2004), reading ability is an important way to improve the general language skills in English.
Therefore, English language learners have to be able to comprehend English reading text. In line with what Burns, Roe and Ross (1984) say, reading comprehension is the ability to understand the content of the given text. It means that without comprehending and decoding, the students will not get anything from the text.
Although reading comprehension is very important, some factors may influence the students' reading comprehension achievement.
According to Mansor, Rasul, Rauf and Koh (2012), reading avidness (habit) is recognized as one of the predictors for academic achievement including reading comprehension achievement.
Furthermore, a research done by Fitria (2013) who conducted the research on the second semester students of English study program of IAIN STS Jambi found that there was a significant correlation between reading habit and reading comprehension achievement. It means that the more students read, the more information they get and comprehend the text better. The students who have high reading habit tend to understand what they read better than the students who have low reading habit. The amount of reading an individual does is related to achievement in reading (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997;Guthrie, 2001) and even to an increased level of text comprehension (Guthrie & Wigfield, 1999). However, English reading is still a challenging task for Indonesian students.
In fact, Indonesian students do not only face the problem in English reading comprehension but also reading in their national language. This fact is showed by the study conducted by Diem in 2011 which investigated 200 fifth graders in Palembang found that the average of mean score of English reading was 51.18, suggesting that the reading achievement of students in Palembang is poor. Furthermore, Diem (2011) also found that the mean score of students' reading habit was 65.34 which also mean that the reading habit of students in Palembang is in average level.
Another study conducted by Diem (2012) (Bryan, Fawson & Reutzel, 2003). Often, a school will reserve approximately 15 minutes of each school day for SSR to allow students to read whatever they want. The students are not required to finish their selections and do not have to write book reports or assignments, and no grades are given.
Library media specialists and teachers are also required to read a book for pleasure during the SSR period (Krashen, 2006). As Valeri (1995, p under the level where they should be. In addition, there were only 42% students who could answer the questions in level 5 above. According to Roe (1999), if students answered less than 70% of the questions correctly, the reading level of the students is one level below the passage. Therefore, it was concluded that the reading level of the students in this study is level 4. It meant that, the reading level of the tenth grade students' of SMA 4 Lahat was the same with the four graders in the United States.
In addition, the result of IRI test showed that the students got difficulties in finding main idea, cause/effect, and vocabulary.
The result of students' scores of IRI test showed that the students faced difficulties in reading comprehension. Therefore, the researcher was encouraged to conduct this present study by proposing these following research questions: (1) Was there any significant difference in reading comprehension achievement and its each aspect between before and after the tenth grade students of SMA Negeri 4 Lahat are taught by using USSR strategy? (2)

Population and Sample
The population of this research was all the tenth graders of SMA Negeri 4 Lahat in the academic year 2014-2015. The researcher selected the sample based on the student's reading habit by giving the reading habit questionnaire. Only 60 students were randomly selected as the sample who consisted of 30 students with High reading habit and 30 students with Low reading habit were equally group to USSR group and Metacognitive group.

Reading Comprehension Test (RCT)
The

Questionnaire
The questionnaire that was used in this research was a readymade questionnaire which was developed by Janthong and Sripethpun (2010). It consisted of 20 items measuring students' reading habit. Before the questionnaire had given to the sample, it was tried out first to non sample. The result was all of 20 items was valid with Alpha Cronbach coefficient was 0.923. Next, this questionnaire did not need for factor analysis because it only had 40 cases.
According to Tabachnick and fidell (2001, p.588), datasets with more than 300 cases were regarded as adequate for factor analysis.

DATA ANALYSIS
To find out whether or not the both strategies improved the reading comprehension achievement of the students, Sample paired ttest was used to measure the pretest and posttest in each group. After that, Independent t-test was used to know the significant influence in terms of students' English reading comprehension achievement between the students who were taught by using USSR strategy and those who were taught by using Metacognitive strategy. To measure the interaction effect among the USSR strategy and Metacognitive strategy with students' reading habit toward reading comprehension achievement, it was used two way Anova in processing the analyses to get the data more accurately.

Descriptive Statistics
The pretest was given to the students both in USSR and Metacognitive group before the experiments were conducted and the posttest was given to the students after accomplishing the treatment using USSR and Metacognitive strategies. The scores of reading comprehension achievement from the whole sample (N=60) were categorized into 5 levels of achievement.
After the treatment had been completed in both USSR and Metacognitive group, it was found that the reading comprehension achievements of the students were in good level, with the mean of 71.24. See Table 1.

Paired Sample and Independent Sample t-test
The results of total score of each variable and its aspects were analyzed using paired sample t-test and independent sample t-  Results.

Stepwise Regression Analysis
The stepwise regression analysis was used to see the contribution of the aspects of reading comprehension to reading comprehension achievement in total (See Table  4 and 5). As shown in Table 4 and

Two-Way ANOVA Analysis
In this research, the researcher also used Two-Way ANOVA to describe the significant interaction strategies used and students' reading habit in enhancing the students' reading comprehension achievement.
The interaction effects exist if the ρ-value is less than or equal (< 0.05). The result showed that the significance value of the students reading achievement was 0.009. It means that there is interaction among strategies used and reading habit toward students' reading comprehension achievement totally. See Table   6.

DISCUSSION
The enhancement of the implication of As stated by Fenwick (1988, p.6), the choice of reading material is relatively free and interruptions are kept to a minimum. Therefore, the researcher provided the multiple genre of reading text in the treatment. This availability of reading material improved the student's achievement. Furthermore, according to Renandya and Jacobs (2002, p.296) that the availability of the self selected materials that the students do like to read can make a lot of difference in students' reading achievement.
In addition to this result, the researcher assumed that the improvement of students' reading achievement in this research was because the students do USSR willingly and naturally, they got something from what they have read. Therefore in doing the treatment, the researcher eliminated writing book reports or taking tests. In line with this, USSR has provided students with an opportunity to assess their reading and become active participants in their own learning processes (Valeri-Gold,1995).
Furthermore, among the aspects of reading comprehension, vocabulary gained highest improvements. It is 55.1%, the most significant contribution to reading comprehension achievement (total) by using USSR strategy. This finding indicates that when the students reading multiple genres of reading text, they found many new words. In line with this, the rationale for SSR was to have students practice reading at their independent reading levels to develop fluency, increase vocabulary, enhance comprehension, and improve wide reading. (Krashen, 1988; Pilgreen, 2000 cited in Kelley and Grace, 2008 knowledge is strong and unequivocal (Baker, Simmons & Kame'enui,1995).  The objective of this research was also to find out the interaction among the strategies used and students' reading habit toward students' reading comprehension achievement.

The Effect of Metacognitive
Therefore, the calculation analysis using by two-way ANOVA was applied to measure it.
Reading habit of students as the moderator variable in this research might influence the improvement of the students' reading comprehension achievement of the student.
Based on the calculation of Two Way Anova found that the result of p-Value = ,009 is higher than the mean significant influence at the 0.05. It indicated that there was interaction effect of the strategies used and students' reading habit toward students' reading comprehension achievement.
In addition, after analyzing the result of the mean difference posttest between the two groups, it concluded that the Metacognitive strategy was good for the students' with high reading habit. The growth of reading habit is the continuous growth of words knowledge (Nation,2003), the words knowledge and reading comprehension achievement are strongly correlated and the teaching reading strategy is the key of the success of students' English achievement (Willyanti, 2005).  Guthrie, J. T. (2001). Benefits of opportunity to read and balanced instruction on the