THE DIFFICULTIES IN READING COMPREHENSION OF THE FIRST GRADE STUDENTS OF SMAN 11 BANJARMASIN

Abstract

Reading comprehension is the readers’ ability to understand, evaluate, and utilize text to find information according to the readers’ purpose. When reading a text, students may find many factors contribute to the cause of students difficulties in comprehending text. . Some of these factors are language knowledge, learner’s background knowledge, motivation, lack of reading strategies, and reading process. This research aimed to describe the students' difficulties in reading comprehension at the first grade of SMAN 11 Banjarmasin. The research method used in this study is a descriptive design used in this research with a qualitative approach. The researcher took the research subjects from one class that was X MIPA 3 and one English teacher. This research used a questionnaire consisting of 16 items divided into five types of questions which were linguistic aspects, reading strategies, psychological factors, and external factors. The researcher used the questionnaire to confirm the interview. The findings revealed that the students face the difficulties of vocabulary, grammar, and making inferences. These difficulties were caused by some factors: lack of knowledge about strategies in reading, lack of practice in reading English texts, lack of practices to find main ideas, explanatory ideas, and relationships between ideas, as well as lack of practices to make inferences and references from reading texts. The other factors were the students did not want to bring a dictionary to school, lack of support and motivation from parents, inadequate learning facilities, and difficulty in adapting in class. Therefore, it is suggested to other researchers to conduct further studies to investigate deeply about the factors which affect students in reading comprehension and how to overcome the difficulties.