A remote reading literacy for senior high school: A voice from students

The pandemic Covid-19 outbreak caused reading literacy to get less attention than the normal school condition in SMA Negeri 2 Semarang. Therefore, there should be ways to run remote reading literacy strategies. This study aimed to investigate students' perception toward a remote reading literacy strategy, particularly the reading texts, learning process, advantages and disadvantages of the remote reading literacy strategy. The population of this study was 36 students of the 12th graders in SMA Negeri 2 Semarang. The study design was qualitative descriptive. The data was collected through questionnaires and interview. Then, the data was analyzed using interpretive descriptive analysis. The specific target to be achieved in this study is that by knowing the students' perception of remote reading literacy, the result may be used to reference the English teachers to have the reading literacy in English lesson. The study results were the students' perception that they needed to read an average of five times before reading aloud the texts with the tangible pronunciation and comprehend the meaning of the new vocabularies. Moreover, they informed that the learning process was unique, promoted autonomous learning. However, the video compressing and the internet connection were challenging for the students. Received: 29 May 2021 Revised: 7 June 2021 Accepted: 14 June 2021


Introduction
In the normal teaching and learning situation, English teachers of SMA Negeri 2 Semarang found some problems applying for reading literacy in their classes. They admitted that some of the problems were the limited available time and inadequate strategies to conduct reading literacy (Edge & Olan, 2020;Prastikawati & Sodiq, 2016). Therefore, they only led the students to have a 15-minute reading time by the end of the last session of each day. In that issue, most of the students chose Indonesian books to read. Therefore, reading literacy in English was far behind (Wiyaka & Prastikawati, 2021). It was proven from the quiz result, which the writer conducted before she applied reading literacy in her class. The quiz items were taken from the 2018 PISA reading literacy survey, and unfortunately, the students' scores were below average. Nowadays, having remote learning caused many teachers to pay less attention to reading literacy. Even the reading literacy program, which students had had by the end of the lesson, is no longer on the school schedule. Practically every teacher needs to improvise the reading literacy based on their provided time and limited strategy. Therefore, the writer intended to apply for a remote reading literacy in English class.
The writer asked the students to have their reading before a 90-minute session in class. The session was in line with OECD's (2019) first proposal of cognitive processing strategies. It focuses on reading fluency. It does not rely on how students read aloud but on the individuals' ability to read words and related texts accurately to understand the whole text (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003). When students understand the pronunciation and meanings of the words or phrases in the texts, they found no obstacles to understand the whole meaning of the texts. That is why it is called fluent in reading.
The applied reading literacy aimed to enable students to recognize vocabulary in the texts and identify the logical and illogical sentences taken from the texts. The texts used in the reading literacy session were Flu, Democracy in Athens, Graffiti, Lake Chad. They were adopted from the 2000 and 2009 PISA Reading Literacy items. Besides the texts, the writer also provided student's worksheets and learning logs. During the session, the writer and students used Ms Teams as the virtual classroom, WhatsApp, text to speech application, video recorder, auto-captions video recorder application, Google Meet and YouTube, during the learning process independently and in class.
The teacher implemented remote reading literacy in some steps. First, she provided instruction, four written texts in the WhatsApp group. Second, students practised reading the texts aloud and recording themselves in video format independently. Before they submitted their recordings, they were advised to check the pronunciations by the text to speech application and practised their aloud readings on the video recording application with the auto caption, such as Google Meet and YouTube. Third, students recorded themselves while reading aloud in video format and uploaded their recordings to the assignment in the cloud storage. Fourth, the teacher invited the students to discuss the texts' topics and vocabularies in the MS Teams meeting based on the English schedule. Fifth, students informed their opinions in the class based on the topics mentioned by the teacher. Sixth, the teacher informed the quiz link to assess students' reading fluency and then the students did the quiz. Seventh, students completed their learning logs.
…… The realization of the learning process was in July 2020. On 20 July 2020, some students consulted with the teacher about the technical problems to submit the videos on the provided link of the video submission. The teacher let the students learn the worksheet, record their video recording of reading aloud for a week. On 18 July 2020, the teacher distributed the file of the first meeting worksheet in WhatsApp Group. She and the students discussed the worksheet instructions to follow. The exercises were recording videos of reading aloud of the texts. The reading aloud was used to fluent the students' reading because they would check the pronunciation and the vocabulary meanings. On 28 July 2020, the teacher took the students to have a class meeting. After she made sure they had opened the worksheets, she asked the main ideas of texts. She signed the 'like' emoticon anytime the students answered her questions to show how she cared for their responses. From the students' responses, she was sure that the students had already read and comprehended the main ideas. After about 74 minutes of discussing the main ideas, she asked the students to do a quiz on reading fluency. The question items were eight sentences to let the students decide whether or not the sentences were logical. After around thirty minutes, she informed the class of the learning logs submission on the provided link.
The questions of this study were: What is the students' opinion toward the reading texts, learning process? What are the advantages and disadvantages of remote reading literacy in English class? Therefore, the study was aimed to investigate students' perception toward a remote reading literacy strategy, particularly the reading texts, learning process, advantages, and disadvantages of the remote reading literacy strategy. This study is expected to reference the English teachers to maintain the reading literacy in English lessons during distance learning.

