THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PEER ASSISTED LEARNING STRATEGY (PALS) IN TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION

This article is aimed at finding out the effectiveness on implementing Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) in teaching reading comprehension and investigating the students’ perceptions on implementing this method. This study used mixed method study which employed quantitative and qualitative research design. Quantitative data were analyzed by using pre-test and post-test, the qualitative data was analyzed by using close ended questionnaire. The population of this study were the students of tenth grade in one of senior high school in Ciamis and the researcher selected a particular class, which was sciences for a total 38 students as the sample. Based on statistical result, after implementing PALS in teaching reading comprehension of recount text, the significant improvement of reading comprehension showed from result of pre-test and post-test. In the pre-test the average score of students was 71.84, and in the post test the average score of students was 87.37. Thus, the use of Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) is effective in teaching reading comprehension of recount text. In addition, from the analysis of close ended questionnaire, the students was gave a positive responses towards PALS in teaching reading comprehension of recount text. In conclusion, the student‘s reading comprehension was effective and the students were able to comprehend the text through PALS. Based on these finding, it is recommended for English teachers to implementing PALS to improve students’ reading comprehension.


INTRODUCTION
Reading is one of language skills that have to be mastered by students. According to Harmer (2007, p. 99) reading is useful for language acquisitions. Provided that students more or less understand what they read, the more they read, the better they get at it. It means that, with reading the readers can express their opinion about the content of the text, based on their background knowledge and experience. Moreover, Ahmadi & Hairul, 2012) said that reading also can build reader's critical thinking toward an a context of a text. One of the important factors in EFL/ESL in learning process that should be emphasized in different level of education is comprehension in reading a text, for example that an area of concern and indeed one of the top priorities of EFL/ESL students after completing elementary English courses is reading comprehension Then, there are several factors that most of students get difficulties in comprehending reading texts : (1) Vocabulary is the main factors which affect reading comprehension, (2) reading also is not students' interesting activity, (3) the teaching and learning process that they get in the class could not help them to comprehend reading text well even the teacher had tried to apply some strategies, (4) the students' lack of strategy in reading also the factor that influenced students' reading comprehension.
Mostly, the teaching and learning process is still less interesting to the students and tend to be teacher-centered. Students usually face difficulties and are less interested in learning because it integrates very few media and does not apply modern technology. The idea of the students' motivation and difficulties which is linked with the need of utilizing technology is supported by (Wang &Liao, 2017 cited in Rizal, Lilies andLeni, 2020) The present study was conducted to find out the effectiveness of implementing PALS in teaching reading comprehension and investigated the students' perception on implementing PALS in teaching reading comprehension. Two research questions are formulated. They are (1) Is the implementation Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) effective in teaching reading comprehension? (2) What are students' perception on the implementation of Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) in teaching reading comprehension?
Comprehension in reading according to Duke (2003) is a process in which readers make meaning by interacting with text through the combination of prior knowledge and previous experience, information in the text, and the views of readers related to the text. Topping, (2009, p. 2) stated that Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) is a scheme that fosters cross-year support between students on the same course. PALS encourage students to support each other and to learn co-operatively under the guidance of students from the year above.
People (students), who are not professional teachers, help and support the learning process of others, in an interactive, purposeful and systematic way.
The purposes of the PALS activities are to increase strategic reading behavior, reading fluecy, and comprehension. The strategy included in these activities are cumulatively reviewing information read, sequening information, summarizing paragraph and pages, stating main ideas in as few words as possible, and predicting and checking outcomes. To students, Peer-assisted Learning Strategies is more effective rather than work individually, especially to improving reading skills. Both the two students can be active to share their own comprehension or ideas from reading texts. Although they work together in order to comprehend the texts, actually there is feeling to compete between them. They compete whose idea would be better. Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) is activities that include Partner Reading with Retell, Paragraph Shrinking, and Prediction Relay. Teachers use a set of brief scripted lessons to train all students.
There are some theories in relation with this study. The first is reading comprehension.
According to Ahmadi and Hairul (2012), one of the important factors in EFL/ESL in learning process that should be emphasized in different level of education is comprehension in reading a text, for example that an area of concern and indeed one of the top priorities of EFL/ESL students after completing elementary English courses is reading comprehension. Therefore, the comprehension in reading a text is the process in which readers make meaning by interacting with text through the combination of prior knowledge and also previous experience, information in the text, and the views of readers related to the text (Duke, 2003).
It is mean with reading the readers can express their opinion about the content of the text, based on their knowledge and experience. Furthermore, reading comprehension needs a successful expansion and arrangement of a lot of lower and higher level processes and skills (Keenan, Betjemann, & Olson, 2008). There are two fundamental components of reading comprehension process (Grabe, Fredricka, & Stoller, 2002) they were : (1) Lower level processes is the most basic requirement for fluent reading comprehension is rapid and automatic word recognition or lexical access. Besides the word recognition, a fluent reader is able to take in and store word together so that basic grammatical information can be extracted a process known as syntactic parsing. (2) Higher level processes is the most basic higher level comprehension process is the coordination of ideas from a text that represent the main point and supporting ideas to form a meaning representation of the text. A text model of reading comprehension, not to be confused with general models of reading, the situation model of reader interpretation accounts for how the reader interprets that information for his or her own purposes.
