Reading Comprehension

Reading is a complex skill, or cluster of skills. It is also one of the basic skills to learn language among other skills. The student must master these skills in order to be able to read well in any content areas. That is why reading is very important for students’ academic activities. Nowadays, most academic sources are gained by way of reading. The importance of reading is for getting information from the text, learning new vocabulary, answering the questions, and translating the text. However, many of the students especially ESL/EFL learners have problems related with reading. One of the problems is that they read relatively slowly. Another problem faced by EFL/ESL students is reading comprehension. Meanwhile, this activity takes very important role in reading activity
The purpose of this study was to know how EFL students’ reading speed and EFL students’ reading comprehension.

Research design used in this study was descriptive qualitative research because the writer had to describe the EFL students’ reading speed and EFL students’ reading comprehension. The population and sample of this study was the third year students of English Department of Muhammadiyah University of Malang. In collecting the data, the writer used true/ false test as the instrument.

After collecting the data, the writer analyzed them using formula which taken from Zorn’s book for measuring the students reading speed and Buku Pedoman IKIP Malang for measuring the students reading comprehension. Based on the category, the students reading speed was 179.93. Meanwhile, reading comprehension test showed that average of EFL student’s comprehension was regarded poor. Finally, the writer suggests that students reading speed and reading comprehension should be improved by applying some new techniques.