Improving Agriculture Students’ Reading Comprehension Through Task- Based Language Teaching (TBLT)

Article history: Received 6 March 2018 Received in revised form 25 July 2018 Accepted 21 August 2018 Available online 21 August 2018 After knowing the problems faced by agriculture students, this study conducted to investigate the effectiveness of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) in improving students’ reading comprehension. Collaborative Classroom Action Research design was used, and the participants were 22 students. The data collected using the observation checklist, field notes, and reading test. The findings showed that TBLT could be implemented to improve students’ reading comprehension in three steps: pretask, task cycle, and post-task which included some specific activities. Suggestion addresses to the ESP lecturers who face the same challenges to apply TBLT as an effort to improve students’ reading comprehension efficiently.


Introduction
Faculty of Agriculture, Universitas Brawijaya Malang (FPUB) starts to make more steps in achieving the vision and mission to be a higher education institution which has international standards and active role in the development of science and technology.As one of the efforts in realizing the internationalization, FPUB requires the first year students to take the English subject only in one semester for three credits.By looking at the Pedoman Pendidikan Program Sarjana Program Studi Agroecoteknologi dan Program Studi Agribisnis Fakultas Pertanian Universitas Brawijaya 2011-2013 Academic Year, English subject for Agriculture students is designed to prepare the students to master all of the receptive and productive skills in English, and those skills should be related to their academic specification field.The problem comes when the students must be able to acquire both productive skills (speaking and writing) and receptive skills (listening and reading) in one semester only.Those skills are almost impossible to be efficiently taught in 16 meetings including the mid-term test and final test.
Based on the course description, agriculture students who take the English subject at that semester should be able to handle scientific texts excellently and communicatively.To conclude, it is needed for agriculture students to improve their reading comprehension that related to their specific field.For Agriculture students, it is not an easy job to do, because they are not used to be exposed in English continuously, and there are so many technical terms that they do not understand yet.
The reason behind the occurrence of these problems probably because agriculture students still do not find the best strategy in reading comprehension.Agriculture students are accustomed to going directly to the text without activating the background knowledge.Enabling the students' background knowledge was an important step in reading because it increases the development of students' anticipation of the text.Many unfamiliar and new vocabularies make the students frustrated while reading the text.The students feel challenging to comprehend English texts because there are a lot of vocabularies they do not understand.Also, they also feel that comprehending a long text was difficult.They find that recognized the meaning of the sentences which are including new and scientific vocabularies are so challenging and without an adequate strategy given to the students the objective of the course cannot be achieved.
I conclude that providing the students with only grammatical knowledge is not enough to improve their ability in comprehending the texts in their specific field.Moreover, the institution demands the students be able to present the text in front of a big forum, so they need to sharpen their ability in summarizing the content of the text correctly and communicatively.TBLT considers as a perfect solution to those problems.The practice situations captured in the tasks are designed as practicable to stimulate the public performance situation in the target academic context (Alexander et al., 1988).The tasks provided are created as meaningful as possible.In EAP context, learners are not merely pointed on their difficulties in the language form, but more about the attempts to acquire new literacy and broader communicative practice to smooth the path to entry greater linguistic efficiency used in academic, professional or even workplace (Hyland, 2014).
In TBLT, the implementation of the task becomes the core of the approach and the tasks given and performed by the students, and when the task has been completed, the teacher discusses the language that is used, making correction and adjustment.(Ellis, 2003 andHarmer, 2007).A task may comprise several techniques; for example, a problem-solving task may include the methods of grammatical explanation, teacher-initiated questions, small group-work, and an oral reporting procedure (Brown, 2015).In performing the tasks, the students have to be able to manipulate the examples, which are provided by the teachers or textbook, into creative language use in which they try to construct their language by recombining some familiar words, expressions, and structures.The creativity that they perform in doing the tasks shows how they can maximally engage the language acquisition (Nunan, 2004).By placing the language as the primarily communicative tools in the language learning process means creating more chances for the students to use the word effectively.So, this study is intended to investigate the effectiveness of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) implementation improving agriculture students' reading comprehension skills.
