Improving the Students' Reading Comprehension Through Three Minute Pause Strategy

This research aimed to explain the improved of the students' reading comprehension in terms of literal comprehension dealing with main idea and details and summarizing dealing with content and logical order. A classroom action research which was conducted in two cycles in which every cycle consisted of four meetings. The location of this research was taken at X students of SMA Gunung Sari Makassar with a number of the subject were 20 students. The research findings indicate that the application of Three Minute Pause strategy was significant in improving the students' reading comprehension in terms of literal comprehension and summarizing. It was proved by the mean score of the cycle I was 6.88then increased to be 7.87 in cycle II. They were higher than the mean score of diagnostic test namely 4.77. It means that there was the improved of the students' reading comprehension in terms of literal comprehension dealing with main idea and details and summarizing dealing with content and logical order.


INTRODUCTION
Language which is basically one of communication tools plays very important rule in community's life right now it is because of each community cannot make relation each other without the use of language which can be understood by the community. (Procter;1986) in Hasmi (2006).
In Indonesia English learning is taught as one of the compulsory subjects from elementary school for fifth and sixth level, junior to senior high school up to the universities. In learning English there are four skills namely: speaking, writing, listening and reading. In this sense the writer especially discuss about reading because it can cover the three other skills. Barbara Taylor (1986:3) in Asmirawati (2010: 6) states that reading is very closely allied to other language processes such as listening, speaking and writing.
Eddie Williams, (1984 : 2) in Zainal Abidin, (2006 : 34) states that the definition of reading is that it is a process where by one looks at and understands what has been written. The purpose for reading is to guide the reader to select the appropriate texts, to determine the appropriate to reading comprehension.
The observation result when the researcher conducted teaching practice in X grade of SMA Gunung Sari Makassar, the students' reading comprehension skill still poor. All of the students can be read but only a few of students can comprehend or can understand what they have read especially English text. It because many factors such as the students consider that English is a subject that very difficult, bore and scares because meaning and letters are different. The other factor is the teacher always uses the same method to teach English subject like the direct method. It is also make the students more bored to study English. As value of observation in the classroom the students' has score 6.0. This score is as a poor category. In this research the aim is to solve this problem until the students have a good score, while the standard curriculum is 7.0 The researcher wants to achieved the score at 7.5 target in learning reading comprehension. In this case, the students have to read critically, and the teacher must select the suitable technique or strategy to teach it.
Furthermore, comprehension is a really important either in reading and other skills. The ability of someone to comprehend is closely related to one's background knowledge. Coady (1972:12) states that the interest and background knowledge would enable the students to comprehend at reasonable rate and keep him involve in the spite of synthetic difficulty.
Meanwhile, Comprehension skill for the primary level consist of Literal comprehension, Sequencing comprehension, Summarization. The researcher focus in literal comprehension. Literal comprehension is that is to receive information stared in a passage.
Concerning with the problem had by the student above, the researcher try apply three minute pausestrategy in teaching an English reading material in this research. In this case, the students have to read critically, and the teacher must select the suitable technique or strategy to teach it. In other to acquire the purposes successfully, students are expected to apply learning strategies. There are some strategies that can be used; one of them is three minute pause strategy.
According to the researcher, three minute pause strategy is a good strategy to use to summarize in their own words what the single main idea of the essay is what the students have experience or study. Using this strategy will help students to identify interesting aspects of what they have experience or study. This strategy not only improving memory comprehension but also to identify any confusion they have.
Summarizing involves placing the main concept into new words, including only the main point. Summaries are shorter than the original and take a broad overview of the source material.

Introduction to Three Minute Pause a. What is Three Minute Pause
The Three Minute Pause helps students' process information by providing a short break during which they summarize new content, connect new content to prior knowledge, and are free to ask clarifying questions .This strategy was suggested by Ralph Tyler and is currently promoted by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins (Northern Virginia Partnership 2003).
Three Minute Pause (Buehl, 2001) allows students to stop while reading, listening, or watching a movie and turn to their partner or group for a review of the content. The three minute pause (Marzano et al, 1992;McTighe & Lyman, 1988) is a strategy that provide students with an opportunity for reflection that can enhance knowledge retention. At strategic points, teachers provide students with the opportunity to pause for three minutes, and educational time out. b. Implementation of Three Minute Pause Strategy According Rachel Billmeyer implementation Three Minute Pause in Reading are: 1. Organize the students into pairs or learning teams 2. Instruct students to read the first page or two of achapter or show them a ten to fifteen minute segment of a video. The length of listening time depends upon the age of the learner and listening time correlates with age. A ten year old can listen approximately ten minutes and then needs to stop and process the information shared. The more difficult the material, the greater the need for students to stop and process more frequently. For example, a 35 minute class for eleven year olds might follow this pattern : a). 11 minute for input b). 3 minute to pause and process c). 2 minutes for the teacher to redirect if necessary d). 11 minutes for input e). 3 minutes pause and process f). 5 minute for summary/conclusion/journal learning/review notes 3. Pause after presenting information the appropriate length of time ask students to spend three minutes processing. During the pause, pairs or learning teams discuss their notes, clarify difficult ideas, and fill the gaps in their notes.
The following ideas might be displayed on an overhead: a). Summarizing with partner or team the information that was discussed. b). Telling partner or team what was most interesting about the information shared c). Identifying anything that is confusing and try to clear it up or prepare a question to ask the group. 4. Model how the conversation would sound when working with a partner or learning team members.
5. Remind students that during the pause they are not to ask the teacher questions but to work with their partner or learning team members.
6. Provide students and opportunity after the pause portion to ask question about unclear concepts, to add their own information that would strengthen understanding of important points or issues, and to seek clarity about any misconceptions.
7. Continue to provide information and pause for the students to process throughout the entire presentation.

