Identification of the Problem
3 and learning process of reading in the eighth grade students of SMP Negeri 13
Yogyakarta. The problems that are related to the students’ reading skills can be influenced by some factors. Those factors can be from the teaching technique, the
media used in teaching and learning processes and the students’ reading comprehension ability.
The first problem which is found is the teaching technique. The teaching technique that was used in the classroom was monotonous. The teacher read a text
loudly and students must repeat their teacher’s words. After that, the students are expected to answer the questions related to the text individually. The reading
lesson is also a teacher-centered lesson. Lack of media is also one of the problems of the English teaching and
learning process in SMP Negeri 13 Yogyakarta. There are no many media can be used for the teaching and learning process. The teacher usually uses a text and
whiteboards. Media has an important role to the teaching and learning process. The media is useful in scaffolding the students in reading lesson. It can help a
teacher in building the student’s background knowledge of the text. Students can relate their background knowledge in understanding a text.
Besides the general problem above, another problem comes from the students. Their reading comprehension skill was low. Almost all students are very
weak at voabulary mastery. Most of them said that they could not understand the text because it has a lot of unfamiliar words. If they find unfamiliar words, they
rely on finding the word in dictionary or asking their friends. They rarely try to guess the meaning of the word. Furthermore, it seems that students have difficulty
4 at the sentence level. A lot of them still confuse in bringing words together to
make an understandable sentence. Finally, the students are also lack of reading subskill which is finding the main idea of a paragraph. This reading subskill is
important in understanding a paragraph and a text. As mentioned above, those several factors affect the English teaching and
learning process in SMP Negeri 13 Yogyakarta. Each factor should be considered so that the solution can be right to improve students’ reading comprehension.