In reading there were four components to be implemented. Reading comprehension was an activity in which there must be more than one component in it (Snow, 2002) as follows : (1) The reader are the first component in reading comprehension. In relation to this study, the readers are the students involved in reading. The students need to have abilities and cognitive knowledge of language as a basis in reading texts, (2) the text : Texts may give great contribution to the students' reading comprehension. Those can be categorized as easy or difficult ones. When the students can relate between what is being informed in the text and what has been there in their prior knowledge, it's mean the texts are easy. And if students cannot connect the information from the text to their background knowledge, the texts can be said as difficult texts because comprehension is not attained, (3) the topic: The topic of the text also influences the students' reading comprehension. When the students are given a text with uninteresting topic, they may find it difficult to understand although the text was categorized as easy, they even seem unwilling to read the text. On the other hand, the students can understand the text well when they are given a text which is interested and relevant to them (Snow, 2002, p. 26), (4) the activity: The activity on reading is closely to the purpose of the reading. Different aims of reading have different activities. In this study, the activity on reading is aimed at achieving the students' reading comprehension on texts.
The next is Reading Comprehension Assessment. Assessment is a measurement done by the teacher to know how far the students have already understood about the materials that have been discussed. In teaching reading comprehension, assessment is aimed to know how far the students comprehend text. The teacher usually gives a test to assess the students' ability. In assessing the students' reading comprehension, the teacher may refer to some technique for test. There are some technique that can be used by teachers (Alderson, 2000, p.206). some of them as follow : (1) Integrative tests: The tests are designed to obtain a much more general idea of how well students read a text, (2) The cloze test and gap -filling test: Cloze test are constructed from a collected text arranged by applying the random deletion procedure for words. The words deleted are between five and twelve. Meanwhile, the gap-filling test does not use random deletion, but it uses rational deletion. The words which are deleted represent the idea to what the whole sentence, (3) Multiple-choice techniques: It is a common technique usually done by teachers in assessing reading comprehension. This technique allows the students to choose the right answer from some possible answers given, (4) Matching techniques: This technique allows the students to match two sets of components.
For example, the testers match the title with paragraphs, (5) Dichotomous techniques: This technique allows the testers to choose the two possible answers given, true or false. The students have two choose one of those two choices, (6) Shorts answer techniques: Short answer technique is constructed by giving questions requiring a brief response in a few words.
It is possibly used to interpret and to see whether the students have really understood the specific information of the text, (7) The summary test: This technique allows the students to summarize the main idea of each paragraph of the whole text.
The third is Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS). In teaching reading comprehension, the teacher may use many different strategies to make the students more easily to comprehend the text. The teachers may use an interactive model to teaching reading comprehension to improve the students' reading comprehension. According to Udaya et al. (2013, p. 6) strategy is one of the important way for the teacher to improving their ability in teaching their students, to make the students more active and easy to understand according to teacher goals as good teacher. Harmer (2007) claims that strategy is an action that the teacher takes to achieve one or more of their teaching learning goals. The strategy can defined as a general direction set for the teaching process. And also the teacher should use many strategies in teaching reading such as applying media, games in order to keep the students interested.
According to Topping and Ehly (2009), Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) is a scheme that fosters cross year support between students on the same course. PALS encourage students to support each other and to learn cooperatively under the guidance of students from the year above. Students, who are not professional teachers, help and support the learning process of others, in an interactive, purposeful and systematic way. According to Miranda (2009) using peer teaching techniques helps utilize all the resources available to a teacher.
Students understand how other students communicate. Additionally, how one students internally assimilates information can be expressed to help other students understand it better.
Effective peer teaching techniques improve the overall learning environment and success of all students when implemented properly.
Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) is a strategy where the learning process more active with asking students to each other during the learning process. Interventions effectively engage students in learning process and produce academic gains across a variety of students populations, academic subject, and classroom arrangement (Rohrbeck, 2003). Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) help students develop reading and social skills, as well as independent growth and development in the context of fluency and reading comprehension (Fuchs and Fuchs, 2005).
In reality, Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) is one of technique for the teachers to develop the students' reading comprehension skills, but she or he should be more creative developing it. In peer assessment, the teacher has contribution as the developer, not the creator. The teacher develops peer assisted learning strategy (PALS) as effective as possible by providing them a chance to work independently. Apply this technique in every reading activities, the teachers should be creative, so that it can work effectively and interestingly.
In applying this technique, the teacher divides the students into two groups (the higher group and the lower group). The students are paired using a ranking system. They are ranked from the top to bottom. Then, the top half and the bottom half of the class are determined.
Students are paired by taking the first person from the top half and the first person from the bottom half, second person from the top half and the second person from the bottom half and the so forth. The students are designed to work together with their partner in order to help each other to solve some problem that they face in reading text. So it is expected to improve students' reading comprehension (Toping, 2005). According to Harmer (2001, p. 21) Working in pairs it possible for students to be more confident, and also gives the points that work cooperatively gives the students chance to be more confident because they can work without the pressure of the whole class.
In this research, the researcher used the recount text the title was "A Trip to Mount Fuji" and the second text the title was "Visiting my Village", both used as the teaching materials in teaching activities.
Furthermore, according to Chiristian and Sera (2016), there were three procedures in implementing Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS).

