Students’ Reading Strategies in Understanding a Reading Text at SMA Negeri 3 Malang: A Case Study

The main objective of English teaching in secondary and tertiary education is to enable the students to read English texts, especially scientific ones. Among the four language skills taught in secondary schools, reading has always received the greatest emphasis. However, some studies indicate that the English reading mastery of senior high school students is still unsatisfactory. With that condition, it is necessary to conduct research on the teaching and learning of reading in the secondary school. In addition, in the theory of constructivism, it is stated that the teacher’s function is only to facilitate the students’ self-learning. One of the ways is by employing reading strategies. Thus, reading strategies are influential to enable the students to develop their reading ability. Therefore, it is important to investigate the reading strategies employed by the SMA students to give a clear picture of the process of learning to read. This study aimed at describing the general and local reading strategies employed by the three kinds of senior high school students, namely the high achiever, average achiever, and low achiever. The study is descriptive qualitative in nature. More specifically, this study was conducted to describe the reading strategies that are typically used by the high, average, and low achievers of second grade students at SMA Negeri 3 Malang. The subjects of this study were 3 students of 2 IPA 1 of SMA Negeri 3 Malang. The second year of senior high school students were selected because analytical expository text, the instrument used, started to be taught at the second year of senior high school students. They were selected on the basis of RFU test to represent the high, average, and low achievers. The subjects were then required to think-aloud, i.e. to report what they were thinking while reading a given text. In the study, the instruments used were an English reading text and thinking aloud method. In the data analysis, the subjects’ thinking-aloud protocol were classified using Block’s reading strategy category. Then, the frequency of occurrence of each strategy was calculated. The study found that the high, average and low achiever did not seem to differ greatly in terms of the reading strategies used. They seemed to focus more on local reading strategies involving the linguistic aspect of a text than the general reading strategies. The high, average, and low achievers used 5 local reading strategies, i.e. paraphrasing, rereading, questioning meaning of a clause or sentences, questioning vi meaning of a word, and solving vocabulary problem. Besides, they also used 4 general reading strategies, i.e. anticipating content, interpreting the text, integrating information, and using general knowledge and associations This study suggests that the English teachers should begin developing awareness of both general and local reading strategies and teach the effective reading strategies which are incorporated in the daily teaching activities. Finally, It is also suggested that further research with more subjects and/or different data collection method and sampling procedures be conducted to obtain a more comprehensive data about the use of reading strategies