The English Reading Proficiency of Universitas Padjadjaran

Undergraduates: A Case Study in Faculty of Cultural Sciences

Ida Farida Sachmadi, Lestari Manggong, Lia Maulia Indrayani,

English Studies Program, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Padjadjaran, Indonesia

Keywords: Reading Competence, Reading Proficiency, Reading Attitude, FIB Unpad Indonesia

Abstract: Reading competence is a critical element to be successful in learning in university level. This study aims to

measure reading proficiency levels of the second year students and their attitude towards English. The method

of this research is based upon the language attitudes theory, adopted from Sarnoff and Asmah, and a series of

questionnaire based on Likert Scale. The reading proficiency is gained from a reading test evaluating five-

component skills: vocabulary knowledge, drawing inferences and predictions, identifying references,

identifying the main idea and summarizing skills, and identifying supporting information. The participants

are 144 second year undergraduate students: 39 students from Japanese Study Program, 53 from History Study

Program, and 52 students from Sundanese Study Program, enrolled in 2016-2017 academic year. The data

are collected through a reading comprehension test. The result of this study indicates that there is a mixed and

wide variation of students reading competence levels; there is one study program whose students have very

good ability in reading English texts, another has students with middle ability, and the other one has very low

ability. The students from the first study program are ready for reading advanced-level English texts,

meanwhile a significant number of students in the study program last mentioned are inadequately prepared

for university reading. This study is a preliminary research, for this result will be put as the initial data for

creating and then testing an appropriate teaching method of further study in English.

1 INTRODUCTION

English is one of compulsory courses in all

universities in Indonesia. In Universitas Padjadjaran,

English course is given to students with the emphasis

on reading skills, for it is considered that they will

need it as they begin to study their own field of

knowledge. They will add knowledge from English-

language text sources as the references for their study,

either from textbooks or international journals, both

printed and digital.

Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in the

1940s wrote a book entitled How to Read a Book, and

mentioned that 'reading is tools', which then brought

European society into literacy (Prijana and Rohman,

2016, p. 225). In a study of students' ability in reading

textbooks, Prijana and Rohman (2016)) found that

there was no significant relationship between high-

GPA students and whether or not they read; however,

the conclusion derived from their research is that

students with high GPAs are more skilled at reading

so they can read faster and get more information: "[...]

which determines faster reading times [is] caused by

skills and training factors. The more skilled at

reading, the shorter the reading time is." (Prijana and

Rohman, 2016, p. 259-260). Therefore, students

should be taught and trained reading skills, including

reading (especially textbooks and journals) in English

which is much more widely available in digital media.

Students of non-native English speakers often

find difficulties in comprehending English textbooks

and international journals. Chen (2017) discovered

that graduate students in Chaoyang University of

Technology, Taiwan, had medium-to-high levels of

reading comprehension difficulties, because they did

not know which reading strategy is appropriate to

understand the journal articles. They had tried some

reading strategies but failed to understand the English

articles because of the lack of training in using the

suitable reading strategy (Chen ,2017, p. 27-28). In

the act of reading, Hermida (2009) has conducted a

research on university students’ approach to reading

academic texts. She based her study on the previous

research from J. Biggs (cited in Lavelle and Zuercher,

2001), saying that most university students at this

time take a surface approach to reading. In this kind

of approach, students only take stated information

from the text, without linking it to other facts or

knowledge. Therefore, they only use this limited

Sachmadi, I., Manggong, L. and Indrayani, L.

The English Reading Proﬁciency of Universitas Padjadjaran Undergraduates: A Case Study in Faculty of Cultural Sciences.

DOI: 10.5220/0008218300002284

In Proceedings of the 1st Bandung English Language Teaching International Conference (BELTIC 2018) - Developing ELT in the 21st Century, pages 361-366

ISBN: 978-989-758-416-9

361

information in their memory in facing another reading

test. On the contrary, a deep approach to reading

makes the reader use high cognitive skills: analyzing,

synthesizing, and solving problems. The deep reader

tries to find the author’s idea, the line and the

structure of the argument. They use their previous

knowledge and concepts to understand the

information from the new contexts. Consequently,

teachers have to train students to use the deep

approach to reading academic tests (Hermida, 2009,

p. 21).

