Final assignment: Summary of A Study on the Reading Skills of EFL University Students

The study conducted by Flora Debora Floris and Marsha Divina investigated kinds of reading skills that EFL University students have difficulty with. The respondents were ten students of batch 2003 studying at an English Department of a private university in Surabaya, Indonesia. They were selected because they had passed all levels of reading classes and had learnt all essential reading skills.

In doing the data collection, the writers used some steps. First step was to analyze the kinds of reading skills which were taught in Reading one, Reading Two, Reading Three, and Reading Four classes at the department. Here, the writer decided to focus on seventeen reading skills which were already taught. They were 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 text organization, recognizing presupposition underlying the text, recognizing implications and making inference, prediction, distinguishing between fact and opinion, paraphrasing, and summarizing.

Second step of the data collection was to develop two reading test. The writers used two kinds of reading text. They developed test items which covered those seventeen kinds of reading skills. The third step was piloting the two reading tests. The fourth step of the data collection was to distribute the reading test to the respondents. The final step was to check and count the results of both reading tests.

In this study, the most difficult reading skill for these students was recognizing text or organization (72.5%). The second most difficult reading skill was paraphrasing (65%). Vocabulary skill was the third most difficult reading skill (57.5%). Meanwhile reading skill which the respondents didn’t have much difficulty with was scanning skill. The other reading skills which had low difficulty level were improving reading speed (10%) and recognizing the author’s presupposition underlying the text (10%).

From the findings in this study, we can see that each reading skill had different level of difficulty for the respondents.

This study is very useful for teacher. These are some benefits for teachers in reading this study:

·     By understanding the types of reading skills, teacher will consider them in designing reading test.

·     It may be teacher’s consideration of creating reading test by understanding the level of difficulty of reading skills.

·     By knowing kinds of reading skill  which most the respondents have difficulty with, teacher may improve those kinds of reading skill to his/ her students.

·     It may create an idea for teacher to have study about the kinds of reading skills that his/ her students have difficulty with.