Some previous studies were conducted to discover the effectiveness of TBLT in helping the students to improve language skills acquisition, especially reading comprehension.Shabanian and Ghasemi (2014) compared the impact of TBLT and Content-Based Language Teaching (CBLT) on Iranian intermediate ESP learners.They used experimental design by assigning thirty participants into two groups: a control group and an experimental group.The participants were chosen randomly from the accounting major.All of the participants were administered in pre-test (reading section of TOEFL).Then, experimental group learnt reading comprehension based on the principles of TBLT, and the other side, control group used CBLT principles.The result of the study showed that experimental group performed better on the reading comprehension post-test than control group.It showed that TBLT has been more effective than CBLT in teaching reading comprehension to Iranian ESP learners.There were some highlights of why TBLT showed more effectiveness in improving students' reading comprehension.First, TBLT was a meaning-centered methodology, and it developed the students' communicative competence.Second, the pre-task in TBLT helped the students to activate the background knowledge before going to the reading comprehension.The similar tasks performed in the pre-task phase, helped them to be more convenient in understanding the instruction of the tasks and gaining the gist of the reading text.Next, the cooperative process during the group work gave the students more enjoyable environment and the chance of improvement because of the provided feedback from their friends.
In addition, other study also done by Madhkhan and Mousavi in 2017.They investigated the impact of TBLT on Iranian learners' reading comprehension by using the experimental design.Two groups of the learners were given the same texts but different task types, activities, and methods during 20 sessions.There were two kinds of the method used in this study namely task-based activities and classical reading comprehension.The result showed that TBLT gave significant positive effects on learners' reading performance.The researchers concluded that TBLT might have a high value for the learners because it demanded the learners to deal with real-life tasks.It seemed useful to give the students more opportunity to bring the real-life environments into the classroom setting.
The benefits in using TBLT also could be seen from Douglas and Kim (2014) study that examined the prevalence of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) in EAP, typical examples of EAP tasks, and the benefits and drawbacks of this approach for EAP students.The participants of this study were 42 EAP professionals from TESL Canada, and they had to complete the questionnaire of their perceptions of TBLT for EAP.The result showed that 86% of participants indicated that TBLT was suitable for EAP instruction.The qualitative analysis of the data revealed that many activities in TBLT such as presentation, essays, and interview were the top three tasks employed by EAP teachers to address the practicality, effectiveness, and learner-centeredness of TBLT.Furthermore, Hismanoglu and Hismanoglu (2011) also showed the powerfulness of TBLT for ESL/EFL teachers.By considering that the purpose of teaching was more than assisting the learners to obtain the scheduled targets, providing them with the real context and condition of language acquisition was more important.TBLT implementation found useful to give the students more opportunities to be exposed to the target language and naturally internalize language skills and also showed the learners how to encounter the real-life problems.In short, TBLT blocked the distance between classroom environment and real-life condition.It gave many benefits for both students and teachers as well.
Stand at the same perception as the previous studies about the powerfulness of TBLT for improving students' reading comprehension skill, thus this recent study wants to prove the effectiveness of TBLT for EAP students especially agriculture students.This study used Classroom Action Research which purposively chosen to gain the depth understanding about the students' response to the approach implementation during classroom activities.Finally, this recent study aims to figure out how TBLT implementation can improve Agriculture students' reading comprehension related to their specific field.

Method
Collaborative Classroom Action Research (CAR) design was used in this study and aimed to develop an innovative instructional strategy which could help to enhance students' success in learning English (Latief, 2015).During this study, I collaborated with the homeroom lecturer who became the observer.This study was conducted in FPUB, and the subject was 22 Agriculture Students of agriculture students who took the English for Agriculture class for the second semester.The preliminary study was conducted on 20th February 2017 by giving them a reading comprehension test.It was done to find out the real problem faced by agriculture students.There were 50 items referred to some indicators: (1) determine the topic of the text, (2) identify the main idea of each paragraph, (3) discover the referring pronoun from the context, (4) identify the detailed information from, and (5) discover the implicit meaning.The result showed that 20 out of 22 students (90%) got the preliminary score below 70, and only 2 out of 22 students (10%) successfully got above 70 for the preliminary score.With the average score of the students in the class was 56, it showed that Agriculture students still face some difficulty in the reading comprehension.
