Indonesian Students’ Reading Literacy
(Hendri Firmansyah, Merie Agustiani,
and Leli Septiani)
Palembang, Pebruari 2014
Indonesian students perform consistently poorly in international surveys.
In the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, more than
half of 15-year-old students were found to be lacking sufficient skills in
reading literacy to enable them to participate actively and effectively in
society, to be functionally literate. The background to this dire situation is
complex. But the examination system may be an important contributing factor.
Indonesian education is focused on tests, and in particular on the
all-important national exams, that millions of Indonesian high school students
take. The exam is of crucial importance and the pressure on students is huge.
Students have even been known to commit suicide after failing the exam.
Cheating is commonplace. Exam results are used to evaluate teachers. Therefore they
teach to the test and an enormous amount of time is devoted to test
preparation. Since the national exams are multiple choice, rote teaching and
learning are the methods generally used, and simple cognitive skills take precedence
over more complex skills involving analysis, evaluation, critical thinking, and
problem solving. Many teachers themselves find this highly unsatisfactory, but believe
their hands are tied.
Schools are strongly affected by the students’ exam performance.
Achievement outcomes affect funding, the school’s reputation, and capacity to
attract students. Thus corruption is allegedly rampant. Teachers and principals
have often been reported to support student cheating. The opposition against
the national exams is widespread, among educators and parents. There is even a
Supreme Court ruling to suspend the implementation until there is equal
educational infrastructure across the country, to no avail. The national
examination system is intended to improve student performance. Instead, it
seems Indonesian education is held in an iron grip by an assessment system,
with low validity and low reliability, which ensures that teaching and learning
remain at a low cognitive level. A number of reforms are currently being
implemented to improve education in Indonesia. The addition of an assessment
system that rewards teachers and students for genuine learning would add to the
positive impact and constructively support the shared goal of authentically improved
student performance.
The Scope of PISA
The focus of Program for
International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 is reading literacy. The scope of PISA study 2009:
- A
profile of reading knowledge and skills, including digital literacy;
- Contextual
indicators relating reading performance results to student & school
characteristics;
- Students’
engagement in reading activities, and learning strategies;
and
- Trend
data on change in student attitudes and in
socio-economic indicators, and also on the impact of some indicators on
the reading performance results.
The Coverage of the
study: 470.000 out of 26 million students age 15 from 65 countries (34 OECD
& 31 partner countries) are involved in PISA 2009.
The table below shows the rank of Indonesian students’ reading performance
based on PISA 2000 – 2009.
Indonesia’s Rank in Reading Performance, PISA 2000-2009
|
Year
|
Average Score
|
Rank
|
Number of Countries
|
|
2000
|
371
|
39
|
41
|
|
2003
|
382
|
39
|
40
|
|
2006
|
393
|
48
|
56
|
|
2009
|
402
|
57
|
65
|
Based on the table above Indonesia students’ reading performance has steadily improved during 2000-2009 period. While, its rank depends on the number of countries participating
in PISA study.
The followings are some factors that influence the
reading achievement of students:
1. Students’ vocabulary Mastery
Vocabulary is
an important component to reading comprehension. Some researchers believe that
vocabulary is the strongest component of proper reading comprehension and
studies have shown that students who have a large working vocabulary receive
better grades than students who do not (Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986). Students
should be able to know the meanings of 90%-95% of the words in a text to be
able to gather meaning from the text (Yildirim, Yildiz, & Ates).
Comprehension decodes or associates meaning with the
symbols that comprise the word. Reading requires interpretation and thinking.
The goal of reading is to comprehend meaning. Comprehension depends on the
ability to get individual word meanings. Good readers have to learn to
interpret word meanings according to the context. They have to comprehend words
as parts of phrases, clauses, and sentences. Both word knowledge and vocabulary
are highly related to comprehension. Comprehension deals with the relationship
of meanings with word symbols, the choice of correct meaning based on the
context, the organization and retention of meaning, and the ability to grasp
meanings from words, phrases, sentences, or long selections. So, it is clear
that students’ vocabulary mastery will influence their reading achievement.
