Assignment 8: A Study on the Reading Skills of EFL University Students

This is a paper of a mini research. The purpose of the research is to investigate kinds of reading skills that EFL University students have difficulty with.

Studies have shown that EFL students who read a lot seem to acquire English better than those who don’t. Realizing the importance of reading for EFL students, it is then very crucial for EFL students to have good reading proficiency. Having good proficiency means the reader has abilities to understand written statements or any type of written texts accurately and efficiency. In this paper the researchers used seventeen skills in reading to measure the EFL students’ reading ability.

They do some steps in this research. The first step was to analyze the kinds of reading skills. The second step was to develop two reading tests. They used two texts in the test. The first reading text covered twelve skills and the second text covered seven skills. The third step was piloting the two reading texts. This was aimed to help the writers to see whether the two reading tests had clear and good instructions and items. The fourth step was to distribute the reading test. And the last step was to check and count the result of both reading tests.

After the test held, they start to check and count the result. The first step was to analyze the result of each reading test. In here they counted the correct and the wrong answers of each reading skill. The second step was to list seventeen kinds of reading skills which were tested in the reading tests. They made the percentage of the seventeen skills. The higher percentage meant the more difficult that particular reading skill for the respondents. If it was low, it was assumed that the skill was easier for the respondents.

From the research, they found that the most difficult reading skill was to recognizing text organization. The second most difficult was paraphrase. The third was the inference from context. Then the easiest reading skill was scanning. And the two easiest skills were recognizing presupposition underlying the text and improving reading speed.

So, from the research we can conclude that each reading skill had different level of difficulty for the respondents.


This research is so useful for teachers because they now know students problem whenever they're reading a text. this might help teachers to find the appropriate method in teching reading.