From the result of the preliminary study, a form of the cycle proposed by Kemmis and McTaggart (2007) considered suitable to be used in this study.It covered four steps: planning, action, observation, and reflection.For data collection, three instruments were used: observation checklist, field notes, and reading comprehension test.All instruments had been checked through expert validation.Reading comprehension test was used as the primary data, observation checklist and field notes were used to collect the supporting data for the study.Observation checklist and field notes were aimed to figure out the students' response to the strategy implementation.Both observation checklist and field notes purposively used to know how effective the implemented strategy to develop students' comprehension ability.To sum up, the study used cycle which included four steps (Figure 1) in seven meetings, and used observation checklist, field notes, and also reading comprehension test as the instruments.
The first step to start the cycle was planning the action.Planning was purposively done to identify the problem found in the classroom context and then it would be the base in developing a plan of action.In this phase, I figured out what kind of potential improvements were needed and possible.The preliminary study was a part of this phase and done at the beginning of the research.It was done to identify the real problem faced by the subject of the study.In CAR, needs analysis was not required.But for this study, I wanted to take a look at the course description and syllabus to recognize what the institution required the students to master at the end of the course.The planning step resulted some points should be considered to support the approach implementation, namely: designing the teaching scenario, lesson plans, and also reading comprehension tasks.Developing the teaching scenario and lesson plan should consider the three steps in TBLT (pre-task, task cycle, and post-task) during the teaching and learning activities.Beside the teaching scenario and lesson, the material for reading comprehension tasks should be concerned.By remembering that they were agriculture students so the materials were taken from some agriculture books and also online sources for reference.
In relation with reading comprehension tasks for the study, the researcher decided that the tasks were emphasized in how to improve the students' reading comprehension including finding main ideas and supporting details, discovering the specific and implicit information, and deciding the synonym of the word.Besides, the tasks were also included the other kinds of reading activity which were related to the objectives of the courses.Also, the tasks were also designed to sharpen the students' ability in summarizing the text so that they could present the text correctly and communicatively in front of many people.The materials for reading tasks used Agriculture texts in the form of report texts and Agriculture journal article.
The first phase in the teaching and learning activities was the pre-task phase.After checking the students' attendance list and informing the objectives of the research, the pre-task was started.In the pre-task activity, the lecturer gave the students some activities which aimed to stimulate the students' background knowledge about the topic and the task of the day.The activities involved the brainstorming activities, performing or showing the model of similar tasks with a different topic, and also giving some pictures or video to be observed by the students.During the pre-task activities in seven meetings, the students constantly showed a good response by paying attention, and most of the students answered the lecturer's questions quickly, and only some of them kept silent.
In the task cycle, the students started to do the task, and the teacher gave them an opportunity to explore the task by using their own words.The students also had a chance to work with a pair and big group, so they could start to discuss the tasks communicatively.The tasks also created an opportunity for the students to explore the tasks by using their own words without scare to make mistakes.During this phase, various activities were used to promote students reading comprehension such as group discussion, information gap, reasoning gap, drawing outline, poster presentation, and video presentation were conducted.At the beginning of the activity, the lecturer asked the students to read the text individually in the given time.Then, they were assigned to a group and do the tasks that were related to the topic.In the first meeting the task activity was an information gap, and for the second meeting, the task activity was reasoning gap activity.Especially in the first and second meetings, the students had to read the shorter text before going to the longer text.The more concise text was aimed to let the students practice more in finding the meaning and synonym of the word.
In the drawing outline activities for the third meeting, the students were asked to draw an outline related to the main ideas and supporting details from the text given.The students were grouped into four groups, and every two groups had to do two different texts.In the fourth and sixth meetings, the task activities were information gap activity.The topic is about Agriculture journal article.In both meetings, before the group discussion, the students had to read the article individually and highlighted some important points from the article.During the group discussion, each student fluently shared the information they got from the article.In the administered time, the lecturer asked the representatives of the group to speak up about the result of the discussion and the other students could contribute some feedbacks.
