Students’ Barriers In Answering Reading Section Of Toefl

This study aimed to determine the barriers students face in answering the reading section of TOEFL, to figure out the factors that influence the students to face difficulties in answering the reading section of TOEFL, and to investigate the strategies that students used in answering TOEFL in the reading section. To collect the data, the researcher used the interview instrument that was analyzed through a descriptive qualitative approach. Eight students from the English Education Department at UIN Ar-Raniry in the academic year 2018 were chosen as participants for this research. They were selected through a purposive sampling technique where the students took the TOEFL and achieved a score of 500 and above. The research finding showed that students often faced many barriers in finding unstated detail, identifying the main idea, finding the implied details, answering transition questions, finding pronoun referents, and identifying the meaning of difficult words used in the context. There are several main factors for this: Students' lack reading motivation, students’ lack background knowledge, time management, inadequate vocabulary knowledge, and the complexity sentence. The researcher also found several strategies students often use to overcome some of their difficulties and classified them into two strategies. The reading strategy are skimming and scanning text, utilizing background knowledge while reading the text, and understanding unfamiliar word using context clues. Also, the test-taking strategy is to look at the questions before reading the text, to answer the easier questions first, and to eliminate erroneous options.