final assignment: STUDY ON THE READING SKILLS OF EFL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

                Study on the reading skills of EFL university students is a research administered by Flora Debora Floris and Marsha Divina from Petra Christian University, Indonesia. This study investigates kinds of reading skills that EFL students have difficulty with, and the most difficult type of reading skill for the EFL students. To answer those questions, the researcher did the research in some steps. The first is analyzing kinds of reading skills which were taught in previous Reading classes. There are 17 which were already taught:

·         Scanning

·         Skimming

·         Improving reading speed

·         Structural clues: morphology (word part)

·         Structural clues: morphology (compound word)

·         Inference from context

·         Using a dictionary

·         Interpreting pro-forms

·         Interpreting elliptical expression

·         Interpreting lexical cohesion

·         Recognizing presupposition underlying text

·         Recognizing implication and making inference prediction

·         Distinguishing between fact and opinion

·         Paraphrasing

·         Summarizing

The second step was develop two reading test. Each reading test adopted from two texts which consists of 34 items as the representatives of 17 reading skills. More than one reading test could give more information about the students’ abilities. The third step was piloting the two reading test to three students who had passed all reading test, and they were chosen randomly. It aimed to see if the test has clear and good instruction and item. The next step was distributing the two tests to ten students in different time. And the final step was to check and count the result of both reading tests.

The first step in data analysis was to analyze the result of each reading tests and put it in two different tables. The next step was to list seventeen kinds of reading skills which were tested in the reading tests. Then the percentage of incorrect answer was calculated. The higher percentage meant the more difficult reading skill.

From the findings, we know that the most difficult skill for these students was recognizing text organization (72,5%).  It might because many Indonesian students were not trained to activate recognizing text organization after reading a passage. The second was paraphrasing (65%) because they had not fully understood the ideas of the original passage or sentence. It may also because they were unable to restate the idea in their own word although they understood the idea. And it related to the vocabulary skill which became the third most difficult (57.5%). Inference from context was also the important skill that was needed by respondents. It was found that the percentage was 57.5%.

Besides that, we could also notice which skill that considered to be easy for the respondents. The first was scanning (7.5%). It could be assumed that they had already trained to use this skill. The other reading skill which had low difficulty level were improving reading speed (10%) and recognizing presupposition underlying text (10%). It indicated that they were good reader. And the conclusion, although it was a small scale research, it showed that each reading skill had different difficulty level for the respondents. Further research could be conducted in the larger scale.

This research is useful for teachers, especially in designing reading teaching and test. From this research teacher know what they should and shouldn’t do. They know the difficulty commonly experienced by students, so that they may find a way to overcome that problem by improving the reading skills that considered being difficult for the students. Teachers may also change the lesson plan so that later, the students will not encounter such difficulty in certain reading skill. Teachers can also design a lesson by considering the reading skill that needs to be improved more, not only concentrate in some certain skill. For example, from the research we know that the students have difficulty with recognizing text organization, but they have no difficulty in scanning. From that, teacher can know that they should train recognizing text organization skill more, than just concentrate in scanning that have been mastered well by the students. But it doesn’t mean that teachers should force students to master all of the skills in a short time or just in one level. teachers may design lesson plan contained plan about which skill have to be mastered first, and what level need to master this skill. How is the method? What are the activities? How are the reading test that may elicit answer to show their mastery in particular reading skill? So it may begin from the easiest skill for the lowest level, and the more difficult skill will be trained in the higher level.