The Contributions of Reading Strategies and Reading Frequencies Toward Students’ Reading Comprehension Skill in Higher Education

Abstract

This study was conducted because of the low level of students’ reading skill. The reading strategies and the reading frequencies were assumed as the factors affecting students’ reading skill. The aim of this study was to describe and to analyze the contribution of reading strategies and reading frequencies toward students’ reading comprehension skill. This study used the quantitative method with the descriptive correlational design. The population was 3000 students who attended Bahasa Indonesia subject in Universitas Negeri Padang, and 353 students were taken as samples by using proportional stratified random sampling. The instruments of this study were reading strategies scale, reading frequencies scale and a reading comprehension test which has been valid and reliable. Based on research findings and discussion, the following can be concluded: (1) reading strategies contributed significance and positively to the students' comprehension reading skill which is 19.6% (R = 0.443 R2 = 0.196 and p = 0.000), i.e. reading strategies contributed directly toward the skills of reading comprehension. Therefore, the higher the reading strategies, the better the reading comprehension skills of the students; (2) reading strategies contributed significance toward the students' reading comprehension skills of 33.1% (R = 0.575 R2 = 0.331 and p = 0.000), i.e. reading frequencies contributed directly to reading comprehension skills. Therefore, the better the reading frequencies, the better the reading comprehension skills of the students; (3) reading strategies and the reading frequencies together contributed significance toward the students' reading comprehension skills of 33.2% (R = 0.575, R2 = 0.332 and p = 0.000), i.e. reading strategies and reading frequencies together contributed directly to the comprehension reading skill. Therefore, the higher the reading strategies and reading frequencies will be the better the reading comprehension skill of the students.

Levels of Reading Comprehension in Higher Education: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…For example, several studies (Tuncer and Bahadir, 2014;Trakhman et al, 2019;Kazazoglu, 2020) indicate that reading is more efficient with better performance in reading comprehension tests in printed texts compared to the same text in digital and according to Spencer (2006) college students prefer to read in print vs. digital texts. In reading the written text, metacognitive strategies are involved (Amril et al, 2019) but studies (Channa et al, 2018) seem to indicate that students do not use them for reading comprehension, specifically; Korotaeva (2012) finds that only 7% of students use them. Concerning the type of text and difficulties, for Wolfe and Woodwyk (2010), expository texts benefit more from the construction of a situational model of the text than narrative texts, although Feng (2011) finds that expository texts are more difficult to read than narrative texts.…”

The Correlation between Reading Strategies and Reading Comprehension

“…Another study by Amir focused on the contribution of reading strategies and reading frequencies toward students' reading comprehension skill. The result emphasized awareness of using reading strategies and employment appropriate and effective strategies while dealing with academic texts (Amir et al, 2019). Both studies were conducted in higher education indicated limited studies involving adolescents in Indonesia.…”

The Effect of Teaching Metacognitive Reading Strategies on the Critical Thinking Skills of Undergraduate Students

“…Academic texts present a new level of lexical difficulty to students as they use specialized writing styles or genres to which many learners may not have been exposed. The last two decades have seen a growing trend toward investigating the importance of reading and teaching different reading strategies to enhance students' reading comprehension (Susanto, 2020;Amir et al, 2019). Though there is little consensus on how many learning strategies are exactly used by learners and how they should be named or grouped.…”