1.
Partner reading with story retell Partner reading is cooperative learning strategy in which two students work together to read an assigned text. During partner reading, each students read for several paragraph. The lower performing students read until finish the first paragraph, then the lower performing read the story retell and the higher performing as a tutor. In this activities, the tutor (the higher performing) and tutees (the lower performing) read the recount text in orientation and event paragraph. They must comprehend those paragraph for about 5 minutes, and write the result of their comprehend. After that, the tutees retell about his idea and the tutor correct it whether that is true or false.

Paragraph shrinking
Paragraph shrinking is an activity that allows each students to take turns reading, pausing and summarizing the main points of each paragraph. Students provide each other with feedback as a way to monitor comprehension in paragraph shrinking the higher performing asks the reader to identify who or what the paragraph is mainly about and the most important thing about the who or what, then the reader must condense, or shrink this information into 10 words or less. In this activities, tutor and tutees take turns reading, pausing, and summarizing the main points of each paragraph, it is take for about 5 minutes. They are identify and write who or what the paragraph is mainly about, and then where the story was taken. After the tutor an tutees summarize the orientation and event paragraph, the tutees tells about his idea, if the tutor disagree with the tutees answers, she/he must correct it by saying ''that's not quite right'' then the tutor tell about his idea.

Prediction relay
The prediction relay is an activity that allows each students to make prediction about what will happen in the next paragraph, make turns reading for 5 minutes, then check their prediction, and summarize the main points. In this activities, after they comprehend the orientation and event paragraph, they makes a prediction about what will happen on reorientation paragraph, after that the tutees read the half paragraph aloud while the tutor correct errors, and the last the tutor confirms the prediction.
The last is Recount Text. Recount text is a text which is purposed to inform and entertain the reader about experience in the past. According to Knapp (2005) claims that recount text, basically it is written out to make a report about an experience of a series of related event. A recount is a text to inform an event or to entertain people.
Recount is typically tells entertain by dealing with a sequence of events that establishes a relationship between the writer or reader and speaker or listener. Recount is a kind of genre that has social function to retell event for the purpose of informing or entertaining. The tense that used in recount text is past tense (Hyland, 2004, p. 29).
Furthermore, Derewianka & Jones (2016) add that there are six kinds of recount text consisting of 1) personal recount which the purpose is to give details of an incident involving personal experience, 2) factual recount which the function is to report on events or incidents not experienced personally by the reporter, 3) autobiographical recount which the function is to recount episodes in someone's life as told by that person, 4) biographical recounts which the functions is to recount episodes from another person's life, 5) historical recounts and accounts which the functions is to record, explain, and interpret important or interesting events in a society's past, and; 6) literary recount which the function is to retell a sequence of factual or imaginary events, often with aesthetic features. However, in the present study, the researcher used personal recount text to be implemented to the students.
There are three generic structure of recount text (Hyland, 2004, p. 135

METHOD
The study was a mixed method study convergent parallel mixed methods design because this study used quantitative data first compared with qualitative data. For quantitative data used pre-experimental design and descriptive design for qualitative data. As mention by Creswell (2014), "in this study, the researchers collect both quantitative and qualitative data, analyze them separately, and then compare the results to see if the findings confirm or disconfirm each other". The researcher involved thirty eight students of tenth grade in Senior High School. Determination of the subjects in this study was based on a purposive sampling technique in which the study was not conducted on the entire population, but focused on the target. The data for this study were collected from pre-test post-test and close-ended

