AN ANALYSIS OF TENTH GRADE STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN COMPREHENDING RECOUNT TEXT

This study aimed to recognize the problems faced by the tenth graders of SMA Negeri 1 Jejawi and to determine the factors that influenced students’ difficulties in comprehending recount text. This study was a qualitative research. The subject of the study was the tenth grade students of SMA Negeri 1 Jejawi in academic year of 2019/2020. The techniques of collecting the data were interview and reading comprehension test. To analyses the data, reducing, data displayed, content analysis, and draw conclusion were applied. The result of the study showed that there were 68.7% students had difficulties in finding the main idea, 70.15% students had difficulties in understanding vocabulary, 66% students had difficulties in finding reference, 59.3% students had difficulties in finding purpose of the text, 67.24% students had difficulties in finding detail information, and 81.95% students had difficulties in determining the generic structure of the text. Some factors influenced students’ difficulties in comprehending recount text were material that has long passage, limitation of words, learners’ background, and environment.


INTRODUCTION
Reading is essential to enhance students' knowledge. It is following Hamra and Syatriana (2010: 29) who stated that students who have more knowledge of the reading matter will get more from the material than the less knowledgeable students. Sukarni, et. al, (2017: 215) also explained that reading is about constructing meaning and comprehending written texts. It means that reading refers to the integrated knowledge to comprehend written text and processing activities to construct meaning and to find information from a text so that someone can obtain the knowledge and share it with other people.
In the reading activity, the readers have to catch the point or message of what they read (Anom & Dahler, 2018: 117). It indicates that comprehension is needed in the reading activity.
The way of the readers to build the meaning by having interaction with the text that correlates the readers' previous science and event, the explanation in a text, and readers' attitude toward the text (Pardo, 2004: 272). It meant that comprehension is required when reading the passage to obtain knowledge and to reach the purpose of reading itself. Besides, comprehension is important in the reading process. Without comprehension, the reader hard to know content of the text itself.
Since students' do a process of comprehension in reading activity, the students sometimes get difficulty. As stated by Larasati (2019: 3), the students faced difficulties in  31 Prayitno, Sartika, Asmara. An Analysis….
reading are due to several factors such as uninteresting reading strategy used by the teacher, students' low motivation in reading, and limitation of students' knowledge about vocabulary and grammatical. In short, the students have problems in reading because of the monotonous teachers' strategy, students' motivation, and students' bad in vocabulary and grammar.
In the reading activity, students often find some difficulties in their reading activity, especially in reading recount text. The difficulty is the condition or situation of a thing that is hard to accomplish in comprehending recount text (Aiman & Fitrawati, 2019: 318). In fact, in recount text, there are three generic structures of recount text, namely orientation that introduces the participants, place, and time in the first paragraph, event(s) that describes a series of events that happened in the past, and reorientation that explains the personal comment of the writer to the story (Deazmi, et. al, 2017: 2). Moreover, Gustina (2016: 10) added that the difficulties may arise in comprehending recount text are decoding, comprehension, and retention in reading recount text, which is indicated the problems such as understanding, analyzing the content of the text, and having limited words and prior knowledge.
In short, the problems of students in reading were less comprehension, lacked of analyzing the reading content, and having limited words and prior knowledge.
This study intended to analyze students' problems in comprehending recount text and some factors that influenced it at the tenth graders of SMA Negeri 1 Jejawi.

METHOD
Before starting this research, some preparation were done such as specifying the research problems into questions, examining studies or the literature about the research topic, deciding the research location, doing preliminary research, and choosing a qualitative methodology. The descriptive qualitative research was applied. According to Creswell (2014), qualitative research is an approach for exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups describe to a social or human problemThe tenth-grade students of SMA Negeri 1 Jejawi in the academic year of 2019/2020 were involved. The school was located on Jl. Raya Desa Lingkis Kecamatan Jejawi Kabupaten Ogan Komering Ilir Regency South Sumatera Province. The data were obtained from written test and interview.
The test was done to check students' ability to answer the questions. The interview was also applied to obtain detailed information to support the reading test result.
To measure reliability and validity of the instruments, a triangulation technique was used.
The kind of triangulation used was method triangulation. The researcher used a reading comprehension test as the quantitative method and interview as the qualitative method. Using triangulation, it was expected that the whole and more detailed information from the students about the students' test output and students' difficulties in having the reading test were obtained.

