STUDENTS' DIFFICULTIES IN READING RECOUNT TEXT 2

CHAPTER II

LITERATURE RIVIEW

2.1    Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension has multiple definitions and explanations. Therefore, it  depends on writer’s mind in modifying comprehension definition. Comprehension is the outcome of reading when readers successfully connect statements and ideas in the text in order to form a coherent mental representation of the text (Kondeou, 2005). Many students get stuck when they meet some difficult words on the text and they ignore them. In some cases, however, that the difficult words are key in comprehending the text. Anderson (2003) states that aim of the reading is comprehension. Reading is one of important skills in learning English and it has many purposes that provide for the students’ abilities to improve their comprehension of reading text. Comprehending one sentence is better than we read many books but we do not know them. Reading is not to pronounce or utter the voices but it means to recognize and understand how to pronounce words. There are four skills of language, they are: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The four skills can not be separated. Reading skill is developed in societies with an extremely developed literary traditions and culture. Reading helps to increase vocabulary which helps for listening comprehension too. According to Linse (2005:69) reading is a set of skills that involves making sense and deriving meaning from the printed word. Therefore, people are not said reading yet before they can get the meaning of what they read.

The most important thing about reading is comprehension. It is the reason that we read (Scharlach, 2008). However, comprehension depends on knowledge that can not always be found in a single word or sentence. Consequenly, students should master some reading strategies in comprehending the text. Many students give up in reading a book because they get stuck in reading first paragraph. Allyn and Bacon (1989) states that understanding words, sentences and paragraphs are essential to comprehend the reading selection. Comprehension is also the process of deriving meaning from connected text. Therefore, comprehension is not a passive process, but an active one. The reader actively read the text to construct meaning. This active reading includes making use of prior knowledge. Recent studies have focused on how readers use their knowledge and reasoning to understand texts. Good readers are aware of how well they understand a text while reading. Good readers also take active steps to overcome difficulties in comprehension.

Hirsch (2003) states the three principles of reading comprehension (which subsume a number of others), they are fluency allows the mind to concentrate on comprehension, breadth of vocabulary increases comprehension and facilitates further learning, domain knowledge, the most recently understood principle, increases fluency, broadens vocabulary, and enables deeper comprehension.

Reading with comprehension involves not only understanding the words in the sentences but also understanding through the writers’ mind. Comprehension process can be challenging for any student with impoverished language and background knowledge (Kieffer, 2010:600). Comprehension entails a process whereby an incoming linguistic message interacts with the world knowledge base and it is transformed into a representation which preserves the meaning of the message, but not its form (Anderson et al., 1977).

2.2    The Importance Of Reading

The process of reading is more important, however the student have to relate that the text of reading has many informations for the  reading purpose. Learning to read is an important educational goal. For both students and adults, the ability to read opens up new worlds and opportunities. Beside compreheding text, reading effectively is one of importance of reading (Djiwandono, 2002).  It enables us to get new knowledge, enjoy literature, and do everyday things that are part and up to date of modern life, such as, reading the newspapers, job listings, instruction manuals, maps and so on. According to Hashmi (2004) reading is a process whereby one looks at and understands what has been written. The key word here is “understands” merely reading aloud without understanding does not count as reading. Asking the students to read aloud, if a teacher already knows that they can read, is an activity of very limited value.

Wigfield and Guthrie (1997) states that students are thought to be motivated extrinsically which is reading for an external reward or intrinsically that is for the sake or value of doing something and that an engaged reader is someone who reads for the sake of reading and not for a grade or for other external incentives. Allen and Virginia crane (2006) based the Lion Functional Vision Checklist (LFVC) states that student is at high risk for not being successful academically, not reading for pleasure, not passing state required achievements test, dropping out of school, not going to college, and not being able to perform at true potential. Paltridge (1978 ):

“We believe that the comprehension process must entail the reception of linguistic information,the decoding of information with the aid of input from perceptual prior knowl-edge, and an act of comprehension which involves an interaction between worldknowledge and the decoded linguistic message (our minimal comprehension principle).”