While according to Eggan and Kauchak implementation of Three Minute
Pause are:

Purpose
To reduce learner passivity and increase interaction and reflection, a technique known as the "Three Minutes Pause" is very useful. The idea is that after covering a topic or a complex concept, you pause and let the participants ponder over what has been discussed in a systematic way. This allows participants to clarify areas they may not have understood well and prepares them for the next part. The interaction and expression of ideas also helps memorization of the content. This technique is particularly useful for lectures since they are usually very passive and encourage non-participation. The Three Minutes Pause allows you to bring interactivity into a lecture without much time cost while significantly helping the audience to understand and memorize the content. It also allows you to monitor participants and receive feedback about areas that you may need to expand on more.

Objective
Pause for three minutes after getting trained or lectured on complex content, and reflect within a group to better understand the concepts presented before moving on to the next topic. b. Techniques of Improving Reading Comprehension There are some techniques that able to help the students to improving reading skill as follow:

Skimming
Speed is often important when we are reading, we may have a lot of to read but not much time, for this kind of reading we usually do not know and remember the information from the book we read. So in this case we need one technique of reading namely reading.
Skimming is a high technique of reading which needed a special skill. It is done when a reader wishes to cover only the most important information or the main idea of the meaning material in a hurry or short time. The reader does not need speed to spend much time to read every word, phrase, sentence or paragraph, they just quickly across and down a page to find the specific information. (Miles, 1985:37)

Scanning
Many students try to read every word when they read. So they read very slowly. In scanning a reader is looking for anything in particular. It is one skill in effective reading means to look for read quickly to fine out the answer to certain what have been determined. Scanning is very past reading.
When you scan, you skip over many words. You look someone information quick as you can (Mikulecky, 1998:21).

c. Level of Comprehension
Anderson (1969), in Zhang (2007:31), argues that there are three important levels of comprehension in reading and the readers read all three: Reading the lines. This is the level of literal meaning (what did the author say?); reading between lines. This is the level of interpretation (what did the author mean?); reading beyond the lines. This is level of inferences and generalizations.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This research used classroom action research (CAR) which is conducted into two cycles to observe the students' reading comprehension through three

Classroom Action Research Cycles
This classroom action research conducted in two cycles and each cycle consists of four meeting. It aims at observing the improving students' reading comprehension through three minute pause strategy.

The Improvement of the Students' Literal Comprehension
The application of Three Minute Pause strategy in improving the students' literal comprehension deals with main idea and details. The improvement of the students' literal comprehension dealing with main idea and details at the second year students' of SMA GUNUNG SARI MAKASSAR can be seen clearly in the following To see clearly the improvement of the students' literal comprehension, the following chart is presented: Figure 1: The Improvement of the Students' Literal Comprehension The chart above shows the improved of the students' literal comprehension which in cycle II is higher 7.8) than cycle I (6.76) and Diagnostic -Test (4.74).
(Cycle II > Cycle I > Diagnostic -Test). It also shows that the result of Diagnostic-Test is the lowest mean score achievement. The students' achievement in D-test is categorized as poor. After evaluation in cycle I and cycle II, there is  The table above shows that the percentage of the students' main idea in reading Diagnostic Test indicates that 16 students (80%) get poor, 4 students (20%) get very poor, and none of students for the other classification. After taking an action in cycle I by using Three Minute Pause strategy, the percentage of the students' main idea is 6 students (30%) get excellent, 8 students (40%) get fairly good, 3 students (15%) get poor and 3 students (15%) get very poor. In cycle II, the percentage of the students' main idea in literal comprehension is 4 students (20%) get excellent, 13 students (65%) get good, and 3 student (15%) get poor and none of the students for the other classification. The result above also proves that the use of Three Minute Pause strategy is able to improved the To know the percentage of the students' achievement in main idea clearly, following chart is presented: Figure 2: The Improvement of the Students' Main Idea The chart above shows that the result of the students' literal comprehension in terms of main idea. After applying Three Minute Pause strategy in cycle I and cycle II, the result of students' main idea achievement improves significantly where Cycle II is higher than D-Test and cycle I. The students' main idea achievement in cycle II is 20% categorized as excellent and 65% categorized as good, while in cycle I is lower than cycle II where the students' main idea achievement in cycle I is 30% categorized as excellent, 40% categorized as fairly good, 15% as poor and 15% as very poor. The D-Test is the lowest where the students' main idea achievement is (80%) categorized poor, (20%) very poor, and none of students for the other classification.

