Reading Strategies Applied By Bengkayang Students To Overcome Their Comprehension Problems

Abstract

Reading is one of the language skills that learners must acquire or have. Improving reading skill assists students to capture the meaning of a reading text. However, students still experience difficulties because of lack of interest in reading and a lack of knowledge of English. Seeing this, there are several strategies that students can employ such as translating, asking questions, and using other references. Many researches into reading strategies to cope with reading difficulties have been done in several regions in Indonesia such as in Hidayati (2018) in SMAN 1 Darussalam Aceh Besar and Ganie, Deliana, and Rangkuti (2019) in Medan, but in Bengkayang, West Kalimantan, there has never been any research done to find out students' English reading comprehension strategies. Thus, this study aimed to find out the strategies of senior high school students in Bengkayang to overcome their difficulties when comprehending English reading texts. The participants of this study were 111 first grade senior high school students from four senior high schools in Bengkayang. This study uses a quantitative descriptive method by using a questionnaire as its research instrument. The questionnaire contains three open-ended questions and sixteen closed-ended questions. The findings have shown that Bengkayang students faced some problems in reading English texts such as lack of vocabulary and lack of grammatical mastery. These problems were 70% and 38.90% of positive responses. To overcome those problems, they used some strategies. Those strategies are divided into three categories of Support Strategies, Problem-solving Strategies, and Global strategies. Based on the findings, Problem-Solving strategies are the type of strategies that students often use while comprehending reading texts. This type of strategy gets above 85% of positive responses from the respondents.