From those previous researches, it could be seen

that to comprehend an English text, students need to

have a certain reading strategy. In the English courses

in universities, the teacher must teach and train

students to use the effective one. Kintsch (1998) had

created a reading comprehension model of English

texts. In line with Hermida (2009) argument, Kintsch

(1998) suggested that readers must combine two

reading models, which he then called as the

Construction-Integration model. This concept is used

in the current study.

University students need to improve their skill in

comprehending English texts. Hellekjær (2009)

discovered in his research that Norwegian

undergraduate students also have serious difficulties

in reading English (30% of the respondents), and

others found it more difficult than reading their

language (44%). Based on his other research, he

argued that it was caused by the failure of the upper-

secondary schools to develop the academic English

reading proficiency that they need when they go to

higher education. The Norwegian EFL teachers in the

secondary schools did not teach reading strategies;

even most of them did not know what reading skills

and strategies are (Hellekjær, 2009, p. 212-213). It

becomes a good idea to make a similar research on

English teachers of junior and senior high schools in

Indonesia, for the university students specifically in

Universitas Padjadjaran face the same problem: their

English reading proficiency is poor.

Another research on evaluating English reading

proficiency is by Stoffelsma et al., (2017) who

studied the reading proficiency, reading behavior, and

reading attitude of 496 pre-service teachers in two

universities in Ghana. She investigated the

connection between students’ reading proficiency

and their behavior and attitude towards English.

However, the result showed that there is no

connection between those three variables, and she

explained that the students possibly “inclined to give

socially acceptable answers [...], whereas in practice

they do not read as much as they report” (Stoffelsma

et al., 2017, 111-112). The methodology of the

current research refers to what (Stoffelsma et al.,

2017) has done in hers.

Ntereke and Ramoroka (2017) also studied the

reading competence of 51 Humanities students in

University of Bostwana. He found that there is a

mixed and variation of students’ reading competence

levels when they started their lecture in the first

semester, and after taking the reading module in one

whole semester, still a great number of students were

not ready for university reading (Ntereke and

Ramoroka, 2017, p. 9)

2 RESEARCH METHOD

The condition found by Ntereke and Ramoroka,

(2017)) also happens to Universitas Padjadjaran

students, especially those from Faculty of Cultural

Sciences. Their reading competence is in wide range,

and some of them are inadequately prepared for

reading texts in university level. Therefore, a research

is conducted to the specific third semester students of

Universitas Padjadjaran.

The first step is to find out the students' ability to

understand English texts, by giving a reading

comprehension test to the students. The questions

given are those that can explore their ability to get the

topics and main ideas, supporting information,

vocabulary meanings, and information retrieval from

inference. In the next stage, the results of the data are

analyzed, so which type of question is difficult is

found out. The results of this study can be the basis

of making learning models and textbooks that can be

offered to the faculty.

In this study, the English learning process of the

third semester students of Universitas Padjadjaran in

2016 has been evaluated by examining the ability to

understand English texts. The respondents come from

three study programs in the Faculty of Cultural

Sciences, namely foreign language program

(Japanese Study Program), non-foreign language

study program (Sundanese Study Program), and non-

language study program (History Study Program).

They are given a reading test, taken from the upper-

intermediate level text, which often appears in

TOEFL. This test includes finding topics, getting

main ideas, scanning/finding supporting information,

guessing vocabulary, identifying references, and

making inference.

The purpose of this research is to get an accurate

description of the Faculty of Cultural Science

students’ ability after learning English for one

semester. It is executed by measuring students' ability

in understanding English. To achieve this goal, the

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type of descriptive research has been used.