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
This research was carried out from January 31 st to February 14 th , 2019. This study attempts to find out the effectiveness of implementing PALS in teaching reading comprehension, first the result of pre-test and post-test of each group was computed by using SPSS 23. Furthermore, the highest score of post-test is 100, the lowest score of post-test is 50, the mean score of post-test is 87.37, and the standard deviation of post-test is 9.98. The researcher found the mean of post-test is higher than the mean of pre-test.
The study raised two kinds of hypotheses, there were null hypotheses (H 0 ) and alternative hypotheses (H 1 ). The null hypotheses (H 0 ) of this study is "There is no a significant difference in teaching reading comprehension before and after being taught by means of Peer  students who choose agree, 8 students who choose strongly agree, and there is no students who choose disagree and strongly disagree. The minimum is 3.00, maximum is 5.00, mean 3.79 this score comes near to 4.00 it means "agree" is the answer of statement 1, and Std.
Deviation is 0.78. It means the students agree that they like reading lesson by using Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS).

Item 2:
The table showed from 38 students (N), 0 students who choose strongly disagree, 3 students who choose disagree, 13 students who choose neutral, 19 students who choose agree, and 3 students who choose strongly agree. The minimum is 2.00, maximum is 5.00, mean 3.58 this score comes near to 4.00 it means "agree" is the answer of statement 2, and Std. Deviation is 0.76. It means the students agree that by using Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS), they motivated to study.

Item 3:
The table showed from 38 students (N), 0 students who choose strongly disagree, 1 student who choose disagree, 6 students who choose neutral, 15 students who choose agree, and 16 students who choose strongly agree. The minimum is 2.00, maximum is 5.00, Mean is 4.21, and Std. Deviation is 0.81. It means, the students agree that reading lesson by using Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) can improve their reading comprehension.

Item 4:
The table showed from 38 students (N), 0 students who choose strongly disagree, 1 student who choose disagree, 7 students who choose neutral, 22 students who choose agree, and 8 students who choose strongly agree. The minimum is 2.00, maximum is 5.00, mean is 3.97 this score was closer to 4.00 it means "agree" is the answer of statement 7, and Std. Deviation is 0.72. It means, the students agree that reading lesson by using Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) is easier to understand the materials.
Item 5: Table 4.7.5 showed from 38 students (N), 1 student who choose strongly disagree, 1 student who choose disagree, 11 students who choose neutral, 12 students who choose agree, and 13 students who choose strongly agree. The minimum is 1.00, maximum is 5.00, mean is 3.92 this score was closer to 4.00 it means "agree" is the answer of statement 10, and Std. Deviation is 0.99. It means, the students agree that Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) could make them confident to interact with their friends.
Thus, the result of negative statement could be seen in table 5 The second previous study by Sulistami et al. (2018) entitled "Improving Students' Reading Comprehension by Using Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) in EFL Contexts", the result indicate that teaching reading comprehension in narrative text by using Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) could improve the average score of students' reading comprehension, and there is significant improvement that showed in this research, it proved from the improvement of the average students' score and students who passed the KKM. This previous study has similarity with the present study which both of them are investigate the implementation of PALS in reading comprehension. But the present study is more focus on implementing PALS in reading comprehension of recont text and also investigate the students' perception.
The third previous study by Hamra & Syatriana (2010) entitled "Developing a Model of Teaching Reading Comprehension for EFL Students", the result indicate that the IMTRC is very effective in improving the reading comprehension of the students. The implementation of the teaching model is accepted by the teachers and students. It is good in relation to the improvement of teaching and learning process. This previous study has a similarity that is investigate a teaching model for reading comprehension.

CONCLUSION
Based on the findings mentioned previously, it can be concluded that Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) was effective in teaching reading comprehension. It could be seen from the students' progress in test and in every meeting. The significant improvement showed in this research, it proved from the average students' score. In the pre-test the students' average score was 71.84, in the post-test the students' average score improved into 87.37.
The analysis of qualitative data showed that the students gave the positive responses towards implementing PALS in teaching reading comprehension. it is based on the students' answer in each numbers of questionnaire. The students interested in implementing PALS in teaching reading comprehension especially in recount text, they through they difficulties in comprehending the text was solved by PALS, because they could shared their opinion with the others. Finally, the researcher concluded that most of the students are agree that PALS was effective and could help the students in reading comprehension. Based on the result of quantitative and qualitative data, it can be concluded that implementing Peer Assisted Learning Strategy (PALS) is effective in teaching reading comprehension.