The goal of education is to enhance the literacy skills of individuals, for examples, reading, writing, and grammar. Students in this days tend to read more in Wattpad. Reading habits are well-planned and deliberate pattern of study which has attained a form of consistency on the part of students toward understanding academic subjects and passing at examinations. Literacy has been introduced and taught to students, especially children at school. It is as a practice of acquiring new knowledge. Literacy development is a beneficial activity which involves students in ways of making, interpreting and communicating ideas or meaning with written language, correcting grammars. These statements implicitly state that literacy is very important in order to understand other skills. Students are taught to be aware of their literacy skills both reading and writing through different kinds of materials. Students was influenced to read Short stories in Wattpad through media. On the other hand, reading may lead to different impact in our Academic performance.
One of the literacy skills that should be developed is reading, “If a student is good at reading he will make good grades otherwise he will stay low in the order of merit.” This statement might mean that reading is considered as a basic skill for students to understand in the process of learning. Reading habits determine the academic achievements of students to a great extent. They also state that by having low comprehension in reading, it influences students’ active thinking and participation in the class. Students often come from different environments and localities with different levels of academic achievement. Therefore, they differ in the pattern of reading habits. While some students have good reading habits, others tend to exhibit poor reading habits. Academic achievement means how much knowledge the individual has acquired from the school. Moreover, in teaching and learning process, teacher and students have to communicate effectively and exchange ideas.
Unfortunately, most students are lacking of ability in understanding English reading materials like Wattpad and they also have problems in responding English comprehension question. Literacy development especially for reading is really needed in tertiary education because the students are going to find job, work and attend many kinds of seminars or meetings. This skill is very important since the information and technology are always developed. The students need to understand the basic skill first in order to achieve the success. Galik (1999) explains why reading is very important especially for students in junior level; “Reading is a corner-stone for success, not just in school, but throughout life. The Commission noted that without the ability to read well, opportunities for personal fulfillment and job success will inevitably be lost.”
Students who have just attended classes in standard schools commonly lack of motivation to learn English. They will not be inspired by using textbooks which are full of grammar. They are more interested in learning English by using another media or materials (Wattpad) instead of textbooks, because the language and grammar are sometimes complicated for them. The university students need new experience in learning English, especially in learning reading comprehension.
There are some ways that have been offered and used to teach reading in junior level and one of them is by integrating literature. Literature has been integrated in language teaching as one of the ways to improve language skills, especially reading comprehension. Hismanoglu (2005) states, “The use of literature as a technique for teaching both basic language skills (i.e. reading, writing, listening and speaking) and language areas (i.e. vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation) is very popular within the field of foreign language learning and teaching nowadays.”
Wattpad’s Short story is one of the literary works used to improve the ability of comprehending the text. Young (1996) mentions two benefits of using short stories. First, short story provides entertaining and fun activities which make students enjoy and feel relax in learning English. Second, it encourages students to be more critical thinker and easy to remember the context of the story. By using short stories, the students can feel new experience in practice reading without making them bored. They are also suitable for all levels with various kinds of topics.
In this modern era, short story is not only found in story books, but also in internet. One of the famous websites or applications that promotes short story and other literature is Wattpad. It is the biggest e-literature community on web which allows people to read and enjoy stories by all online writers all over the world and share their own stories through writing (Popescu). Readers and writers can access this media through its website or Wattpad application available on smartphones. Wattpad helps writers share their stories to public, attract readers to read and get feedback from them. Readers can also give their comments, follow, communicate through comments, and create new chapters or suggestions from original text.
Based on the explanation above, the researcher decided to focus on using short story through Wattpad in teaching reading to university students. The researcher assured that this method was appropriate for teaching reading comprehension to university students. It was hoped that reading learning process can be more exciting and their reading comprehension would be improved because students would actively read it and understand the context by giving feedback or comments toward the story they read and interpreted the messages. Finally, it was hoped that it could support other lecturers to use this idea in teaching their students too. In order to achieve the objectives of this study, the following research question was formulated: was there any significant difference in reading comprehension achievement between the students who were taught by using short stories through Wattpad and those who were not