Furthermore, the results of this study can be used as

a basis for preparing appropriate learning models for

students in different study programs, so that later it

can be used by English lecturers at the Faculty of

Cultural Sciences.

The research team has measured the level of

students' reading comprehension of English text

through analysis of the difficulty level of the given

test. Preparation of questions in the test focused on

five components of reading proficiency, namely: (1)

vocabulary knowledge, (2) drawing inferences, (3)

identifying references, (4) identifying the main ideas,

and (5) identifying supporting information. The total

number of questions in the test is 12 questions, with

the division of 6 questions for Text 1 and 6 questions

for Text 2. The spreads in each of the text questions

are as follows: two questions on supporting

information, one question on main ideas, one

vocabulary question, one references question, and

one inference question.

The compilation of these five components of

proficiency is based on a reading comprehension

model of the English text, called the Construction-

Integration (CI) model from (Kintsch, 1998). The CI

model distinguishes two reading models: the reader's

text model and the situation model of the reader's

interpretation. According to the text model,

understanding the reading lies in two levels: local and

global. The examples of local levels are knowledge

of nouns, verbs, and modifiers, which construct

sentence comprehension; whereas, at the global

level, reading can use language knowledge and inter-

sentence relationships to understand text content,

such as inference techniques. In reading a text, it is

also necessary to use model situation from the

reader's interpretation. In this model, the reader uses

the prior knowledge in order to understand the text

being read, by searching for explicit and implicit

information, in addition to building reader-free

interpretation (Kintsch, 1998). Free interpretation

can be influenced by the reader's intent, the purpose

of reading, the text genre, and the evaluation of

important information in the text (Grabe and Stoller,

2011). This technique is a part of high level reading

skills, while the understanding of the meaning of

words, phrases, and sentence structure formations are

included in low-level reading skills. These two

techniques, according to Kintsch (1998), are needed

in reading comprehension. In this study, five skills

are examined from these two models, as mentioned

above.

The test of students’ language attitude is adopted

from the method used by Aziz (cited in Kaur, 2015)

in an investigation he executed to students of

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. The definition of

language attitudes is taken from who explains that

language attitudes are "disposition to react favorably

and unfavorably to a class of objects"; and also

Asmah (cited in Kaur, 2015) who defines the concept

as "the way an individual feels and thinks about

something or someone". In this study, Universitas

Padjadjaran students’ attitude towards learning

English is examined. This could give supporting

information in creating a suitable learning method in

further study on English.

The questionnaire, given in Indonesian language,

meanwhile, is compiled based on Likert Scale,

offering a method for measuring characteristics and

personality traits of a person. This attitude

measurement scale consists of questions with five

alternative answers: (1) STS (Sangat Tidak

Setuju)/Strongly Disagree; (2) TS (Tidak

Setuju)/Disagree; (3) R (Ragu-ragu)/Not Sure; (4) S

(Setuju)/Agree; (5) SS (Sangat Setuju)/Strongly

Agree. The questionnaire given consists of eleven

items:

1. I love learning English.

2. I learned English only to get good grades.

3. I can understand the difficult concept of

English.

4. I can do English tests well.

5. I am willing to take a part in the English

class if the learning method is interesting

and various.

6. I am an active participant in English class.

7. I can understand the concept of English

clearly because audio-visual equipment that

the lecturers use is adequate.

8. The teaching and learning environment is

very supportive and improves my English

lessons.

9. I spend more time doing English homework

than working on homework from other

courses.

10. I am willing to participate in English class

because it is challenging.

11. I am satisfied with the English skills I

learned from the lectures.

The completed questionnaires were analyzed by

calculating the number of voters for each statement,

and comparing the number of Agree and Strongly

Agree with the number of Strongly Disagree and

Disagree voters. From these comparisons, the

tendency of students from each study program in

giving their opinion towards English learning is

shown.

The English Reading Proﬁciency of Universitas Padjadjaran Undergraduates: A Case Study in Faculty of Cultural Sciences

363

The interpretation of answers then is described

based on the following table.

