Students’ Difficulties in Reading Comprehension and the Strategies to Deal with the Difficulties

Abstract

Indonesian reading interest according to PISA (2018). Indonesia is ranked 6th from the bottom or 74th.In more detail, based on the results of the PISA study, 30% of Indonesian students are at least Level 2 in reading ability. Students often feel difficulties in reading comprehension therefore they need strategies to deal with the difficulties. this study was carried out to explore two research objectives; to find out the students’ difficulties in reading comprehension, and to find out the strategies to cope with the difficulties in reading comprehension. This study used a qualitative approach with case study design. In this study, the researcher employed a single instrumental case study, because the researcher only focus on high achievers. This current study involved 19 in this study were first grade students at SMA Hasyim Asy’ari Batu, and they were asked to do the test given by the researcher, the test consisted of four aspects (main idea, detail information, understanding vocabulary, and making inferences). The students’ scores from the test were used to invite five students with the highest score to interview, the interview is used to find out the difficulties in reading comprehension and the strategies they use to deal with the difficulties. The collected data were then analyzed using the data from the test were analyzed descriptively by using formula percentage calculations, meanwhile, the data from the interview were analyzed by using transcription. The findings showed that students were still difficult with four types of difficulties in detail information, difficulty in understanding vocabulary, difficulty in determining main idea, and difficulty in making inference. Meanwhile, several factors that cause students’ difficulties were difficulty in understanding long sentences in the text, difficulty in understanding vocabulary, and difficulty in concentration. The researcher discovered that the strategies they used to overcome their difficulties were by highlighting, translating, and reading repeatedly. It can be implied that they use cognitive strategies to deal with the problem. Keywords: Reading Comprehension, Descriptive Text, Reading Difficulties, Reading Strategies