There are two main reasons that people read: the first is for pleasure and the second is for information (Linse, 2005). As another example of the importance of world knowledge in interpreting text, consider the frequency with which we face, and the ease with which we understand figural speech. Similes such as, "man is like a computer,"or, metaphors like, "encyclopedias are goldmines," are faced and under-stood many times a day. Yet it would be impossible to understand this comprehension theory and measurement sentences if the reader are dependent on individual word meanings.

Reading the world always percedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world (Slover, 1983). Context as it relates to world knowledge is critical also. In order for comprehension to occur, there must be an interaction between the linguistic string and the reader's world knowledge base (Royer and Cunningham, 1978;14). In addition, Gioia (2006) determines the importance of reading; Reading has declined among every every of  age group, educational group, income group, region and race ; Literature awakens, enlarges, enhances and re!nes our humanity in a way that almost nothing else can ; Most people read to be closer to other people, to understand other people, to understand other situations.

2.3    Developing the Basic Comprehension Abilities

When students are taught how to read, teachers emphasize them on reading  comprehension. It is vey important to know, because comprehension is the main goal of reading. In addition, to get new knowledge about the reading process, writers also know components of reading ability. Vellutino et al (2007) determines that the three major components of reading ability: (a) Reading Comprehension, here in defined as the ability to comprehend written language; (b) Context-Free Word Identification, the ability to identify printed words without the aid of context; and (c) Language Comprehension, the ability to comprehend spoken language. Vocabulary experts agree that adequate reading comprehension depends on a person already knowing between 90 and 95 percent of the words in a text. Knowing that percentage of words allows the reader to get the main thrust of what is being said and therefore to guess correctly what the unfamiliar words probably mean (Hirsch, 2003). 

Researchers have concluded that comprehension strategies should be taught to students as they are immersed in reading rather than separate from reading (Block et al., 2002). Direct instruction in comprehension strategies includes teacher modeling and explaining when and how to use the strategies, repeated opportunities for guided practice, and extended independent reading (Guthrie, 2002). Comprehension strategy instruction has been identified as effective at increasing students’s comprehension (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), although most of the evidence relies on research conducted on only a single comprehension strategy in each study (Guthrie et al., 2004).

The RAND Reading Study Group (2002) concluded that very little research has been conducted on the use of multiple strategy instruction in the classroom and called for more studies of this nature. Therefore, there are many studies of reading comprehension are failed. Pressley (2006) concluded that effective comprehension instruction includes teaching a small repertoire of strategies, modeling and explaining, and facilitating scaffolded practice. These comprehension strategies include making predictions and connections to ideas in text based on prior knowledge, constructing mental images that represent ideas in text, asking questions and seeking answers, and constructing summaries of what has been read (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). Recently, researchers have emphasized that educators must develop a motivational context for reading, provide interesting and appropriate text, and teach research-based reading comprehension strategies to increase comprehension (Gambrell et al., 2002). However, it is not guarantee fully that educators can applicate it in the class room. It has still many problems found when they try to develop those skills.

2.4              Classification Of Reading Problems

Reading problems often seem to come and go over the years. The students of Vocational school may have difficulty learning to comprehend text in first grade and then finally seem to master the skill. Then, in third grade or so, when the emphasis in school changes from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”, the students may begin to struggle again, and then again settle it down. They may have trouble when they should have enough vocabularies to comprehend whole text. According to Rasheed (2011) there are two difficulities in reading, they are :

Difficulty of Vocabulary

For the learners, there are always many new words whose meanings are not clear to them. That is why they cannot understand the given texts. Students need a broad vocabulary of words that they understand and can use correctly to label their knowledge and experiences. The breadth and depth of a students’s vocabulary provide the foundation for successful reading. Tomlinson (2007, P.18) describes that oral vocabulary refers to words that are used in reading. Even students who have very extensive oral vocabulary may have great difficulty in reading words in print if they have a small reading vocabulary. However, Students do not  know all meaning of every words, so they try to do guess or predict the unfamiliar words. Guessing helps readers to activate their background knowledge about a topic, beginning the process of combining what they know with new material in the text. Predictions are wild guesses, they are based on clues within the text such as pictures, illustrations, subtitles, and plot. Predictions will also come from readers’ background knowledge about the author, text form, or content. Students should support why they make their predictions.