FINDING AND DISCUSSION
The finding showed that students had problems of reading in terms of finding main idea, grammatical features (vocabulary), reference, purpose of the text, detailed information, and generic structure. The detail explanations were as follows.
First, in determining the main idea, it was found that there were seven questions about finding the main idea in the text. From the table above, it was shown that there were twenty-two correct answers (61%) and fourteen incorrect answers (39%) for item number 1, ten correct answers (27.8%), and twenty-six incorrect answers (72.2%) for item number 6, eight correct answers (22.2%) and twenty-eight incorrect answers (77.8%) for item number 11, ten correct answers (27.8%) and twenty-six incorrect answers (72.2%) for item number 13, five correct answers (13.9%) and thirty-one incorrect answers (86.1%) for item number 15, fifteen correct answers (41.7%) and twenty-one incorrect answers (58.3%) for item number 18, and nine correct answers (25%) and twenty-seven incorrect answers (75%) for item number 22. See Table 1.   Table 3.  Table 4. incorrectly. It can be stated that most students had difficulties comprehending recount text to find detailed information in the text. See Table 5. Sixth, in generic structure, there were ten correct answers (27.8%) and twenty-six incorrect answers (72.2%) for item number 3, and three correct answers (8.3%) and thirty-three incorrect answer (91.7%) for item number 5. It was shown that generic structure was quite difficult for the students and more than half of the total students got problem in answering the questions. the percentages of difficulty of it can be seen in Table 6. that students were lazy to read the long passage and their ability in comprehending the content of the text was low. It was in line with Satriani (2018:17-20) who stated that the reason of students made mistakes in reading because they did not understand the content of the text that made them were lazy to read. Second, 70.15% of 36 students faced difficulty in grammatical features in this case understanding vocabulary. They still misunderstood making meaning of synonym and antonym due to have a limitation of words. To comprehend the text, students should master in vocabulary. As supported by Yuliawati (2018: 2), vocabulary play important role in learning language so that students can improve their language skills in reading. Third, there were 66% of 36 students had difficulties in answering the questions about finding references. Most students did not know how to identify the pronoun and word references well, and understanding the text because of their lack vocabulary and prior knowledge of grammatical features. Moreover, students' ability in finding reference to the text was low. It could be said that students should resolve those problems to comprehend the text well.. Then in finding the purpose of the text, there were 59.3% of 36 students faced difficulty to answer the questions.
The factor that caused students difficult to answer the question was students were lazy to read the long passage. Besides, at the first time when reading the text they did not like the topic because it was uninteresting. As supported by Hasibuan (2018: 132), students could not comprehend the text well because of uninterested in reading the text. Next, there were 67.24% of 36 students difficult to find stated/unstated detail information. The reason was students' poor ability in identifying the text. They read whole the text to find the answer, and also had low motivation in learning English. It meant that students lacked a strategy to find the answer and had no desire to learn. It was supported by Harida (2014: 187) who stated that students were unable to apply reading strategy and had no motivation and interest in reading. Ganie, et.al (2019: 691) also stated that reading was an attractive subject because students tended to think that this subject was uninteresting that made their motivation was low to learn it. Finally, there were 81.95% of 36 students difficult to answer the questions about generic structure. More than half of the students faced difficulty in answering the questions. It was because the students did not know what generic structure was and had not comprehend about it. It was in line with Yuliani (2013: .2) who found that some students had problem in deciding generic structure of recount text. Also, Aiman and Fitrawati (2019: 321) described that students did not know the generic structure of the recount text because they lacked knowledge or mastery of vocabulary in comprehending part of generic structure. They generally guessed the answer based on their feeling and lacked concentration in doing it. To be able to answer questions related to the generic structure of recount text, the students needed to increase their knowledge and understanding to comprehend the generic structure of recount text (Deazmi, et. al, 2017: 7). In conclusion, students were difficult to answer the questions of recount text in terms of finding the main idea, understanding vocabulary, reference, determining the purpose of the text searching detailed information, and generic structure.

Journal of English Educational Study (JEES)
Besides, several factors influenced the students when they answered the questions such as text materials, students' vocabularies, students' background, and the environment of the classroom. First, reading materials; long passages. When reading the text, students had to comprehend the text itself to take the information. At that time, students needed time to understand the text and the information. However, there was limited time to comprehend the text that made students faced difficulty to comprehend the text and to find the answer from the text. As supported by Shehu (2015: 29), the factor that influences reading comprehension achievement was reading material. It can influence students' achievement if the text given is not at the right level of the difficulty of the students. Second, vocabulary mastery. To understand what the text tells about, students should enrich their vocabulary. It could be the main problem in understanding the text if the students lacked vocabulary. It is related to Ganie, et.al (2019: 691) stated that students were incompetent to know the meaning of the words and were not familiar with the vocabulary in the text. Next, learners' background knowledge. Students had no interest in learning English. They did not like English because it was influenced their ability in comprehending the text. As stated by Shehu (2015: 29), interest is one of the important factors that caused the improvement of students' reading comprehension achievement. Last, the environment. The condition of the class was not clean enough and weather is hot so that students felt uncomfortable to learn English. As Shamaki (2015: 41) stated that one of essential component in the learning environment is the class should be clean, quiet, and comfortable.
To sum up, several factors influenced students' difficulty to comprehend the text when they do reading activity such as the text materials, students vocabulary, learners background, and environment. Students faced difficulty when the teacher give them the test with long passage. Also, students had a limited vocabulary to comprehend the text. besides, the situation of environment and learners' background were also influenced students' comprehension in reading the text well.

CONCLUSION
The tenth grade students of SMA Negeri 1 Jejawi tend to have problems in six aspects of reading recount text, namely the generic structure of the text, understanding vocabulary, determining the main idea, determining detailed information, finding reference, and finding the purpose of the text. It was happened because of several factors such as materials, vocabulary, learners' background, and environment. In terms of reading materials; students were lazy to read the long passage so that made them difficult to find the answer or to get the information from the text. Then the limitation of the students' vocabulary became the factor that influenced students' ability in comprehending the text. Next, learners' background made students were difficult to understand the text. Besides, they did not have an interest in studying English and had obstacles to get the meaning of the text. Last, the condition of the environment in the class that made students got difficulty to get the information from the text.