Reading Comprehension Difficulties among Tenth Grade Students of Vocational High School

This research was aimed to identify: (1) the difficulties faced by tenth grade students of
Vocational High School in reading comprehension and (2) the factors influencing students’
reading comprehension difficulties. This research was conducted by using descriptive qualitative
method, which both questionnaire and interview were the instruments of data collection. The
data was analyzed based on the theory of Miles and Huberman (2014) which reducing it by
categorizing the relevant data. The participants of this study were tenth grade students of a
Vocational High School in Medan. In doing this research, the procedures were gathering the data
and information, reducing data, and drawing conclusion. The result of the research showed that:
(1) most of the students have difficulties in determining main idea, locating reference,
understanding vocabulary, and making inference and (2) the factors influencing their difficulties
were limited vocabulary knowledge, lack of fluency, lack of familiarity of the subject matter, and
the problems in recalling after reading.