A Study of EFL Students’ Perception towards Extensive Reading Activity at Universitas Islam Malang

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate and describe the EFL students' perceptions towards extensive reading activity at the Universitas Islam Malang. Reading ability is a basic foundation in academic reading or writing that every student must have. The objective of the reading activity is to help readers understand what they read. In Indonesia, there is still a significant lack of reading enthusiasm among EFL students. As a consequence, it may limit their learning and comprehension of the material. Extensive reading assists students to deal with all of the problems in the reading activity. Furthermore, there is still a lack of information on students' perceptions of the benefits of the implementation of extensive reading activity. Besides, because everyone can give a different perception, so the researcher conducted research in English Department at the Universitas Islam Malang. The design of this research is descriptive qualitative research. The subjects of this study are the 8th semester students of the English Department at Universitas Islam Malang from the 2018 academic year. The researcher chose twelve students who have done extensive reading activity. To know the students' perception towards the implementation of extensive reading activity, interview was used as the instruments for collecting data. Furthermore, the questions are originally made by recent researcher which has been validated. The process of data analysis included organizing and familiarizing, coding and reducing, and interpreting and representing. The findings of this study showed the students’ perceptions towards extensive reading activity were positive. Most of the students mentioned that doing the extensive reading activity regularly is the way they optimize their reading effort, choosing different levels of language as a way to upgrade reading material. They also mentioned the problems they faced while doing the activity because of a lack of language proficiency. Besides, the participants reviewed the benefit of extensive reading activity, which could improve their English language proficiency and develop imagination. Furthermore, the benefit they mentioned is increased English skills, general knowledge, and reading interest. After all, they said that through an extensive reading activity they could find an interesting way to learn English.

Keywords : EFL Students, Students’ Perception, Extensive Reading.