The poster presentation task activities in the fifth meeting, took each group of the students to perform the summary of the article they read before in the form of a poster.The class discussion was conducted for each poster presentation.During the discussion, the students could give any feedbacks, opinion, or questions for the group who presented the poster.For the last meeting, the task was a video presentation.There were three groups that ready to show their video.The video was played in front of the class, and the other students should give some feedback or questions regarding the article.
The last phase was post-task.In this phase, the lecturer gave the students adjustment and feedback related to the tasks assigned in the task cycle.The post-task activities were designed to make sure that the students had already understood the text and be able to make a summary by using their own words.In the first and second meeting, the response of the students during post-task activity was quite good.Most of them could make a summary related to the article by using their own words and of course some of them still used mixed language.In the third to the seventh meeting, the post-task activity also ran so well.The lecturer also provided the students with feedback about the text in every meeting.In addition, the students also had the same opportunity to give feedback for today's activity.During the implementation of TBLT in the classroom activities, the observation process was conducted.This process was the steps of collecting data which indicated the success of the strategy to solve the problem in the class (Latief, 2015).The focus was on the strategy implementation to solve the problem.During the observation process of the strategy implementation, there were two kinds of data which were collected.The collaborator had a responsibility to fill both the observation sheet and field notes while observing the strategy implementation.The data were taken from the observation checklist and field notes as supporting data, and the data taken from the reading test as the primary data.The observation checklist was needed to collect the data qualitatively during the implementation of TBLT for the teaching and learning activities in the cycle.There were some factors including the response of the strategy implementation in the classroom context.
The second instrument was field note.The field note was applied to collect qualitative data which were deeper or beyond the observation checklist.The field note was employed to anticipate the possibility to uncover the data during the implementation of TBLT for the teaching and learning activities.The last instrument was reading test.The reading tests were done to collect the quantitative data of the students' reading comprehension score during TBLT implementation.The reading test was given at the last meeting of the cycle to figure out how well TBLT could improve students' achievement specifically in reading comprehension.
Reading comprehension test administered at the end of the cycle to figure out the influence of the strategy implementation to improve students' reading comprehension achievement.The indicators of the test were created based on the micro skills of reading comprehension and also the result of the preliminary study.After being validated by the expert, the researcher administered the test for the try out to ensure the instruments regarding the item discrimination of the test.It was tried out by another group of the students which had the same characteristics as the subject of the research.The result of the item discrimination showed that 30 out of 50 items in the reading comprehension test were accepted with the interpretative quality in the range good (0.30 -0.29) and very good (0.40 and up).After conducting the try-out test, determining the criteria for success was also a crucial step.It was used to see whether the study was stopped in one cycle or needed more cycles.The criteria of success became the measurement of the strategy implementation effectiveness.For this study, the criteria of success were decided based on the result of the preliminary study and also the students' response to the strategy implementation.

Table 2. Criteria of Success
After the reading comprehension test was administered, the reflection step was conducted.It was purposively done to evaluate the implementation of the strategy.Reflection was the data analyzing the process to decide how far the data collected indicate the success of strategy implementation in solving the classroom problem (Latief, 2015).Furthermore, in the reflection step, some factors which supported the issue and success which might occur during the strategy implementation was seen.The analysis process engaged the comparison of both data that were collected during the observation.It would be the base to evaluate which criteria success had been achieved, which one had not attained yet and the possible reason why those criteria were not achieved yet.The result of the reflection was used to determine which part of the strategy that needs improvement.The revision of strategy was required if the criterion of success had not been achieved yet, and the researcher needed to repeat the cycle.

The Improvement of the Students' Reading Comprehension Score
The result of the reading comprehension test showed that 73% of the students (16 out of 22 students) passed the minimum passing grade of 70 and 27% students (6 of 22 students) got below 70 for the minimum passing grade.The details were as follow.Three students got 70 for the reading comprehension test; three students got 72 for the reading comprehension test, four students got 74 for the reading comprehension test, two students got 80 and 84, and also one student got 82.Seven students got the score in interval 60-66 which means below the minimum passing grade.

