Students’ Perception on Reading Comprehension Problems in Narrative Text

Abstract

Reading in another language is more difficult than reading in the first language (Nation, 2009:3). Even it will be a complex process if the students have to read in another language with various different text genres. Besides, the reader should recognize the words and sentences, and also understand the purpose of the text genre. Narrative text is one of the genres studied by the secondary students, but it is still difficult for some students. Al-khaleefah (2017:35) found that there were various difficulties encountered in the narrative text because it posed not only lexical difficulty but also rhetorical structuring of its action throughout the story. Therefore, this study investigated students’ reading problems of narrative text from the perception of students. Students’ perception in this research refers to the process of how the students recognize and interpret their problems in reading comprehension through the questionnaire. This study used Gunning’s theory (2002:7-13) that divided the reading problems into five, namely: (1) Problems of language knowledge, (2) Problems of background knowledge, (3) Problems of motivation, (4) Problems of reading strategies, and (5) Problems of reading knowledge. If the students’ perception toward reading comprehension problems is positive, it means they agree that they are lack of language knowledge, inappropriate strategies, lack of motivation, insufficient background knowledge and difficulty in reading process can pose problems in reading comprehension. On the other hand, if the students’ perception toward reading comprehension problems is negative, it means that they do not agree that they are lack of language knowledge, inappropriate strategies, lack of motivation, insufficient background knowledge and difficulty in reading process can pose problems in reading comprehension. xii The design of this research was survey study because it involved collection of data by asking questions and recording participants’ answers to them (Breakwell et al, 2013:58). Survey study used for various purposes to estimate population characteristics. The goal of this survey study to determine the percentage of senior high school students who have positive or negative perception on reading problems. The area of the research was SMAN 2 Jember. The participants of this research were the tenth grade students of SMAN 2 Jember in academic year 2019/2020. The data collection method using questionnaire adopted from the survey of Xiubo Yi & Zhang (2006). The questionnaire was divided into two parts. The first part consisted of data about personal information. The second part was questionnaire that consisted of 20 items written in Indonesian in order to avoid misunderstanding among the students. The students were asked to identify their reading problems by responding to Likert scale (strongly agree, agree, strongly disagree). The result of data analysis showed that students’ positive perception on reading comprehension problems proved that the students still faced some problems in their reading narrative text. In other words, the students agreed that they were lack of language knowledge, used inappropriate strategies, lack of motivation, lack of background knowledge and difficulty in reading process. Based on the result of the questionnaire the most problematic aspect that hinder the students’ reading comprehension was “Motivation” (65.6%), then followed by “Strategies” (63.7%), “Background Knowledge” (63.3%), “Reading Process (60%)” and “Language Knowledge (55.4%)”. It was reasonable why the teacher should be concern on those five aspects of reading problems. The teacher needs to pay attention on students’ reading problems by considering the implications that have been drawn from the result.