Teacher’s efforts to overcome students’ difficulties in reading comprehension

Abstract

Reading comprehension is one of the language skills that is learned by the students in senior high schools in Indonesia and is believed as the hardest English skill. The purpose of this research is to find out the reading comprehension difficulties faced by the students of MAN Model Banda Aceh and the teacher’s efforts to overcome those problems. This research used descriptive qualitative method and the data collection was done by means of a written test and an interview. The written test was done to find out the difficulties faced by the students in reading comprehension which scoped into five categories namely finding main idea, factual information, vocabulary, reference and inference. Additionally, the result shows that the biggest problem faced by the students was finding main idea and the least problem was vocabulary. Furthermore, the interview was conducted to find out the teacher’s efforts such as previewing, predicting, skimming, and scanning, guessing from the context and paraphrasing to assist the learners. The most common efforts made by the teacher to overcome the students’ difficulties in reading comprehension were skimming and scanning, using contextual clue, and predicting.