This study is to find out whether or not and to what extent the use of STAD improves the studentsí reading comprehension and to find out the improvement of studentsí motivation when STAD is implemented in teaching reading to the second grade students of SMP Negeri 3 Karangayar in the academic year of 2010/2011.
For the purpose, the writer conducted a classroom action research from April 30th to May 26th, 2011 in the second grade of SMP Negeri 3 Karanganyar. There were two cycles of the action research and each cycle consisted of a series of steps, namely; identifying the problems, planning the action, implementing the action, observing the action, reflecting the result of observation, and revising the plan.
The data of the research were collected by using some techniques including observation, interview, questionnaire, documents analysis, and tests. Then, the qualitative data were analyzed through the procedures assembling the data, coding the data, comparing the data, building Interpretations and reporting the outcomes, while the quantitative data were analyzed using statistics descriptive technique to calculate the mean score of pretest and individual quizzes.
The result of the implementation shows that after the researcher conducted the actions, the studentsí reading comprehension improved as shown in the result of both the observation on the students activities during the actions and their pre-test and individual quizzes mean scores. From the reading comprehension test, the mean score of the pre-test was 45.5, and the mean score of the individual quiz 1 was 61.6 and the mean score of the individual quiz 2 was 73.0. STAD can improve the studentsí reading comprehension. The improvement can be identified from studentsí reading comprehension achievement in term of main idea, detail information, vocabulary, inference, and reference. From the result of the observation STAD can improve studentsí motivation. The students were more active during teaching-learning process; the students gave more attention to the lesson and the teacherís explanation; the students asked the teacher questions more actively. Based on the result above, it could be concluded that STAD technique really improved the studentsí achievement in reading comprehension and their motivation. The improvement was quite significant which was reflected from the improvement of the studentsí reading comprehension and studentsí motivation.
Therefore, STAD can be applied in teaching learning process. Hopefully, by applying STAD, the students can achieve the optimum reading comprehension. The researcher hopes that what the researcher has done will give the English teachers inspiration to conduct STAD in their classroom.