READING COMPREHENSION PROCESS BY STUDENTS WITH DIFFERENT LEARNING STYLES

The objectives of this qualitative research were to: discover the reading comprehension processes of students with visual and auditory learning styles in understanding exposition and narrative texts. The questionnaire consist of 30 items was given to 70 students Semester VI students of State Institute for Islamic Studies Medan, North Sumatera (Institut Agama Islam Negeri Sumatera Utara: LAIN- SU) The learning styles to be discovered were visual and auditory. The result of the analysis items, only six students were chosen as the sample. Because the learning styles in focused were only visual and auditory, without any combinations of visual and auditory or vice versa.Based on the findings, the students with visual and auditory learning stylevisual learners applied interactive method in reading exposition text, especially applied interactive models, the combination of bottom- up and top- down models i.ern bottom up and top down method and generalizing idea or statement while the auditory learners applied top- down process especially, sampling, predicting and testing. In reading narrative text, the visual learners applied bottom up and top down method while auditory learners applied recognizing word/ phrase meaning, pronouncing and predicting. Therefore, it can be concluded that the learning styles affect the students reading comprehension process.It implies that, lecturers in the process of instruction should understand the students learning style, thus it is suggested that lecturers need to introduce the reading comprehension processes models and to motivate the learners to apply reading comprehension process while reading are important.