Table 1: Percentage of Choice of Answer (Wiji, 2014)

Range Interpretation

0 Nothing

1-25 A little

26-49 Nearly half of it

50 Half of it

51-75 Mostly

76-99 Almost entirely

100 Entirely

Each statement is interpreted based on the

interpretation in the table above. Then from the total

answers, the assessment of English learning is

acquired.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

There are 39 students of Japanese Study Program, 53

from Sundanese Study Program, and 52 from History

Study Program, who took the reading test. The test

result is described in the table below.

Table 2: Percentage of Number of Correct Answers

Type of

Question

Percentage of Right Answer

Japanese History Sundanese

supporting

information

88% 86% 79%

main ideas 87% 61% 41%

References 86% 67% 53%

Vocabulary 86% 44% 54%

Inference 78% 70% 45%

From the data, it can be seen that the tendency in

the Japanese Study Program is as follows: (a) the

easiest type of question for the students is the

question of supporting information, with the average

number of correct answers is 34.4 from 39 students

(88%); (b) meanwhile, the most difficult question for

them is the type of inference question, with an

average number of correct answers of 30.5 (78%).

Also from the data, it can be seen that the

tendency of the History students is: (a) the highest

ability is in answering the questions of supporting

information, with the average correct number of 45.5

from 52 students (86%); (b) In contrast, the students’

lowest ability was in terms of answering the

vocabulary question type, with a correct number

averaging in 23.5 out of 52 (44%).

Meanwhile, the tendency of the Sundanese

students is: (a) the students’ highest ability is in

answering the supporting information types of

questions, with the average number of correct

answers is 41 (79%). In contrast, the students’ lowest

ability is in answering the questions of main ideas,

with the average number of correct answers being 22

(41%).

Table 2 shows a clear difference between the

ability of students of Japanese and Sundanese Studies

Program, while History Study Program is in the

middle. Above 80% of students from Japanese Study

Program are able to answer questions correctly

except the type of inference question. While in

History Study Program, more than 60% students can

answer the questions correctly for all kinds of

questions except the question of vocabulary meaning.

However, only the kind of questions on explicit

information can be answered by 60% students of

Sundanese study program; the other four types are

only answered correctly by less than 50% students,

with the questions of main ideas being the least

correctly-answered.

From the percentage of students who answered

above 60% (their test score are above 60), it can be

seen that the order is: 92% from students of Japanese,

64% from History, and 39% from Sundanese Study

Program. The difficulty level of problems for each

study program is also examined. In general, it can be

seen that the percentage difficulty of the text for each

type of problem is as follows:

Table 3: Questions’ Level of Difficulty

Type of

Question

Percentage

Japanese History Sundanese

Inference 22% 56% 59%

References 14% 39% 55%

Vocabulary 14% 33% 47%

main ideas 13% 30% 46%

supporting

information

12%

14%

21%

From table 3, it can be concluded that the ability of

the students of the Japanese Study Program is still

low in making inference or obtaining implicit

information. Meanwhile, from the data it appears that

they can easily get explicit information in the text.

Table 3 also shows that the ability of the students

of History Study Program in knowing the meaning of

the word or understanding the vocabulary based on

the context is still low. Meanwhile, the data reveals

that these students are superior in terms of

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understanding the information contained in the text.

It is also known that the students of Sundanese Study

Program have difficulty in finding main ideas in a

text, even more difficult than finding hidden/implicit

ideas in the text, which is usually seen from the type

of inference questions. Some students have a low

ability to know the meaning of vocabulary in context,

as seen from the types of vocabulary questions and

references. Meanwhile, in obtaining supporting

information, almost all students of Sundanese Study

Program given the test are able to solve it.

The result of the test on students’ attitude towards

learning English could be seen in the following table.

Table 4: The Result of the Questionnaire.

No Statement

Answer

Strongly Agree & Agree

How I learn English Japanese History Sundanese

I love learning English.

