The primary aims of this research were: (1) to find out reading strategies
used by good reading achievers to comprehend English texts and (2) to find out
dominant reading strategies used by good reading achievers to comprehend
English texts.
The participants of this study were five students who had good
achievement in reading English text. Three of them were second graders of social
department, while the rests were second graders of science department. Through
think aloud task, they were asked to verbalize their thoughts as they read an
English text. Thus, it enabled the researcher to identify reading strategies used by
them. To confirm the result of think aloud task, an interview was held at the day
after each participant completed the task. Both think aloud task and interview
were tape recorded. The recorded think aloud task and interview were transcribed
in order to make the data easier to analyze. Validation effort was done through
methodological triangulation and peer review.
Applying the O‟Malley and Chamot‟s strategy classification, this case
study discovered around 53 strategies used by the participants of this research.
Those strategies could be classified into five sub categories of metacognitive
strategies, six sub categories of cognitive strategies and three sub categories of
social/affective strategies. Based on the strategies which had been listed, seven
were dominant among the participants. The seven dominant strategies cover selfmanagement,
selective attention, and monitoring which belong to metacognitive
category; repetition, elaboration, and making inference which belong to cognitive
category; and questioning for clarification which belongs to social/affective
category. In general, the dominant categories of reading strategy used by the
participants were metacognitive category 45.28 % and cognitive category 41.51
%.