2. Students’ reading habit
Regarding
the importance of reading, it is essential that students who learn English as
their foreign language establish good English reading habits because they are very
much involved in and greatly benefit from English reading practices. A habit of reading is established by having
frequent repetition of reading practices
in a course of time so that it becomes the second nature of the EFL students’ daily activities.
A
good reading habit is necessary for a healthy intellectual growth and plays a
very crucial role in enabling a person to achieve practical efficiency.
Furthermore, an individual's interests are determined to a considerable extent
by the amount he will read and the intensity with which he will pursue his
reading activity. By reading books, one gets confirmation or rejection of one's
own ideas, which makes one think more critically about right and wrong in the
society.
Most of the EFL students do not indicate to have good
English reading habits. Although, In Indonesia, the students have formally
learned English from Elementary school to university. The length of time to
learn English does not guarantee the cultivation of good English reading
habits.although the EFL students have positive beliefs that reading English can
improve their English skills and knowledge and can support their future career
and academic success, most of them are indicated not to have good English
reading habits. This is proved by the fact that they do not always read English
everyday which means that reading English practices is not their habitual
activity. The reasons for not having regular English reading practices are that
they do not understand the content of the text in English and encounter a lot
of unfamiliar words that obstruct reading comprehension (Iftanti, 2012).
Furthermore, Iftanti stated (2012, p. 151) that,
“there are certain factors which are found to actively contribute to the
development of reading habits. Personal characteristics of the students
including age distribution, social class, and parents’ occupation (Adetunji,
2007); accessibility to electronic facilities such as internet (Akyay &
Ogeyik, 2009; Karchmer, 2001; Huang, 2004) and home video *influence the
students’ reading habits (Kaufman, 2007). Moreover, the environmental
influence, parental influence, peer pressure, school curriculum, and teachers
(Adetunji and Oladeji, 2007) are the other factors which can either support or
militate against better reading habits. In line with this, Nathanson, Pruslow,
and Levitt (2008) found the evidence that parents have a powerful effect in
creating enthusiastic readers”.
3. Students’ access for reading activities
According to Newmann, Celano, Greco, and Shue (2001,
cited in Dahlan, 2012,p. 2), ” the availability of access services has given
positive effects towards the development of students’ reading and writing
skills which is believed to be the basic capital for learning and acquiring
skills in various other fields of studies. Moreover, it is also believed that
this availability of access will affect willingness of the school community to
visit and use available services”.
One of access service toward language learning,
especially reading, is library. One of the functions of library is to provide
the access service for students to find various kinds and numbers of
information based on their need. Unfortunately, there are still many libraries
in Indonesia that have not reached the natioanl standard yet. In South Sumatra
itself, there have been only 30% of high school libraries which satisfy
national standard (Dahlan, 2012).
4. Teachers’ approaches to teaching reading
One of very important reading purposes is to get meaning
from a text. This means about the process how the reader decodes the message
from the text. In getting the meaning from the text, the reader needs a
comprehension strategy. It is supported by (Hillerich, 1983, p.125) that states
the major goal for any reading activities is comprehension. Using a study
technique of teaching reading comprehension is very important in teaching
reading comprehension of EFL students. Unfortunately, Most of teachers of
English rarely use approches or
strategies and create dynamic and
interesting classroom athmosphere in teaching reading which can gain students
participation in every reading activities.
REFERENCES
Antoni, Nurman. (2010). Exploring EFL teacher strategies in teaching
reading comprehenson. Jurnal Penelitian
Pendidikan, 11(2): 39-51
Diem Chuzaimah, D. (2012). How the presence of a
technologically supported library influences high school students’reading
habits and skills. Global
Advanced Research Journal of Library, 1(1): 001-005
Hamra, A. & Syatriana, E. ( 2010). Developing
a model of teaching reading comprehension for EFL students. TEFLIN Journal, 21(1):27-40
Iftanti, Erna. (2012). A survey of the english
reading habits of EFL students in Indonesia. TEFLIN Journal, 23(2):149-164
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