85% 89%

81%

I learned English only to get good

grades.

8% 11%

6%

I can understand the difficult concept

of English.

44% 15%

12%

4 I can do English tests well. 69% 28%

23%

I am willing to take a part in the

English class if the learning method is

interesting and various.

77% 92%

81%

I am an active participant in English

class.

31% 40%

21%

I can understand the concept of English

clearly because audio-visual equipment

that the lecturers used is adequate.

28% 43%

42%

The teaching and learning environment

is very supportive and improves my

English lessons.

46% 51%

35%

I spend more time doing English

homework than working on homework

from other courses.

8% 21%

17%

I am willing to participate in English

class because it is challenging.

33% 58%

60%

I am satisfied with the English skills

acquired through the lectures.

26% 15%

17%

From the survey, the results reveals that almost all

students of Japanese Study Program were happy to

learn English and not just to get good grades, and half

of them prioritized learning English. Similarly,

students of Sundanese Study Program and History

Study Program loved to learn this language but most

of them did not put it in the first priority. In the next

point, nearly half of Japanese literature students

thought they could understand difficult English

concepts, and most of them were sure that they were

able to do English tests well. In contrast, most

students of Sundanese Study Program thought that

they are unable to grasp the difficult concept and they

are also unsure whether they could do the tests

properly. Meanwhile in the History Study Program,

almost half of the students were unsure of whether

they were able to understand difficult English

concepts or not and mostly thought they were not

able to do their tests properly.

4 CONCLUSIONS

From the research on three study programs at the

Faculty of Cultural Sciences of Universitas

Padjadjaran, there are several important points.

Related to the effectiveness of learning English, it

could be concluded that Japanese Study Program

students have the ability to understand English

reading very well. It can be seen from the average of

correct answers on all types of questions in the test,

which is above 80%. Meanwhile, the students of

History Study Program can follow the learning of

English well enough since the average number of

The English Reading Proﬁciency of Universitas Padjadjaran Undergraduates: A Case Study in Faculty of Cultural Sciences

365

correct answers in the test is above 60%, and only one

below that score. Afterwards, the students of

Sundanese Study Program still have to do a lot of

practice to understand the English text because the

average number of correct answers on the four types

of questions in the test is below 60%, and only one

type is above it.

In general, from all participants of this

investigation, it can be concluded that they are weak

in finding main ideas (48%), but they have tolerable

ability in guessing vocabularies (61%), referring

pronouns (68%), and making inferences (64%), and

they could easily find stated information (84%).

There is a connection between the students’

reading proficiency and their attitude towards

English learning. The students of Japanese Study

Program thought they could understand difficult

concepts in English structures, and were sure they

could do the tests well. It is in accordance with the

number of correct answers they had made.

Meanwhile, students of Sundanese Study Program

confessed that they did not really understand difficult

concepts in English structures, and were not sure

whether they had done well in the tests. It can be

shown as well in a few numbers of correct answers

they made. In addition, it is expected that the

result of this research can be useful for the

sustainability of teaching and learning process of

higher quality English Course in the Faculty of

Cultural Sciences.

We would also like to give some further

suggestions. For Japanese Study Program, it is

necessary to increase the difficulty of learning level

from upper intermediate to advanced level. They

could also be given TOEFL preparation, besides

beginning to practice comprehending English

textbook and journal. In further study on English,

they can be given the materials of writing scientific

articles.

Meanwhile for the History study program, the

students could be given exercises in understanding of

reading intermediate to upper intermediate level of

English, and in further study on English, they can

start to be introduced to questions from TOEFL, as

well as readings from textbooks and journals in

English.

At last, for Sundanese Study Program, the

students still need to be given a lot of practice of

reading English texts in pre-intermediate to

intermediate level with General English topics. In

further study, it is necessary to teach writing skills to

add knowledge about the structure of sentences, to

help them understand easier the meaning of sentences

and ideas in it.

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