Reading Test: How Students Face It in EPT

Abstract

Many perceptions have been expressed regarding reading comprehension related to the TOEFL test. Most students in higher education in non-English speaking countries such as Indonesia still have difficulty mastering English texts. The implication is that the TOEFL test results have also decreased. The reading test section is a part that must also be mastered well by students to increase their scores. This qualitative-descriptive study involved six participants with specific criteria. One of them was that they had already taken one form of the English Proficiency Test (EPT) with reading as one of the sections. The results obtained included five challenges and three strategies regarding reading skills in ETP. The five challenges were looking for the main idea, determining the meaning of a complex word, identifying pronoun reference, specifying implied detail, and determining the passage's tone while the three strategies were reading the first sentence of each paragraph, guessing and using context clues, and skimming. In conclusion, all test-taker candidates of EPT must prepare themselves with adequate vocabulary to understand the meaning of the text given because the more vocabulary mastered, the greater the understanding of the text read. Therefore, one conclusion that can be drawn is that vocabulary plays a critical role in understanding the text given in the test.