Reading dominates four English major skills that are taught in Junior High
School. Most of science and information are written in English, so the ability of
reading English text is important. The students have to understand the contents of
the reading text to get good achievement in English.
Because of those reasons, this study was aimed at improving students’
activeness in reading class through Pair Work. The objectives of the study were to
describe the implementation of teaching reading by using Pair Work to VIII E
students of SMP N 5 Purwokerto and to describe weather Pair Work can improve
the students’ activeness or not. The study was implemented at SMP N 5
Purwokerto, especially class VIII E using an classroom action research. The writer
took 36 students as the subject of the research.
She used observation, interview, and questionnaire to collect the data. The
technique of analyzing the data were reducing the data, presenting the data, and
verifying the data. The result of the study showed that the students’ activeness
improved. The students accepted and enjoyed the Pair Work implementation
because they could follow the cooperative learning principles and Pair Work well.
The result showed the average score of Pair Work action in cycle 1 was
27.7% to the average score of Pair Work action in cycle 2 was 68.75%. So the
improvement of the score was 41.05%. It means that there was a significant
difference of students’ activeness after implementation was better than before. In
conclusion, the teaching reading using Pair Work can improve students’
activeness in reading class.