Indonesian Students’ Reading Literacy

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:

1. A profile of reading knowledge and skills, including digital literacy;
2. Contextual indicators relating reading performance results to student & school characteristics;
3. Students’ engagement in reading activities, and learning strategies; and
4. 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

http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/the-indonesian-education-dilemma-high-test-scores-or-genuine-learning on February 18, 2014.

OECD. (2010). PISA 2009 results: Executive summary. Retrieved from www.google.com/search?q=48360434.+ppt&btnG= on February 18, 2014.