An Analysis of The Students’ Problems in Comprehending English Text of The First Year Students at SMA PGRI Pekanbaru

Keywords: reading, comprehension, English text, students’ problems Reading serves as an important tool in every field of professional service and one of the indispensable channels around the world to recognize, interpret, and perceive written or printed material. Without reading, it will be difficult for students to further the students’s advanced education in higher level fields. Hence, the students that can comprehend what they read in English text mean have reading comprehension correctly. Reading comprehension is not a simple process, because of English is a second or foreign language for the students.The students still find the problems in comprehending English text. The objective of this research was to find out the students’ problems especially in comprehending English text. Five problems which faced students including language knowledge, background knowledge, motivation, the lack of reading strategies, and reading process. This research used qualitative research. The data was taken from the first year students of SMA PGRI Pekanbaru. The researcher took 39 respondents from X MIA 1 as samples. In this research, the researcher used questionnaire and interview as research instruments. The results of the study showed that the students’ problems in comprehending English text were motivation (45.51%), background knowledge (42.73%), the lack of reading strategies (38.46%), language knowledge (35.04%), and reading process (33.33%). Thus, the highest percentage was motivation. In different way, reading process was the lowest percentage in this research