Reflection of the TBLT Implementation
The findings from the result of the students' reading comprehension show that 16 students out of 22 students in the class (73%) pass the minimum passing grade of 70 and even 3 out of 22 students get above 80 for the score.To sum up, 16 students passed the minimum passing grade.It meant that the first criteria of success were fulfilled.Besides, the data from the reading comprehension test also recorded that 27% (6 out of 22 students) students did not pass the minimum passing grade, but they still showed an improvement in the score.So from the result of the final reading comprehension test, the implementation of the TBLT brought a positive impact on the students regarding their reading comprehension.
The data from both observation checklist and field notes showed the positive progress during the teaching and learning activities.The students showed constant improvement in the class participation during the pre-task, task cycle, and post-task.So, it meant that the learning process by using the proposed strategy was quite good.Thus, the finding data indicated that the second criteria of success were also accomplished and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) was proven to improve the students' reading comprehension so that the study could be stopped and reported.

Criteria of Success Data Source Research Instrument Technique of Analysis
The students' score enhancement which showed that 60% (13 of 22 students) of the total number of students get 70 in the test score

Reading comprehension test result Reading Comprehension test
Scoring the students' answer The students' active participation in every stage of teaching and learning activity in the classroom Students' interaction among the group of members and teacher Observation Checklist and Field Notes Filling the observation checklist and Taking note on the good points and things should be improved

TBLT on Agriculture Students' Reading Comprehension
The students' showed positive responses to TBLT implementation and students' reading comprehension score's improvement in the test.TBLT proved to give students more opportunity during the classroom activities and bridge the classroom communication between partners and teacher (Valli and Priya, 2016).Based on the findings, the students showed a constant positive response during the teaching and learning process in the class.In this study, TBLT was implemented in three phase: pre-task, task cycle, and post-task.In the pre-task, the lecturer does: (1) the brainstorming activity, (2) showed the model of similar tasks, or (3) Gave some pictures and video to be observed by the students.That activity was done differently in each meeting but had the same function to stimulate the students' background knowledge of the topic.In the pre-task, the students were given some stimulation to explore their background knowledge of the today's topic.The use of pre-task activities helped to create a positive attitude in the students' mind before started to read the text (Greenwood, 1981).
As it was suggested by Skehan (1996) the use of pictures, the example of the similar tasks with a different topic, and also video in the pre-task phase were proved useful to carry out the students' interest and enthusiasm during the classroom activities.It found effective to let the students speak up more in the classroom activity.This kind of activity also took part in increasing students' positive view regarding the reading activities.The data from the observation checklist showed that the 80% of the students showed constant excellent participation during the pre-task activities in almost all meetings.Also, the observer commented in the field notes that the students' response to the pre-task activity was excellent and the atmosphere in the classroom was enjoyable for both students and lecturer.
The next phase was the task cycle, and the tasks include some meaningful activities to promote students' comprehension in the scientific text specifically related to the Agriculture.This phase comprised some steps: (1) let the students read the text individually, (2) assign the students into groups, (3) students work in a group and do the tasks related to the topic and some indicators stated in each lesson plan.The tasks involved the information gap, reasoning gap, outlining the main ideas and supporting details, poster presentation, and video presentation activities.
The meaningful tasks delivered through the task cycle during the TBLT implementation in the class created a significant opportunity for the students to practice their language skill through the group discussion and other group projects.Group work embraced climate and promotes students' responsibility and autonomy and helped the process to be experienced actively (Bolukbas, 2011;Brown, 2015).The group discussion or group work effectively played a role in stimuli and encouraged the students' participation during teaching and learning process.The students tended to involve in the practical language use which more focus on the meaning that linguistic form.By focusing more on the meaning, the students got a better comprehension of the texts given.Beside the group discussion, the choices of materials which were appropriate to the students' specific field also the other factors that increased the students' comprehension of the text given.
