Frontloading Strategy to Improve EFL Junior High School Students’ Descriptive Text Reading Skill

Abstract

Reading is the receptive skill that should be master by the EFL learners in Indonesia, specifically by the junior high students. The curriculum mention that the standard of reading competency in Junior high school is to understand and comprehend words and sentences from various texts (KTSP, 2007). This means, besides numerous advantages of reading the students are also demanded to be able to comprehend the text. Moreover, on the final test even National Exam of English subject, many texts correspondingly appear as the element of the questions. In fact, despites of the need and the advantages of reading comprehension, many junior high school students especially who live in the village still unable to understand the text easily. The condition of course will hamper their educational process. This research offers an alternative strategy in reading that is Frontloading Strategy. Kamil, Borman, Diole, Kral, Salinger &Torgesen (2008) mention that frontloading is making a difficult text to be accessed by all children easier. Frontloading strategy is believed to be one of the powerful before-reading instructional strategies to facilitate comprehension of a passage. The strategy is expected can help the EFL junior high school students to comprehend the descriptive text easily.