Difficulty of Grammar

Lack of grammatical knowledge creates difficulty for student in reading student’s grammar can be improved by story books. Gambrell et al (2002, P. 151) describes that many students have the advantage of having stories read to them at home. And they may have heard events described by adults as well as beginning to tell their own stories about things that have happened to them. All of this enables the students to develop their language. One type of this development is that the students will begin to acquire, intuitively, knowledge about grammar or sentence structure. Ellis (2006a) distinguishes two senses of grammatical difficulty:

(1)   The difficulty learners have in understanding a grammatical feature,

(2)   The difficulty learners have in internalising a grammatical feature so that they are able to use it accurately in communication (p. 88).

Ellis argues that the first sense of grammatical difficulty relates to explicit knowledge, while the second sense relates to implicit knowledge.

Difficulty in Finding Main and Specific Ideas

The ability to identify main ideas in text is a key reading comprehension skill (Aulls, 1978; Harris & Sipay, 1980; Jolly, 1974 ). The main idea of a text is the core of the material, the particular point the author is trying to convey. The main idea of a text can be stated in one sentence that condenses specific ideas or details in the passage into a general, allinclusive statement of the author’s message. Specific ideas are specific informations in a text which support the main ideas. To get main and specific ideas, students should have good reading strategies. When they try to find the ideas, they should know what the context of the text.  In classroom discussions, all of the following words are sometimes used to help students understand the meaning of the main idea.

   The main idea, in contrast, is a complete sentence that states the topic and adds the writer’s position or focus on the topic. When the main idea is not directly stated, it is said to be implied, which means it is suggested in the thoughts that are revealed. In this case, the author has presented a complete idea, but for reasons of style and impact has chosen not to express it concisely in one sentence. As a reader, it is readersr job to systematically connect the details and focus the message. Pressley et al. (1997) suggests that weak readers are generally passive and do not attempt to connect ideas in the text to what they already know. Successful readers, however, actively draw on their background knowledge to connect to and within the text (van den Broek & Kremer, 2000).

Difficulty in Comprehending Whole Text.

O’malley (1995) states the lack of background knowledge also makes difficult to students in comprehending text. The background knowledge is used to make conclusion and find the main idea. It means students are not only to have enough vocabulary but also to find the ideas from the text, they also need enough background knowledge of the text.  Biemans & Simons’ (1996) definition of background knowledge is slightly more complex, “…(background knowledge is) all knowledge learners have when entering a learning environment that is potentially relevant for acquiring new knowledge (p.6).” This definition is quite similar to Schallert’s (1982) definition “The effectiveness of direct instruction on background knowledge as a means to build reading comprehension”. It means students shoud active their background knowledge to comprehending a text. Activating relevant background knowledge by expressing in some form what one already knows about a topic has been demonstrated to be more effective than activating irrelevant background knowledge (Peeck et al., 1982) or not activating any background knowledge. When reading unfamiliar passages, students that were asked to state their background knowledge on the text topic significantly outperformed students who were not asked to state background knowledge. However, when reading familiar passages, only a subset of the student population, age-matched students without disabilities, benefited from background knowledge activation.

The importance of background knowledge to reading and understanding texts. According to Hirsch (2006) the reading comprehension problem is in reality a knowledge problem. Readers acquire meaning from a text by analyzing words and sentences according to their own personal knowledge of the world. Personal knowledge is influenced by age, sex, race, religion, nationality and occupation. They are called cultures. In similiar to Reynolds et al (1982) reported that culture influences knowledge, belief and values; and that knowledge, belief and values, in turn, influences reading comprehension process. 

