Constructing Toulmin's Logical Structure Through Viat-map Application for Reading Comprehension of EFL Students

Learning English is necessary for a non-English speaking country since most of the information was mostly provided in English. To access that information, people are encouraged to understand the English language. An application called Viat-map is develophed as an English Reading Comprehension Learning tools. It is using the Toulmins Arguments concept to form a graphical logic structure. The lecturer was responsible to find the important statement in the Reading material and used it to form a Toulmin Argument concept. It provides the students with several answers to be chosen by the student to reconstruct the logic. This experiment involved fifty-eight sophomore English as a Foreign Language students. The Assumption built in this research is that by forming a graphical logic structure of Toulmin arguments in Viat-map will have a better understanding than the summarization method. Before the experiment, an initial test using three reading materials was conducted. The main purpose of this test is to get their base reading score used to create control and experiment groups. The control group used the summarization method to understand the reading material, while the experiment group applied Viat-mat. The experiment itself was conducted one time and divided into four activities, reading, pre-test, reading with activity, and post-test. The experiment results showed that there are significant difference in post-test, the experimental groups outperformed control groups. Other results showed that there are no improvements from pre-test to post-test for control groups, unlike the experiment group which had a moderate improvement from pre-test to post-test.