Research Methods
The study was a qualitative descriptive design. According to Arikunto (1998), qualitative descriptive research is research that describes or explains an event. In addition, this research describes the conditions and research process in detail. Moreover, Best (1981) also argues that descriptive qualitative studies describe the characteristics of existing phenomena, developing opinions, ongoing processes, significant impacts, or trends in the excitement in society. Therefore, remote reading literacy was described taken from the data. It was collected through three questionnaires and one interview question. The data was then analyzed using interpretive descriptive analysis.
The participants of this study were XII MIPA 8 students in the fifth semester, consisting of twenty female and sixteen male students. Thirty-six students had remote reading literacy in English class, and they answered the questions in the learning logs as the questionnaires and had the interview after the learning process.
This study used qualitative research to get the data from the participants. The learning logs of 36 participants functioned as the questionnaire, and the writer interviewed six randomized students to know the students' opinions towards the remote reading literacy implementation from its reading texts, learning process, advantages, and disadvantages. The questionnaires consisted of three open-ended questions. Moreover, the students answered the interview with one open-ended question.
The questionnaire items were as follows: 1. Have you read these texts before? 2. How many times do you practice your reading before you save your video recordings to upload them as your assignment? Explain the reasons! 3. How do you feel about the reading texts, learning process, and quiz?
After the students submitted their questionnaire responses in the form of learning logs in Google Drive, the writer interviewed six randomized students to determine the students' opinion on the advantages and disadvantages of remote reading literacy. The sampling technique used was convenience sampling. According to Dörnyei (2007), convenience sampling is a sampling method from researchers. Meanwhile, Crossman (2017) states that researchers use the closest and most existing research subjects in the study in convenience sampling. Therefore, the writer took six students from the available participants.
The procedure in this study began with the learning process. And then, the data were obtained by questionnaires from the learning logs and interview. The learning logs, treated as the questionnaire, were analyzed by using non-statistical instruments. The nonstatistical data were used to analyze the descriptive data: the students' effort to read aloud the reading texts fluently, their opinion on the reading texts, learning process, disadvantages, and disadvantages of remote reading literacy.

Results and Discussion
The result of the yes-no question on the questionnaire, whether the students read the texts before the learning process, as shown in the table below: 77.8% of the participants admitted that they had already read the reading texts used in the remote reading literacy, and only 22.2% said they had never read the texts before. It means that at least most of the students had read the texts used in remote reading literacy. From the table above, it is informed that 36.3% of the participants needed read five times and more to read the texts for some reasons. The following are the reasons why the students need more than one practice before they could record their reading aloud fluently: 1. The students made sure they knew the tangible pronunciation. 2. The students found out the meanings of the words in the texts. 3. The students found out the main ideas of the texts. This information showed that the students found it was essential to read more than once to read aloud. It was important to make sure the students correctly pronounce the words, know the meanings, and find out the main idea. Table 3 Students' perceptions of the reading texts No. Answers % 3. The texts challenged the students to check the pronunciation and meanings of the word on Google and Google Translate.
The texts encouraged the students to practice tangible pronunciation.

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25 Table 4 Students' perceptions of the learning process No. Answers % 3.
It enriched students' vocabularies.
It encouraged students to pronounce tangibly.
It improved students' confidence in reading aloud.
It provided students' freedom to express themselves.
It led the students to be autonomous learners.
It gave opportunities for all students to give their opinion.
It should be improved by having a video conference.
Technical issues, like internet connection, video compressing, and limited phone memory storage, caused problems during the learning process. 40% of the participants thought that their pronunciation and vocabularies were improved through the learning process. The process of recording the independent reading aloud encourages students to search for what they needed. It also built their confidence to express themselves in reading aloud because they could manage the convenient time for them to practice and record themselves. However, 15% of the participants saw that the learning process should provide video conference to communicate orally and improve internet connection quality. The quiz was qualified and straightforward.
The quiz improved the students' self-evaluation.

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The students had yes-no questions for the quiz, and they needed to know whether or not that they could handle the texts because they had been fluent in reading them. Moreover, the students were satisfied with the quiz quality.
After the students had their reading literacy process, six randomized students were chosen to be an interview. The data taken from the interview showed the advantages and disadvantages of remote reading literacy. The advantages were as follows: 1. It improved the students' pronunciation. 2. It enriched the students' vocabularies.
3. It encouraged the students to browse websites to search vocabulary meanings and pronunciation. The disadvantages which students encountered: 1. Varied condition of students' cell phone caused some technical problem, for example, the error happening during the video recording. 2. The poor internet connection made it the students difficult to upload their video recording on Google Drive. 3. The video compressing took students' time longer than the reading aloud process itself.

Conclusion
From the data obtained through questionnaires and interview with 36 participants from XII MIPA 8 in the fifth semester in the academic year 2020/ 2021, the writer could conclude that the students have varied perceptions towards report reading literacy.
The study results were the students' perception that even though most of the students had already read the texts before the remote reading literacy, they needed to read an average of five times before reading aloud the texts with the tangible pronunciation and comprehend the meaning of new vocabularies. This fact proved that students need more than one time to read English texts. Moreover, the students informed that the remote reading literacy process was unique and promoted autonomous learning. They also admitted that they enjoyed the remote reading literacy since they found advantages in their learning process. However, the task of video compressing and the internet connection were challenging for the students. In conclusion, remote reading literacy will run well if students' motivation supports it as the basis of autonomous learning. It is also expected to be an interactive learning process with varied technique and applications. Furthermore, it needs a good internet network and compatible gadgets. Hopefully, this study may contribute to enrich the remote reading literacy strategies.