As a result of students’ low vocabulary mastery,
they become pessimistic to read and try to
understand the content delivered in English
textbooks. Things get worse when students avoid
English textbooks for learning resources. In line
with this situation, Koch and Eckstein (1991)
found that there are two types of readers when
dealing with reading passage, namely over optimism
and over pessimism. The former refers to those
students who are very confident in their reading
skills, while the latter refers to students who are not
confident and strongly disbelieve their reading skill.
To overcome students’ difficulties on their low
vocabulary mastery, they translate English textbooks
using the online application such as google translate
(translate.google.co.id). Unfortunately the
application can meet the accuracy demand to
transfer the text meaning. Most of the time, the
application delivers inappropriate meaning for
particular terms. Having taken the wrong translation,
students risk themselves in comprehending the
content of the reading passages.
5 CONCLUSION
This study was aimed at investigating students’
summarizing ability, reading comprehension ability
and their difficulties in reading comprehension.
Participants in this study did not perform well in
summarizing the English passage. Instead of
summarizing, students translated the content of
reading they deal with. In a reading test, they had
poor performance to accomplish reading
comprehension test. This happened because they
were lack of vocabulary mastery and failed to
perform reading strategies to achieve solve reading
test. Last findings concern their difficulties to read
English textbook. They had one thing in common,
they had poor vocabulary comprehension.
Based on the findings of this study, there is a
need to improve pre-service physics teachers
competence in reading comprehension on Physics
concept delivered in English textbook. Their poor
performance might affect their future academic
achievement. There is a need on the part of the
university to solve these reading comprehension
problems. One of the possible effort is that English
subject should be designed to meet the objectives of
boosting pre-service physics teachers reading
comprehension ability.
This study has several limitations. Future study
can investigate pre-service physics teachers using
large-scale participants and different research
method to gain proper and sound findings
concerning pre-service physics teachers’ reading
comprehension ability
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