Reading comprehension is a readers’ ability in understanding, evaluating, and utilizing texts to find information according to the readers’ purpose. In order to find the information from a text, readers should be able to find the writers’ ideas whether it is explicitly or implicitly stated in the texts. When reading a text, students may encounter many factors contribute as the cause of students’ difficulties in comprehending text. Some of those factors are language knowledge, learner’s background knowledge, motivation, the lack of reading strategies, and reading process. This research aimed to describe the students' difficulties in reading comprehension and the factor that cause the students difficulties in reading comprehension at the first grade of SMAN 11 Banjarmasin.

A descriptive design was used in this research with a qualitative approach. The researcher took the research subjects from one class that was X MIPA 3 and one English teacher. This research used a questionnaire consisting of 16 items divided into five types of questions which were linguistic aspect, reading strategies, psychological factors, and external factors. The researcher used the questionnaire to confirm the interview.

The findings revealed that the students face the difficulties, as sequenced from the most to the least difficult, such as; vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, lacking of knowledge about strategies in reading, lacking of experiences in reading, lacking of experiences to know main ideas and explanatory ideas, relationships between ideas, and lacking of experiences to make inference and reference The factors of students difficulties that the student faces in reading comprehension is not knowing the meaning of some words and students forget to bring a dictionary, lack of support and motivation from parents so that students are less motivated in learning, inadequate learning facilities, and difficulty adapting in class.Therefore, it is suggested to the students to read a lot of books so they can gain more knowledge in the future, and do more practice with reading, to the teacher to maintain the guided learning in reading comprehension to make sure the students more understand the context, to other researchers in similar field to investigate more about the factors of students’ difficulties in other grades and in other high schools.