Electronic Theses and Dissertation

This thesis focuses on the strategies used by the outstanding students in comprehending expository texts: a case study at sman 1 sigli in pidie regency. by using purposive sampling technique, the school was chosen as the sample because they were ranked higher than the others in terms of their national evaluation results especially in the academic year 200512006. by using purposive sampling, thirty-one outstanding students of the third grade were selected. quantitatively, the respondents were high ranked students. using descriptive qualitative approach, this study attempted to identify strategies used by the outstanding students when comprehending expository texts; to find out the problems they faced and to describe strategies used to handle those problems. two types of data collection techniques were employed: observation, and questionnaires. all data were transcribed into written forms and they were analyzed by using categories developed from the data collected. the study found that in the attempt to comprehend texts. the respondents usually made use of common words available in the text (58%). while they did not translate text word by word, there are 55% of respondents claimed that they often made prediction through contextual expression. besides, there are 58% of respondents said that they found unfamiliar words less than 50% in a text. and its varied to non verb (74%). 22% of respondents made use of the dictionary to find the meaning of unfamiliar words. the study also found that in the attempt to find the main idea, 55% of the respondents usually use scanning strategy. to comprehend ambiguous words, the respondents usually ask their peers or teachers or made prediction over the meaning of the words. to achieve better comprehension of expository text, the study recommends that students read various types of texts. so that they will have a wide range of vocabularies. 11 is also recommended that, when teaching, teachers implement meaningful learning techniques, which will maximize the potential owned by the students such as making prediction, thinking aloud, and locating detail by using hints of questions that follow the texts.