Students’ Perception Toward Their Reading Difficulties of Different Genres

Abstract

Students of English Language Teaching Program are required to have the ability to comprehend different kinds of texts or genres. Howewer, their reading ability as reflected in Reading courses and other courses is low. This paper is aimed at describing the students’ perception toward their reading difficulties of different genres. The data presented in this paper are partially derived from the data collected through a descriptive research conducted in 2009/2010 at the English Department of FBSS, State University of Padang. The instrument of the research were a reading test, which was to determine the level of the students in genre awareness and reading comprehension, and interview to gain students’ perception on their reading difficulties. Data were analysed descriptive-qualitatively and descriptive-quantitatively. From the result of the test, the students thus are categorised into high, middle and low achievers. The result of the interview showed that students with different level of comprehension had different difficulties in understanding texts with different genres because of some factors. Thus, improving the syllabus on Reading courses and other related courses such as Writing, TEFL dan Linguistics are considered important. Keywords: perception, genre awareness, reading comprehension

The Contribution of Genre Awareness and Reading Habits Towards Students' Reading Comprehension

“…The finding concerning the partial contribution of genre awareness to reading comprehension confirms the results of the previous studies (e.g. from Andriyani et al, 2019;Azizah & Fahriany, 2017;Grabe, 2012;Hansen, 2018;Kalali & Pishkar, 2015;Karbelaei & Hajezi, 2015;Molotja & Themane, 2018;Nam, 2014;Rozimela, 2014;Sari, 2017;Sawangsamutchai & Rattanavich, 2016;To & Pang, 2019;Xu & Li, 2018;Yayli, 2011). In general, these previous studies led to several findings.…”

“…Similarly, Kalali and Pishkar (2015) find that awareness of genre can improve students' reading comprehension. Some other studies also confirm the contribution of genre awareness to students' reading comprehension without mentioning the extent to which genre awareness can aid reading comprehension (Molotja & Themane, 2018;Sari, 2017;Sawangsamutchai & Rattanavich, 2016;Xu & Li, 2018;Yayli, 2011). The significant role of genre awareness on students' reading comprehension is emphasized by Sari (2017), who conducted a study on university students as she found that students who were not aware of genres had problems in reading comprehension.…”

“…Academic genres, however, are often unfamiliar to students. Therefore, learning genres has already taken an important position in the teaching of English in Indonesia and students are exposed to English in different genres (Rozimela, 2014;Sari, 2017). Students, then, are facilitated with knowledge of generic and lexico-grammar features of several text types through which they learn shared formal characteristics of genres.…”

“…Good readers learn to develop a strategy to recognize specific features of genres that are relevant to their needs and goals (Hansen, 2018). Yayli (2011) and Sari (2017) indicated that knowledge of the genre contributes to a better understanding of locating key information in texts. Their findings also revealed that knowledge of the organization of a particular text and common textual signals can help identify important information as well as the relationship between ideas in the text.…”

“…To measure the students' genre awareness, we need to know its elements, namely (1) topic of the text, (2) speaker/author of the text, (3) audience for the text, (4) relationship between the participants, (5) purpose of the text, (6) setting, (7) structure of the text, (8) tone of the text, (9) typical patterns of grammar, (10) typical vocabulary, (11) community expectations and/or shared understandings, and (12) assumed background knowledge (Anderson & Anderson, 2003;Vollmer, 2018). Besides genre awareness, reading comprehension also has some other determinant factors, i.e., background knowledge about the content of the texts, specific vocabulary used in a text, and strategies of reading a text (Rozimela, 2014;Sari, 2017) that can develop reading habits. Neal et al (2006) view reading habits as a way of how readers organize their reading and how often, how much, and what they read.…”