Fostering Students’ Positive Attitude Towards Reading Comprehension Through ReadWorks

Abstract

The pandemic of Covid-19 has resulted in school closure and changed the education activity into distance learning dramatically. English teachers are eventually demanded to call their students from online classroom. ReadWorks offers students to ignite their motivation in both reading practice and immediate feedback in order to accelerate comprehension growth. However, mediating technology into a learning activity is challenging, it allows for reliable internet access, disadvantaged background, digital literacy, and others to reflect different effects related to the students' reading process. Current sequential descriptive quantitative research aimed at investigating the students' responses towards ReadWorks and to what extent it assisted them to elevate the comprehension of text. An open-ended questionnaire was distributed to thirty-eight students from Islamic senior high school who were taught by ReadWorks. The data obtained from the instrument were analyzed using descriptive statistics and categorized on the basis of the recurring themes. The findings revealed that the students dominantly gave a positive response to these online resources and instructions. It changed their attitude to the reading process in which ReadWorks contributed to reading. It included the systematic focus on vocabulary fluency, background building, controlling pace of learning, and training being independent reader. Although there were no significant score changes for the comprehension questions during the activity, they remained to answer correct questions posed by the teacher from the text discussion. In conclusion, it carries an alternative way to improve comprehension, since it has enormous potency to use to answer the future growing phenomena about reading.