Difficulty in Making Conclusion

Poor readers have difficulties in making conclusion aboout content presented in the text. It caused by the students limited bakcground knowledge about the text. After identifying the main idea and significant details, they can begin to make conclusion in order to draw conclusions. Conclusions is not directly stated in the reading, so they have to be a good detective. Drawing a conclusion is based on their own reason and logical thinking about the facts readers read in the passage. A Conclusion is a logical result of thinking about the information in the reading. When readers read, they can predict what they think will happen next. An inference is a guess that readers make while readers are reading. Readers guess based on what readers already know. Think about the information and details given. Then, readers use readersr own knowledge to predict what readers think might happen.

Readers own knowledge is essential to making conclusion. A conclusion is a decision that readers make after thinking about all the information readers have. Just like a detective, readers must pay attention to the facts. The facts are like clues that readers have to look for so readers can understand the reading. By putting together all of the clues, readers are solving a mystery. Readers are a good thinker, so the facts will lead readers to the conclusion (without anyone telling readers) if readers follow them carefully (Joseph, 1998).

Working memory effects the ability to maintain information in the mind at a given moment and to activate long-term memory during reading. Long-term memory in turn effects through its contents and organized structure the ability to understand the applied lan­guage and its abstractness as well as pragmatic and other meanings of language (Numminen, 2002).  Good readers take information from a text and add their own ideas or opinions to make conclusion. During the process of inferring, readers make predictions, draw conclusions, and make judgments to create a unique interpretation of a text. Making conclusion allows students to move in to the text and to make assumptions about what is not precisely stated in the text.

Conclusion made by students may be unresolved by the end of text, neither confirmed nor rejected by the author. Good readers also can infer the meaning of unknown words using context clues, pictures, or diagrams. In their review of the research, Sinatra, Brown, and Reynolds (2002) found that students’ ability to make causal conclusion is important for building a coherent understanding of text linked closely to the strategy of determining importance. Conclusion is the process of identifying, recording, and writing the most important information from a text into readersr own words. The ability to reduce a larger piece of text to its most important messages is done through conclusion. The re-statement of the text is referred to as paraphrasing.

Conclusion involves using key words and phrases to get the general gist of a text. In similar to Wittrock (1990) states that when students are taught to conclude, their comprehension improves and they are able to monitor their understanding. In other hand, Trabasso and Bouchard (2002) conclude that “Readers improve the quality of their summaries by identifying the main ideas generalizing and by removing redundancy” (p.182). 

2.5 Recount text

Reading text sometime becomes hobby of some students in Indonesia. There are two text types which they read; Literary and Factual texts. Literary texts consist of  fiction or not real stories while Factual texts is real and provable story. To understand how students comprehend texts, studying the differential contribution of different text based characteristics such as genre, or text type is essential (Abdollahzadeh, 2009). Texts of the right reading level are neither too easy nor too hard for a particular reader. Choosing texts of the right difficulty and interest levels will encourage students to read and to enjoy what they are reading. Vocabulary, word length, grammatical complexity and sentence length are traditionally used to indicate the difficulty level of a text.

Text types show groupings of texts which are similar in terms of co-occurrence of linguistic patterns. The same genre can differ greatly in its linguistic characteristics. The different genres can be quite similar linguistically. The terms 'genre' and 'text type' represent different, complementary and perspectives on texts. The distinction between genre and text type is an important and useful one for language learning classrooms. Paltridge (1996) :

“There are many ways in which the relationship between genres and text types may be exploited in the language learning classroom. Many of the suggestions made in the literature on genre analysis for dealing with the generic structure of texts may equally be applied to the teaching of textual structures”

The types of text (genres) developed in the 2004 English curriculum include transactional conversations (to get something done), interpersonal conversations (to established and maintain social relations), short functional texts (announcements, greeting cards, etc.), monologues and essays of certain genres. In other words, these are the communicative competence to be developed. Along with competence, the literacy levels are also determined based on the government regulation. At Vocational High School, graduates are supposed to be ready for handling the kinds of text : narrative, descriptive, recount, procedure, and report.