b. Details
The application of Three Minute Pause strategy in improving the students' literal comprehension in terms of details can be seen the difference by considering the result of the students' Diagnostic-Test and the students' achievement after taking action in cycles through the application of Three Minute Pause strategy in teaching and learning process.  The table above shows the percentage of the students' details achievement in Diagnostic Test indicates that 8 students (40%) get fair, 11 students (55%) get poor, and 1 students (5%) get very poor and none of students for the other classification. After taking action in cycle I by using Three Minute Pause strategy, the percentage of the students' details achievement increases where 4 students (20%) get excellent, 1 students (5%) get very good, 1 students (5%) get good, 4 students (20%) get fairy good, 3 students (15%) get fair, 3 students (15%) get poor and 3 students (15%) get very poor. In cycle II, the percentage of the students' achievement in details is higher than cycle I where 8 students (40%) get excellent, 1 students (5%) get very good, 2 student (10%) get good, 1 students (5%) get fairy good and 8 students (40%) get fair.
To see the percentage of the increasing of the students' details in literal comprehension clearly, the following chart is presented:  categorized as fair, 55% as poor, 5% as very poor, and none of students for the other classification.
The result above proves that the use Three Minute Pause strategy is able to improve the students' details in literal comprehension.

The Improvement of the Students' Summarizing
The application of Three Minute Pause strategy in improving the students' summarizing deals with content and logical order. The improvement of the The table above indicates that there is improve of the students' summarizing from D-Test to cycle I and cycle II, which in D-Test the students' score achievement in summarizing is 4.81. After evaluation in cycle I the students' summarizing becomes 7.00, so the improvement of students' summarizing achievement from D-Test to cycle I is 21.90%. There is also significant increase of students summarizing from cycle I to cycle II where the students' summarizing in cycle I is 7.00 and in cycle II is 7.94. So the improvement of students' summarizing achievement from cycle I to cycle II is 9.40%.
In the table above also indicates that the indicators of students' summarizing improves significantly which in D-Test, the students' content achievement is 4.75. After evaluation in cycle I, the students' achievement in content becomes 7.13 and cycle II becomes 7.88. The students' logical order achievement also improves from Diagnostic -Test to cycle I namely 4.88 to 6.88 and in cycle II is 8.00 (Diagnostictest < cycle I < cycle II). The table above shows that there is significant increase of students' summarizing after taking action in cycle I and cycle II through the application of Three Minute Pause strategy. The improvement of students' summarizing from diagnostictest to cycle II is 31.30%. To see clearly the percentage score increase of the students' summarizing, following chart is presented: Figure 4: The Improvement of the Students' Summarizing The chart above shows the improvement of the students' summarizing in cycle II is higher (7.94) than cycle I (7) and D-Test (4.81). It also shows that the result of D-Test is the lowest achievement. (D-Test < Cycle I < Cycle II). After evaluation in cycle I and cycle II, there is significant improve of the students' literal comprehension that shown clearly in the chart after taking an action in cycle through Three Minute Pause strategy, that is 31.30%.

The Improvement of the students' Summarizing Dealing with Content and
Logical Order