Furthermore, according to Nunan (2004), the creativity that the students showed during the completion of the task brought them to maximally engage the language because they tried to construct their language by recombining some familiar words, expressions, and structures.In TBLT, the students were not scared to make some mistakes, and they could express what they understand about the texts freely.Based on the data from field notes, almost all of the students used mixed language between Indonesian language and English during the task completion.The use of mixed language was not seen as a problem during the strategy implementation because most of the students still kept trying to use English during the task activities.
The students attempted to deliver the content of the article by using English and manipulate the word they found in the text during the performance of the tasks.However, TBLT was also known as the meaningbased approach that emphasizes how students could understand the meaning of the task and constructed their text by choosing the best vocabulary and grammar to communicate it.So, the critical point was the students able to deliver the content of the article clearly and correctly.The students' performance was continued by letting the other students' to give feedbacks.The feedbacks given to their friends' works could continuously help them to check their comprehension.It was supported by the data from the observation checklist in all meetings that 60%-70% of the students could summarize the article given by using their own words.According to Nunan (2004), this kind of flow in the task activity would maximally engage the students' language acquisition.So, they were not only improving the comprehension but also their English acquisition became broader.
Both information gap and reasoning gap activities that the students experienced during the strategy implementation brought the awareness that reading comprehension was not only about reading the text or finding the meaning of each vocabulary presented in the text but also it could be combined with some exciting activities that included the group discussion and group project.The activities which included the group discussion contribute the communicative goals that the students need to deal with the completion of the tasks.In other words, TBLT helps to promote students' collaborative skills with their partners.
According to Brown (2015), group work generated interactive language and also offered and embraced effective climate, and promotes the students' responsibility and autonomy.Also, Bolukbas (2011) stated that carry out reading comprehension activities through cooperative learning strategies had helped the process to be experienced more actively.In the post-task, the students were asked to summarize the information that they got after reading the text.The summarizing activity gave the students more opportunity to re-check their understanding by reflecting the information from the text and integrated the text information with prior knowledge.Additionally, the feedback from the students and teachers to reveal the tasks helped to monitor the students' progress and opinion about the task performance.
To sum up, the findings during the strategy implementation showed that TBLT could be used for promoting Agriculture students' reading comprehension.TBLT can be seen as a solution for the students to improve their reading comprehension and also give more alternative tasks and activities to be applied in the classroom context.TBLT also can be implemented as a breakthrough of the learning approach to bring the awareness to start to change the teacher-centered into student-centered approach.

Conclusion and Suggestions
From the findings and discussion, it can be concluded that the effective implementation of TBLT to improve Agriculture students' reading comprehension by the following activities: a) Pre-task: (1) brainstorming activity, (2) performing the example of a similar task with the different topic, (3) displaying pictures or video to be observed by the students.b) Task cycle: some activities such as group discussion, information gap activities, reasoning gap activities, drawing outline related to the main ideas and supporting details, poster presentation, and video presentation.The activities are supported by some following steps: (1) students read the text individually, (2) ask them to highlight the important words and sentences, (3) assign the students to work in a group to find the specific and implicit information presented in the text, (4) ask the representative of the group to present their findings, (5) give the chances to the students in the class to provide feedback.c) Post-task: (1) let the students summarize the text by using their own words, and (2) give feedbacks for the activities.
Additionally, the implementation of TBLT in reading comprehension brings many advantages.First, the students become more active in the classroom activities because they have more opportunity during teaching and learning process.Second, TBLT implementation increases the students' awareness to understand the meaning of the vocabularies from the context of the text.Finally, it gives the students a broader view of the reading strategy which is useful for them to comprehend the text.
By considering the result of this research, it is suggested for English lecturers who face the same problem to apply TBLT for the teaching and learning activities, specifically in reading comprehension.For supporting the TBLT implementation, the lecturer should be well-prepared to design the tasks as meaningful as possible.Besides, the lecturer should make sure that the materials are appropriate for the students' specialized field and academic level.Implementing TBLT can give potential benefits to solve the students' problems in reading comprehension which considers challenging for them.However, this strategy also could be used by the English lecturers from the other major department who wants to improve the students' reading comprehension skill for other genre text.