e. The Problems of Vocabulary in Reading
Comprehension is an essential need for reading. The success of reading can be examined by the comprehending of the reading material.
As an example, the students who lack in reading usually have a low-level of comprehension. They cannot read in a certain time with the
understanding of a low-frequency of words. This may be caused by their lack of word recognition in which they cannot understand almost all of
the words in the text that they read. The words are unfamiliar for them and they do not have background knowledge related to the words or even
they cannot connect the unfamiliar words with the context of the text. Thus, there are many factors influencing the students’ difficulties in
reading comprehension. Sometimes, the texts are too complicated to read so that the
students find it difficult to comprehend the text. The use of semantic mapping or clustering can be a strategy to teach reading comprehension
in which they can map the content of the passage in the form of semantic mapping. The strategy can be applied to the students individually or in a
group. Moreover, the problem commonly faced by the students in reading
a text is they do not understand about the meaning of the words. They find so many unfamiliar words in the text so that they cannot grasp the
meaning of the text. One way to cover this problem is by guessing the unknown words from the context. Mikulecky Jeffries 1996:49 state
that guessing the unknown words from context is the effective and the
efficient ways to read comprehensively since we can understand the words by using the text surrounding the words. Guessing words can save
more time because the readers do not need to interrupt their reading by searching the words in the dictionary or asking to the other readers.
Another way to guess the meaning of the words is by analyzing the word itself. The words can be analyzed by seeing the morphological
structure of the words. For instance, looking for the derivational affixes such as prefixes de-, dis-, re-, etc and suffixes -able, -ity, -ous, etc
may give clues to determine the part of speech of the words. Analyzing the words can also be done through looking for the root of the certain
word, determining from the grammatical context, and looking at the semantic context or topic of the text
According to Nation 2011: 249, there are fourteen difficulties commonly faced by children in reading, two of them are decoding or
recognizing the printed words and linguistic comprehension. Both factors have big influences to the success of reading comprehension. It will be
unsuccessful if the students cannot be familiar with the words and cannot understand the words that they have decoded. Hence, the reading
comprehension cannot be seen from one perspective. Students who have ability in word recognition do not necessarily succeed in reading
comprehension if their knowledge and understanding of the words are still poor.
Moreover, Leach in Woolley 2011: 25 asserts that the unfamiliar words found in the text become the major problem for the primary
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