a. Content
The application of Three Minute Pause strategy in improving the students' summarizing in terms of content can be seen the difference clearly by considering the result of the students' observation data and the students' knowledge after taking action in cycle I and cycle II through the application of Three Minute Pause strategy in teaching and learning process. Fairy good 6.6 -7.5 0 0 0 0 3 15% 5 Fair 5.6 -6.5 5 25% 5 25% 1 5% 6 Poor 3.6 -5.5 11 55% 5 25% 3 15% 7 Very poor 0 -3.5 4 20% 0 0 0 0 Total 20 100 20 100 20 100 The table above shows that the percentage of the students' content in Diagnostic Test of reading indicates that, 5 students (25%) get fair, 11 students (55%) get poor, 4 students (20%) and none of students for the other classification. After taking action in cycle I by using Three Minute Pause strategy the percentage of the students' reading test in content is 1 students (5%) get excellent, 1 students (5%) get very good, 8 (40%) get good, 5 students (25%) get fairy good and 5 students (25%) get poor and none of the students for the other classification.
In cycle II, the percentage of the students' reading test in content is 7 students (35%) get excellent, 6 students (30%) get good, 3 students (15%) get fairy good, 1 student (5%) get fair and 3 students (15%) get poor and none of the students for the other classification.
To know the percentage of the students' achievement in content clearly, following chart is presented: Figure 5: The Improvement of the Students' Content The chart above shows that the result of the students' summarizing in terms of content. After applying Three Minute Pause strategy in cycle II, the result of students' content is higher than diagnostic test and cycle I where the students' content achievement in cycle II is 35% categorized as excellent, 30% categorized as good 15% categorized as fairy good, 5% categorized as fair and 15% poor, while in cycle I is lower than cycle II where the students' content achievement in cycle I is 5% categorized as excellent, 5% as very good, 40% categorized as good 25% categorized as fairy good and 25% as poor. But the result of Diagnostic-Test is the lowest where the students' content achievement is categorized 25% as fair, 55% as poor, 20% categorized as very poor and none of students for the other classification. summarizing in terms of Logical order can be seen the difference clearly by considering the result of the students' diagnostic test and result of the students' test in cycle I and II (After using Three Minute Pause strategy). The table above shows that the percentage of the students' logical order in Diagnostic -Test indicates that 5 students (25%) get fair, 11 students (55 %) get poor, 4 students (20%) get very poor and none of students for the other classification After taking action in cycle I by using Three Minute Pause strategy, the percentage of the students reading test in logical order is 1 student (5%) get excellent, 4 students (20%) get very good, 1 student (5%) get good, 5 students (25%) get fairy good, 4 students (20%) get fair, 4 students (20%) get poor and 1 student get very poor.
In cycle II, the percentage of the students' reading test in logical order is 4 students (20%) get excellent, 6 students (30%) get very good, 3 students (15%) get good, 1 student (5%) get fair, 6 students (30%) get fair and none of the students for the other classification.
To know the percentage of the students' achievement in logical order clearly, following chart is presented: Figure 6. The Improvement of the Students' Logical order The chart above shows that the result of the students' reading summarizing in terms of logical order. After applying Three Minute Pause strategy in cycle II, the result of students' logical order is higher than Diagnostic -Test and cycle I There is also significant improvement of students reading comprehension from cycle I to cycle II where the students' reading comprehension in cycle I is 6.88 and in cycle II is 7.87. The students' achievement in cycle II is categorized as good, so the improvement of students' reading comprehension achievement from cycle I to cycle II is 0.99.

(Poor Fair
Good) The table above proves that the use of Three Minute Pause strategy in teaching and learning process is able to improve of students' reading comprehension after taking action in cycle I and cycle II where the students' achievement in cycle II is the highest (Cycle II > Cycle I > Diagnostic-test) and the increase of students' reading comprehension from diagnostictest to cycle II is 3.11. To see clearly improve the students' reading comprehension, following chart is presented: Figure 7. The Improvement of the Students' Reading Comprehension The chart above shows the increase of the students' reading comprehension in cycle II is higher (7.87) than cycle I (6.88) and D-Test 4.77. (Cycle II > Cycle I > Diagnostic -Test). It also shows that the result of Diagnostic -Test is the lowest achievement. The students' achievement in Diagnostic test is categorized as poor.

CHART TITLE
After evaluation in cycle I and cycle II, there is significant improvement of the students' reading comprehension where the result of cycle I is categorized as fairy good and cycle II categorized as good. The increase is shown clearly in the chart above that is 3.11.

CONCLUSION
Based on the research findings and discussions in the previous chapter, the following conclusions are presented: a. Using Three Minute Pause strategy can improve the students' literal comprehension at X of SMA Gunung Sari Makassar. It is proved by the students' achievement in cycle II is greater than cycle I and D-Test which in D-Test the students' mean score achievement in literal comprehension is 4.74. After evaluation in cycle I the students' literal comprehension becomes 6.75 and cycle II 7.79.
b. Using Three Minute Pause strategy can improve the students' summarizing at X of SMA Gunung Sari Makassar.It is proved by the students' achievement in cycle II is greater than cycle I and D-Test which in D-Test the students' mean score achievement in summarizing is4.81. After evaluation in cycle I the students' summarizing becomes 7.00 and cycle II 7.93.
c. Using Three Minute Pause strategy can make the students more active in learning process, especially in reading activities.
d. The process of the teaching and learning runs well during the classroom action research at X of SMA Gunung Sari Makassar because the students are enthusiast to study English. Besides that, the researcher also gets full support by the teachers.