Improving Students‟ Reading Comprehension of English Passages By Implementing Cooperative Learning “Two Stay and Two Stray” in English as General Subject at the State University of Padang

Teaching reading by guiding students in reading a text and supplying them with a lot of vocabulary is believed to be effective in increasing the students‟ comprehension skills. However, the facts show that this strategy of teaching Reading fails to increase the students‟ comprehension. The aim of this research is to see whether teaching reading by implementing Cooperative Learning type of Two Stay And Two Stray strategy could improve the students‟ reading comprehension skills, beside this research is also aims at identifying the factors that influence the improvement of the students‟ reading comprehension skills. This research is a classroom action research. This research has been done in three cycles; until the result indicates the significant improvement. The participants of this research were the students who took English as General Subject. The data of this research was taken by using reading test, observation list, and interview. The procedures of the research was by implementing cooperative learning of type two stay two stray; the students have worked in the group of four discuss and solve the reading task, then, two member of the group joined the other groups to share their comprehension of the text to the host group. The data were collected through the observation of the students‟ activity in learning and their reading test, and interview. Then, the data was analyzed by using quantitative and qualitative analysis. The result indicated that there is a significant improvement of the students‟ reading comprehension skills after implementing two stay two stray strategy until three cycles. This research also found that there were two main factors that influenced the students‟ reading comprehension namely: internal factor (motivation of the students in reading, students‟ background knowledge of the text), the external factor related to the way of teaching using two stay and two stray strategy and motivation given by the lecturer to the students in learning reading comprehension. In conclusion, the strategy of Cooperative Learning type two stay and two stray can be used as one of teaching strategies in teaching Reading to the students of English as General Subject.