EFL students’ difficulties in comprehending English reading texts

Abstract

This study intends to find out the challenging areas of difficulty in comprehending English texts by EFL students. It is further to find out why the students face the difficulties in those areas. The participants of this study were 52 eleventh grade students from a senior school in Banda Aceh. The instruments of this study were a test and an interview guide. Based on the analysis of the test, we found that the challenging areas in comprehending the texts were inference, vocabulary and phrase question, and this question was also classified into the difficult question based on the index difficulty formula. From the interviews, the students claim that they were poor in vocabulary mastery, and limited knowledge in analyzing reading comprehension questions. Furthermore, there were some factors which lead to the students’ challenges in comprehending the text. They were discovered to be vocabulary, sentence structure, reading comprehension question types, and, finally, the lack of knowledge and skills in analyzing the text. Thus, teachers must be aware of these problems so that they can assist their students in overcoming them to further improve reading comprehension.