Kamis, 24 Juli 2014

MURDER TECHNIQUE

MURDER TECHNIQUE 

PART I. DEFINITION OF MURDER TECHNIQUE
MURDER is one of the types of cooperative learning techniques. MURDER technique was introduced by Hythecker, Dansereau, and Rocklin. The word MURDER stands for Mood, Understand, Recall, Detect, Elaborate, and Review. This technique is done in pairs or group. Moreover Hythecker, Dansereau, and Rocklin say that the implementation of MURDER technique leads to better performance and more effective than that produced by students using their typical study methods. In this technique, the students can encourage themselves to process the content of material with different goals for each steps. MURDER study asks students to collaborate to perform the thinking tasks or summarizing and elaborating on reading material. The “M” in MURDER stand for “mood”, the first step in which the individual should attempt to find a time and place that set a positive mood. This will allow the individual to study more effectively, because an individual will usually not be able to read effectively if he or she is in an environment that is distracting or just generally irritating. The “U” in MURDER stand for “understand”, which the individual marks any information in the text that he or she does not understand by circling it, highlighting it, or simply drawing a question mark next to it. The “R” in MURDER stands for “recall” which the individual should attempt to paraphrase and note everything that he or she leaned from the section that he or she just went over. The “D” in MURDER stand for “digest/detect”, suggests that the individual should go back over each topic that he or she marked earlier and reread that material in an attempt to understand that material better. The “E” in MURDER stand for “expand/elaborate”, suggests that the individual should go back and start asking and attempting to answer questions about the specific topics that he or she still does not understand even after completing the digest step. The “R” in MURDER stands for “review” all of the material that the individual actually does understand in order to refresh material in the individuals mind .There are two objectives of the MURDER script. First, learners are supposed to acquire knowledge about text content. Second they are supposed to acquire text-learning strategies. These strategies include cognitive skills such as explaining and meta cognitive skills such as monitoring. In accordance with these objectives, MURDER increases learners‟ engagement in cognitive and meta cognitive activities. As an example for cognitive activities, learners are supposed to engage in explaining.

PART II. THE STEPS, LEVEL AND IMPLEMENTATION MURDER IN  LISTENING COMPREHENSION.
The MURDER technique can be used or can be collaborated into all the skill, they are reading, listening, speaking and writing. But I choose two skill to apply this technique, listening and reading.
1.      Listening.
Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning. Listening is often confused with hearing. Hearing is simply the  act of perceiving sound by the ear. If you are not hearing-impaired, hearing simply happens. Listening,  however, is something you consciously choose to do. Listening requires concentration so that your brain  processes meaning from words and sentences. Listening leads to learning. While hearing is a biological process that can be scientifically explained, listening is a neurological cognitive regarding the processing of auditory stimuli received by the auditory system. Hearing is always occurring, most of the time subconsciously. Listening is the interpretative action taken by the listener in order to understand and potentially make meaning out of the sound waves.
Listening is the foundation of language. Listening is an integral part of the reading process. It helps to build vocabulary, increase fluency and aid in comprehension. Supporting reading through listening enables students to build skills and access curriculum at their grade level. We teach listening because listening is very important to improves relationships, improves our knowledge, improves our understanding, can save money, exchange information, enjoy yourself, and share the feelings. And we teach listening to prepare our students for these situations :
-          Attending a lesson or a lecture. The aim of this activity is to understand the main concept and to be able to distinguish the main information.
-          Listening to announcements, news and weather forecast. In this situation listener’s objective is to get relevant information.
-          Listening to live situation in which one takes no part. This type of situation is usually connected with eavesdropping. The person listening to the conversation is usually unaware of the context so that he or she cannot interfere into the conversation.
-          Listening to or watching plays, watching TV or listening to a radio for pleasure.
-          The aim of this activity is to entertain oneself.
-          Listening to someone giving a speech. The listener is often interested in views and attitudes of the speaker.
-          Following the instructions. The listener’s objective is to accomplish the task successfully .
For example in junior high school.
a.       In the implementation, teacher set the mood of students by relaxation and focused on the task group. Teacher giving interesting information about phenomena like earthquake. This activity is done at the beginning of the lesson or apperception. Teacher gives motivation to the students so that students’ enthusiastic be increased. Most of the students raise their hand and attempt verbal expression to the problems posed by teachers, because these problems indeed close to life day-to-day. This activity makes good the mood of students to participate in future learning. In addition, teachers also deliver learning objectives, so that students feel the material lessons learned have benefits for themselves.
b.      At the Understand stage, students given the opportunity to form understanding independently with listen the material that read by the teacher. This activity done by each pair of students. In this stage students are not only acts as a receiver of information in the learning activities, but students construct their comprehension about what they heard. And teacher gives exercises to the students and this stage students are actively exploring knowledge independently.
c.       In Recall activity each pairs of students discus about the exercises that given by the teacher before. One of students express their opinion and other write down the task. More interactive collaboration of students in the group, the results of student evaluations at the end learning even more good.
d.      In Detect, students are required to examine the delivery of responsive material and information carefully. In this stage the student may submit opinions or if there are questions.
e.       In the Elaborate stage, teachers provide an opportunity for group renderer to respond and provide objections related to the question of other group members in detect activity.
f.       The last stage of learning activities is Review stage. In this stage, students under the guidance of the teacher summarizes learning outcomes that have been studied.

