ABSTRACT

Rostika, Lilis, 2021. Students’ Problems in Reading Descriptive Text at the Eighth  Grade of SMPN 24 Banjarmasin in Academic Year 2020/2021. English Language Education Study Program, Faculty of Teachers Training and Education, Lambung Mangkurat University, Banjarmasin. The first advisor : Prof. Dr. H. Abdul Muth’im, M. Pd., the  second advisor : Rizky Amelia, M. Pd.

Keywords: Problems, Reading,  Descriptive Text.

Reading is a basic and an important skill that should be mastered, since this skill requires the readers to draw and interpret information appropriately. Hence, if students have a low reading  ability, they will find difficulties which can become problems in reading. Moreover, according  to the research which aimed to complete the previous study at SMPN 24 Banjarmasin, the eighth grade students of SMPN 24 Banjarmasin were really excited about Descriptive Text which became the main purpose of the researcher for conducting this research.  Therefore, this research  aimed to describe the eighth grade students’ of SMPN 24 Banjarmasin academic year 2020/2021 problems in reading descriptive text.

In this case, the researcher used Qualitative-Descriptive approach in this research. In addition, there were 15 students of  the eighth grade students of SMPN 24 Banjarmasin as the research subjects. The researcher also adapted questionnaires,  interview, and reading comprehension test as research instruments. After gathering and analyzing the data, it was found that the problems  were related to making inference, finding main ideas, finding detailed information, identifying reference, and understanding the meaning of words which were caused by some factors such as limited vocabularies mastery and forgetting the materials that had been learnt previously by the students. All in all, it is suggested that the students should read more books to improve their vocabulary mastery, the teacher can also use cooperative learning strategy in reading comprehension and teach the students about finding vocabularies meaning by using clues from texts. Lastly, other researchers are suggested to add various instruments in their study and hopefully this research can be a reference for a further research.