The Problems of the Third Year Students of SMAN 4 Malang in Comprehending English Reading Texts

In English as a Foreign Language, the emphasis of teaching and learning process tends to be on reading skills. It can be seen from the fact that almost 50 percent of the items of the national final examination consist of reading. It means that if the students have problems in comprehending reading texts such as narrative, descriptive, procedure, recount, and report, they will fail in their examination. Therefore, this study is intended to find out the students’ problems in comprehending English reading texts. Besides, it is also intended to investigate the similarities between the problems of high, moderate, and low achievers, and the solutions taken by the teacher. This study is categorized as a descriptive research since it describes the reading problems faced by the third year students of SMAN 4 Malang. Because this study is focused in only one setting, it is regarded as a case study. The subjects of this study were 41 students of the third year of SMAN 4 Malang on East Java Province in the academic year of 2008/2009. The instruments used to collect the data needed in this study were a questionnaire, an interview guide, and a kind of reading test for determining high, moderate, and low achievers. The data of this study consisted of qualitative data. After that, the qualitative data were analyzed by relating the collected data with other studies, experts, or methods. Based on the questionnaire and the interview, all the students had problems in comprehending English reading texts. The problems were related to vocabulary knowledge, reading comprehension, reading strategies, physical condition, reading interest, and use of reference material. However, the problems of the students mostly were just the same. Based on the questionnaire, the most prevalent problems that the students often found were the difficulties in acquiring meaning of special terms (65.85 %), in recognizing two or more similar words (56.1%), in understanding idioms (53.66%), and also in reading fast and accurately (51.22%). Based on the interview, the problems were lack of vocabulary knowledge and reading interest. There were also some actions such as CTL, cooperative learning, and jigsaw done by the teacher to solve the problems. Based on the findings, it is suggested for the English teacher to provide the students a lot of different types of text and consider what skills might be learned by the students in order to ease them in comprehending English reading texts. It is also suggested for the principal of the school and the authority to facilitate the school with a lot of English reading materials, such as newspapers, magazines, novels, encyclopedias, comics, and so on. However, carrying out the next research in more than one setting might be done by other researchers in the future with new different approaches or methods