The Correlation Between Cognitive Test-taking Strategies and Achievement in Toefl Reading Comprehension of the Students of English Department at State University of Makassar

This study investigated the correlation between cognitive test-taking strategies and achievement in TOEFL reading comprehension. It was conducted to find out: (1) the most dominant cognitive test-taking strategy applied by the students of English Department at the State University of Makassar, (2) the TOEFL reading achievement of the students of English Department at the State University of Makassar, (3) the correlation between students' cognitive test-taking strategies and their achievement in TOEFL reading comprehension. The research applied correlation research design. This research was conducted to the fourth-semester students in three fields of study at English Department of the State University of Makassar. There were 20 students were from English Education, 12 students from English Literature and 15 students from Business English. The data were collected through documentation of TOEFL reading comprehension score and questionnaire. The research result showed that (1) comprehending strategy was the most dominant cognitive test-taking strategy applied by the students of English Department at the State University of Makassar, (2) the TOEFL reading achievement was achieved into the fair category. It was proven by mean score 42.51 range from 21-30 score. (3) There was a correlation between cognitive test-taking strategies and TOEFL reading achievement with r = .822 classified as a high category in which score interval was higher than 66. Therefore, cognitive test-taking strategies have a role toward TOEFL reading achievement.

Reading is conducted for many purposes. People read newspapers to get information about advertisements, politics, or hot news. People read novels for entertainment so that they sometimes create their imagination to keep the story alive. For the academic reason, students are asked to read materials to extend their knowledge or certain topics based on each field of study. The key of reading is comprehension (Tankersley, 2003:90). Reading comprehension is dependent on three factors. The first factor is that the reader has knowledge about structures of the text. The second one is that the reader is able to monitor and reflect on his or her own level of understanding while reading the material. The last one is that the reader has an adequate background in the content and vocabulary being presented.
In other words, those factors are basic in learning reading comprehension.
To measure the extent to which students' ability in reading comprehension, the teacher administers a test. Bachman (1990) states that tests are designed to obtain a sample of individual behavior. In other words, tests can measure students' ability whether or not they can pass the learning based on their score. The teacher often gives the objective test to students, such as multiple-choice test.
The test is not only conducted in the educational area but also in other areas.
According to Mohammadi & Abidin (2011:237) section, students often feel that the section is difficult in which there are many unfamiliar words for them. Besides, the texts are boring because of its length. This section is also placed in the last section so that students are too tiring to think. Others sometimes underestimate it since the answers were provided in the text itself.
Consequently, many students get a low score in reading comprehension section.
Those problems happen because students do not learn the strategies applied in taking TOEFL reading comprehension test.
There are many strategies used in taking TOEFL reading comprehension test.
Some strategies are similar to reading comprehension strategies taught in the classroom regularly, but there are also strategies that are not used especially in paper-based TOEFL. They are summarizing, making prediction and paraphrasing.
The test takers can apply strategies such as scanning, skimming, identifying the main idea, making a prediction, making an inference or guessing the word by using the context clues in the text.
As the purpose of the study, the researcher explored students of English Department at CLS. Therefore, the researcher formulated research questions as follows:

3.
Is there any significant correlation between students' cognitive test-taking strategies and their achievement in TOEFL reading comprehension?

