The Difficulties Encountered by the Students in Reading Comprehension at Second Semester Students of UNISMA

Abstract

This article presents the difficulties encountered by the students in reading comprehension at second semester students of UNISMA. The aims of this study was to know the difficulties and to know the causes of students’ difficulties in reading comprehension of the second semester students of University of Islam Malang. This research employed quantitative and qualitative approach. The sample of this study was 40 second semester students of English education department of University of Islam Malang. The findings showed that second semester students of University of Islam Malang were still difficult in four types of difficulties such as difficulty in understanding vocabulary were 44.5%, difficulty in making inference were 26.2%, difficulty in detail information were 19.5% and difficulty in determining main idea were 9.75%. Meanwhile, several factors that cause students’ difficulties were difficulty in understanding long sentence in the text, difficulty in understanding vocabulary and difficulty in concentration. To sump up, that several second semesterstudents were lack of vocabulary mastery, they found problem to read long text and often lose concentration while reading and comprehending English text. Therefore, the students should be more diligent to read English text to increase their vocabulary mastery and easy to understand the English text. Hopefully, this research can be such a medium for lecturers to evaluate their reading process, the media they used and look for an effective technique to teach them reading comprehension.