Students’ ability And difficulties in Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Reading is a process of comprehending a written language or text. Students can get knowledge and improve their writing, speaking and listening skills. Ideally, students should comprehend what they are reading as well as be able to comprehend the content they are reading. In fact, the researcher realizes that some students are still struggling to understand or comprehend the text. This include issues with recognizing the text’s information, main idea, and topic; figuring out the meaning of words that are referred to or have similar meanings; and figuring out the theme or purpose of the text.  The aimed of this research to describe students’ ability and difficulties in reading comprehension at the fourth semester student of English Department at IAIN Kerinci. In collecting the data, the researcher employed reading comprehension test in term of essay that consisted of five questions related to main idea, topic, supporting detail, inference and social function of the text to 22 students. The data gotten revealed that the ability of students in reading comprehension was in sufficient category namely 12 students who were got this category and it was higher than students who were in very good (2 students) or good (5 students) category. Meanwhile, regarding to the ability of students in reading comprehension, the data revealed that most of the students have difficulty in identifying main idea (44.33) in fail category and topic of the text (54.55) in poor category.