One of the text types is recount text. A recount text is a short story in which narrate the events or particulars of a past events. It is usually based on true life events. Memoirs and biographies can be described as a form of recount. In similiar with this dififnition, Derewianka (1990) defines that recount text is to tell what happened and reconstruct past events. Recount text can also be identified by its purpose. The pupose of recount text is to entertain by dealing with a sequence of events that establish a realtionship among writer, reader, speaker, and listener. In line, Joyce and Feez (2008) state that recount text is to respond personally to temporal series of events. Examples of recount text: some picture books, short stories, some fables and myths, autibiographes, humorous stories, some poems, films, videos, television programs.

A text has specific characterictics in generic structure of the text . They are very significant to differ one text among other texts. Language features is one of text characteristic. Setiyaningsih (2010) states that the language features of a recount text are:

a.) focus on specific/Independent participants,

b.) use of simple past tense,

c.) circumstances of time and place,

d.) focus on a temporal sequence of events, and

e.) use of material process.

The aim of genre recount text is to tell about an event. Recount texts have three parts; orientation (telling about who, where, when and how of the event),  sequences of events( event 1,2,3,...and end of event) and reorientation. Characteristics of genre recount are to use simple past tense, action verb and adverb of time (Djiwandono, 2002).

Title Orientation Sequences of events Reorientation/conclusion

Example of recount text :

A Trip to the Zoo

Yesterday my family went to the zoo to see the elephant.

When we got to the zoo, we went to the shop to buy some food to give to the animals. After getting the food we went to the nocturnal house where we saw some birds and reptiles which only come out at night. Before lunch we went for a ride on the elephant. It was great fun. Dad nearly fell off when he let go of the rope. During lunch we fed some birds in the park. In the afternoon we saw some animals being fed.

When we returned home we were very tired but happy because we had so much fun.

Taken from:   Education Department of Western. (1994). Australia Writing Resource Book. Addison Wesley: Longman Australia

2.6     Previous Study

There are some studies about students’ difficulty in reading that have been done by some researchers. First, it is the research conducted by Indrawati (1998) entitled “Student difficulty and perception of difficulty in reading English text at the fourth semester English department of FKIP Universitas Bengkulu”. This research uses descriptive method and concludes that there is no significant correlation between reading difficulties faced by student and their perceptions toward reading English text. This is proved by correlating the scores of reading comprehesion test and queationnaire to 92 students of fourth semester S1 English department ,FKIP, Universitas Bengkulu, 1998. The result indicated that calculated value of ( Product Moment Pearson Formula) = 0,094 is lower than the critical value of r =0,207, at 5 percent level, for N =92. This meant there is very low correlation between the two scores and there is no significant correlation.

Second, a study is conducted by Puspita (2001) entitled “Descriptive analysis of the difficulties encountered by students in comprehending reading text ( A Study on the Third Semester Students of English Study Program Registered in the Academic Year 1999/2000)”. This study also uses descriptive method. It concludes some students’ difficulties in reading. They are the lack of competence to find the main idea and the specific idea in the reading text. The lack of ability to predict the meaning in the reading text and students has limited vocabularies. The lack of students’ ability to decriminate or differ between noun and adjective. The students less comprehend in grammar of reading text. The lack of background knowledge about reading text and the lack of comprehending about the reading text.

To get more information, writer also takes results of study from Lailafitriani  (1998) entitled “Descriptive analysis of difficulties in comprehending reading texts encountered by first year student 1997/1998 of English department in the faculty of teacher training and education Universitas Bengkulu”. It concludes that students are still weak in essay, matching, completion, multiple choice and true-false question. In essay question, students have limited of understanding of the text. In matching question, students have limited vocabulary. Students have also limited grammar in completion question. In multiple choice question, students have limited of knowledge background. In true-false question, student are weak in comprehending text and making summary.

Based on the thesis of above, it can be concluded that students’ difficulties in reading comprehension can be divided into three, there are (1) text reading , (2) grammar, and (3) vocabulary. There are some types of test used to measure the students’ difficulty in reading, they are Essay, Multiple choice, True or false, Matching, and Completion question. To explore the matter further, this study found out the students’ difficulities in reading recount text on the second semester student of SMK N 3 Kota Bengkulu.