Review of Related Literature
Many researchers had investigated the correlation between test-taking strategies and students' performance on test-taking strategies. Zhang et.al (2013) investigated kinds of test-taking strategies use. They found that compensation strategies were mostly used by students and there were twenty-one strategy items of metacognitive strategies that significantly correlated with students' test performance. Sathopoulou & Nikaki (2009) found the most popular cognitive strategies used by students of Greek were inferring meaning, using prior knowledge to deal with the topic and searching for specific information. They also found that metacognitive strategies, such as considering the type of text and its characteristics (i.e. length, organization, and other text features). Ghafournia & Afgari (2013) had investigated the correlation between cognitive test-taking strategies and reading comprehension. They found comprehending and retrieval strategies more frequently at the high level of reading proficiency than the participants at the intermediate and low levels. This study is supported by Bachman and Palmer's (2010) idea about the interaction between the two sets of linguistic and non-linguistic factors (i.e., English reading comprehension as part of linguistic factor and strategies as part of non-linguistic factor).
In Indonesia, especially in Makassar, the research of cognitive test-taking strategies is a new research. This research describes strategies used by test-takers' based on the category of cognitive strategies in answering TOEFL reading comprehension. Cognitive strategies are ongoing mental activities used by testtakers to utilize their world knowledge and language to solve the given task (Zareee 2007).
According to Purpura (1999), cognitive processing is a multi-dimensional construct constituting a set of comprehending, memory and retrieval strategies. Related to Purpura's idea, Phakiti (2006) Oxford, 1990) Regarding the study, the researcher adopts cognitive strategies in taking reading comprehension test from Phakiti (2006) (2) restatement: or, that, is, in order words, i.e; (3) example: such as, for example, e.g. The answer to this question can generally be using the following steps: (i) find the word in the passage; locate any structural clues; (ii) read the part of the passage after the structural clue carefully. c). Determine meaning from word parts. The examinees can learn word parts such as bi-means two. Thus, bidirectional means in two or both direction.
Based on examples of cognitive test-taking strategies above, the researcher concludes that Cognitive Test-Taking Strategies in this research are strategies used by students in taking TOEFL reading comprehension section, based on the category of cognitive strategy. The focus of cognitive strategies in this research consists of comprehending, memory and retrieval strategies. Comprehending strategies are strategies that used to comprehend ideas in the reading passage; Memory strategies are strategies that used to remember ideas of reading passage; Retrieval strategies are strategies that used to remember vocabularies and pronouns related to reading the passage.

Participants
The researcher took a sample from students who enroll ELTIC course at Center for Language Service (CLS) of State University of Makassar. There were 20 students from English Education, 12 students from English Literature and 15 students from Business English.

Instruments
The researcher used documentation of TOEFL reading comprehension score and questionnaire. Documentation of TOEFL reading comprehension score was used to find out students' achievement during taking ELTIC course. Meanwhile, a questionnaire was used to measure cognitive test-taking strategies applied by the students.

a. Documentation of TOEFL Reading Comprehension Score
The documentation of TOEFL reading comprehension scores used to find out the students' achievement during taking ELTIC course which was provided by CLS.
The section consisted of five reading comprehension passage, followed by 50 multiple-choice items.

b. Questionnaire
The researcher used a questionnaire that described cognitive test-taking strategies. She used a 5-point Likert scale to indicate the frequency of using each strategy applied by students. This questionnaire consisted of 30 statements. It was piloted to the students who had passed ELTIC course. The result of validation showed that 10 statements were invalid and 20 statements were valid In addition, the reliability analysis was conducted. It was calculated by using Cronbach's alpha formula. The reliability index was (r = 8.48) which was highly reliable.

Procedures
The students were given TOEFL test by CLS. The time allotted to answer the test was 120 minutes. By assessing TOEFL reading comprehension, the researcher took the only score of TOEFL reading comprehension section at CLS. Then, the researcher gave the questionnaire to students after TOEFL test took place. The time allotted to answer the questionnaire was 15 minutes.

Data Analysis
The researcher used descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, Pearson Product Moment, through using the 20 th version of SPSS software.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The findings of this study are described and discussed in the following three research questions.

What cognitive test-taking strategy is the most dominant applied by students of English Department at the State University of Makassar?
To investigate the first research question, the descriptive statistics were calculated. The results can be seen in Table 1.  To find out the correlation between cognitive test-taking strategies and TOEFL reading achievement, Pearson Product Moment was calculated in Table 3. N 47 **. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).
As described in Table 3, there was significant and a positive correlation between cognitive test-taking strategies and TOEFL reading achievement. The both variables showed r = .822 at p =.000 in which categorized as positive and high.
These data proved the hypothesis which H0 was rejected and H1 was accepted.

Conclusion
Based on findings and discussion in the previous chapter, the research results can be concluded that the most dominant cognitive test-taking strategy applied by students of English Department at the State University of Makassar is a comprehending strategy. Next, The TOEFL reading achievement of students of score in the very poor category. Besides, there is a significant correlation between students' cognitive test-taking strategies and their achievement in TOEFL reading comprehension. The research results revealed that the correlation coefficient between cognitive test-taking strategies and TOEFL reading comprehension was r = .870** at p < 0.05 which was categorized as high. This study describes that cognitive test-taking strategies can assist students to obtain a better score in answering TOEFL reading comprehension test.

Suggestion
The researcher suggests that students should be trained to get comprehending strategies so that it can be easier for them to find the correct answer related to reading the passage. In addition, English teacher should combine other strategies to help students in taking TOEFL reading comprehension test. Due to the limitation of time, the next researcher should use another instrument in order to know the use of test-taking strategies applied by students.