The Difficulties Faced by Students in Reading Comprehension Section of National Examination

This thesis is entitled “The Difficulties Faced by Students in Reading Comprehension Section of National Examination”. This study aims at finding out the difficulties faced by senior high school students in reading comprehension section of the national examination and finding out why the students face difficulties in reading comprehension question of national examination. The subject of this study is the first year students of SMA N 1 Bakongan. There are four classes in this grade. As the sample the writer took one class namely X-2 consist of 27 students. This study used qualitative and quantitative research methodology. The data were collected by using a test and questionnaire. The test consists of 20 questions classified into 4 types of reading comprehension question namely main idea questions, detail meaning questions, implied meaning questions and vocabulary questions. The questionnaire consists of 17 questions. Index of difficulty and percentage formula were used to analyze the data. The result of the test showed that the first year students of SMA N 1 Bakongan found difficulties in answering reading test. The students’ difficulties are in answering detail questions (100%), implied meaning questions (80%), vocabulary questions (60%) and main idea questions (40%). The result of the questionnaires showed that the students’ difficulties in answering all aspects of reading questions were caused by some problems, for instance the students could not understand the long reading text, the students could not master the vocabulary and also could not found the similar meaning of words. Then, the students did not know about the terms bottom-up strategy and top-down strategy, because they never learned about that strategies before. So, they never applied it when they answered the questions. Students also had less of concentration and they were nervous when they answered the questions. Finally, they could not determine the main ideas correctly.