A Study on the reading skills of English Department of Petra Christian University's students

Divina, Marsha (2007) A Study on the reading skills of English Department of Petra Christian University's students. Bachelor thesis, Petra Christian University.

Abstract

In this study, the writer investigated the kinds of reading skills that English Department of Petra Christian University (PCU)?s students have difficulty with and the most difficult reading skill for them. The theory of reading skills by Nuttall (1996) and McWhorter (2002) were used as the main theories of this research. In her study, the writer used descriptive-qualitative approach with quantitative data. She developed two reading tests which covered seventeen kinds of reading skills. The reading tests were administered to ten students from English Department of PCU batch 2003 to find out the answers of her research questions. The result of the analysis showed that each reading skill had different level of difficulty for the respondents. Recognizing text organization skill with difficulty level reaching 72.5 % was the most difficult reading skill for English Department of PCU?s students. Others two skills which had difficulty level more than 50% were paraphrasing (65%) and inference from context skill (57.5%). On the other hand, scanning skill in which the difficulty level reached 5 % was a reading skill which was least difficult for the students. In conclusion, this study showed that English Department of PCU?s batch 2003 students still had difficulties in activating some reading skills effectively.

Actions (login required)