PART III. THE STEPS, LEVEL AND IMPLEMENTATION MURDER IN READING COMPREHENSION.
Reading.
Reading is the process of constructing meaning in transaction with texts and not simply the ability to recall what was directly stated in the text. Meanwhile comprehension is the goal of both reading and listening. Successful comprehension enables readers (or listeners) to acquire information, to experience and be aware of other worlds (including fictional ones), to communicate successfully, and to achieve academic success. Reading comprehension is a complex activity where the reader can get knowledge from the text both of information or message and new vocabularies; furthermore, to understand text the reader need to find out the meaning or the correlation between the sentences that establish in the whole text. They can retell again the information that they have read depend on their knowledge, culture and background. Finally, there are a lot of benefits that the reader can get from reading. If we read a lot of books, magazines, articles, and many things you can get a lot of knowledge and information from it. The habit of reading can add to the information available on various topics. It also helps the readers to stay in-touch with contemporary information and makes them sensitive to global issues and helps them catch in hand what is going on around them. Generally, reading texts are good sources and wealth choices for self improvement and motivation. They have a great contribution towards proficient achievement. In addition, they are informational and reliable for what we may query for a long time without satisfactory answers. Students need to read both complex text and a lot of text. According to Adams (2009), “To grow, our students must read lots, and more specifically they must read lots of „complex‟ texts that offer them new language, new knowledge, and new modes of thought”. Reading is like every other human activity in that the amount of practice really matters, especially the amount of reading done while reading proficiency is being developed. Ensuring that students are given example opportunities to read a variety of materials in a variety of ways increases their motivation because teachers can tap into students‟ interests and give students enough practice for reading proficiency to develop.
For example in Senior High School.
a.       Mood. The students are ask to set their proper mood. A pair of students sets a relaxed purposeful mood before beginning their work. They make sure they are clear on the procedure to follow and engage in a little chit-chat.
b.      Understand. The students are ask read silently each section for understanding the general idea of the text. A reading passage ( or section from a text ) has been divided into sections. ( The teacher can do this or students can use natural breaks in the passage, such as chapter sections ). Each student read the first section silently.
c.       Recall. The students (one member of the pair) are asked to recall the information or key ideas of the text  without looking at the text. Without looking at the text, one member of the pair acts as a recaller who summarizes the key ideas of the section.
d.      Detect. The other partner looks at the text, detect any errors, omissions, or unnecessary information in the summary and discusses these with the recaller. The role of recaller and detector rotate for the next section.
e.       Elaborate. Both students elaborate on the ideas in the section. The types of elaboration include the following :
1.      Connections with other things the students have studied.
2.      Links between the section and students’ lives.
3.      Addition of relevant information not included in the section.
4.      Agreements or disagreements with the views or ideas expressed the section.
5.      Reaction to the section such as surprise, gladness, or anger.
6.      Applications of the ideas and information.
7.      Questions either about things not understood or questions sparked by the section.
f.       Review. When the entire text has been completed, the pair combines their thought to summarize the entire text.

PART IV STRENGTH AND WEAKNESSES OF MURDER TECHNIQUE
This technique has strength and weaknesses when applying in teaching learning process.
-          Strength
1.      Making the students can work together to share what they have learned to their friend.
2.      Research on the MURDER technique suggests that they increase comprehension and recall. Several elements of the technique may account for this:
a.       working with someone else may help keep students on task,
b.      talking about the text may help recall and comprehension,
c.       identifying main ideas may help recall and comprehension,
d.      the detecting step gives an opportunity to correct misunderstandings,
e.       the elaborations may help connection the ideas in the texts with readers’ lives and give them an opportunity to raise questions,
f.       the review step may help put each section into a large overview,
g.      the repetition involved in the various steps may aid recall.
3.      This technique can be used for all the skills (reading, listening, speaking and writing) so all the skill can be taught.
4.      Small group (in pairs) can have quality discussion because if the students work in pair they will more focus in study and also each member of the group will pay attention to check his/her friend understanding.
5.      Making positive interdependence (sink or swim together) its mean that each group member’s efforts are required and indispensable for group success and also each group member has a unique contribution to make to the joint effort because we know everyone have difference skill, ideas so they can contribution what they know to make their group can  reach the goal.
The murder technique also has its weakness, such as:
1.      It can make the class little bit noisy because all the students have to speak with their partner alternately to summarize the key ideas of the reading passage in order his/her partner can detects any errors, omissions, or unnecessary information.
2.      This technique will take a longer because there are many steps that the students have to done such as: first read the reading passage and then the students as recaller to summarize the key ideas with the member, and the other member has to detect any error from what his/her friend said, and then elaborate the idea and the last the students have to combine their thoughts to summarize the entire text (write down the conclusion).
3.      The group setting should be heterogeneous based on the students’ characteristics, and it should be not too big of each group.
4.      The wrong choice of choosing the member of each group will make conflict among the members that will not promote better learning.
5.      The students will not succeed if they cannot work well together.
6.      The technique does not work due to students’ passivity.
PART V CONCLUSION
Based on the explanation above, we can conclude that MURDER  as an alternative technique in teaching learning process. It may improve the teacher’s capability to conduct teaching learning activity appropriately. Moreover, this technique will encouraged students to communicate with each others and with the teacher in the classroom. So, they can work together and it is useful for their socialization and communication. The students also will able to improve their ability. They can be more active in the class and be more skillful in understanding an English lesson because they have been trained to learn effectively using MURDER technique.













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