8th Assignment: Final Assignment of Topic in Applied Linguistics
Maulina Adzkiyah (2201409033 405-406)

A STUDY ON THE READING SKILLS OF

EFL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

By:

Flora Debora Floris

Marsha Divina

Petra Christian University, Indonesia

SUMMARY

The study attempts to investigate kinds of reading skills that EFL (English as a Foreign Language) University students have difficulty with. For this purpose, two reading tests which covered seventeen kinds of reading skills were developed and administered to ten students of batch 2003 studying at an English Department of a private university in Surabaya, Indonesia. The analysis showed that each reading skill had different level of difficulty for the respondents.

Studies have shown that EFL students who read a lot seem to acquire English better than those who do not. They “do not only improve in their reading abilities, but also improve in using and increasing their English abilities and knowledge. Reading proficiency is determined by reading skills. According to Wassman and Rinsky (2000, p. 2, cited in Suparman, 2005, p. 141),

To understand all the printed materials in English, high reading proficiency is of paramount importance without which the information will not be comprehended. However, it takes an “effective reader” to make sense out of the print which EFL students are bombarded daily. Thus, becoming an effective reader means the reader has reading skills and knows how to use them effectively.

There are three majors categories or reading skills suggested by Nuttal (1996, pp. 44-124). They are:

1.      Efficient reading skills

2.      Word attack skills

3.      Text attack skills

Method

There are some steps used by the writers in doing the data collection. They are mentioned as follows:

1.      The first step was to analyze the kinds of reading skills.

2.      The second step was to develop two reading tests.

Steps:

a.       The writers adopted two reading texts for reading test one and other two reading texts for reading test two.

b.      They developed test items based on those reading texts.

3.      The third step was piloting the two reading tests.

4.      The next step of the data collection was to distribute the reading test to ten students of English Department Batch 2003 who had already passed all reading classes.

5.      The final step of the data collection was to check and count the results of both reading tests.

The followings are the step done by the writers to analyze the data:

1.      Analyze the results of each reading test.

2.      List seventeen kinds of reading skills which were tested in the reading tests.

3.      Calculate the percentage of incorrect answer for each reading skill.

Discussion

The most difficult reading skill for these students was recognizing text organization. The second most difficult reading skill was paraphrasing. However, it was found that in this study vocabulary skill was the third most difficult reading skill. Since there were only three wrong answers from the total respondents’ answers toward scanning skill’s items, it could be assumed that students did not have much difficulty with this skill. The other reading skills which had low difficulty level were improving reading speed and recognizing presupposition underlying the text.

Conclusion

From the study, it can be conclude that each reading skill had different level of difficulty for the respondents.

COMMENT

Reading, one of the four language skills, is actually skill that as important as the others. But in our environment reading skill is usually underestimated compared to the others such as speaking skill. This study has successfully showed us that there are some factors that may cause the low level of reading skill. There are seventeen reading skills that studied in the research. I think, this research has proved that each reading skill should be developed in order to improve reading ability of the respondents.

BENEFIT FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

Since it was found in the study held by the writers that each reading skill had different level of difficulty it could be found that there are some benefits we got. For example, a teacher might take a look on this study to prepare the lesson plan on the topic of reading and to make it more understandable to students in order to achieve the objectives of the lesson. The teacher could adapt the findings from the study to decide which reading skills should get more attention than the others. Another benefit was that teacher could be informed that reading skill was actually not as simple as people thought. Many people did not know that actually there are seventeen skills under covered by reading skill. By this study, teacher could consider the proportion of improving reading skill so that none of the skills would be underestimated or even gone.