Identifying Learners’ Difficulties in ESL Reading Comprehension

Reading is one of the fundamental skills in language learning and all English as Second Language (ESL) learners need to acquire it in order to master a language. However, statistics show that Malaysians are not reading enough especially the school students who are labeled as reluctant readers. This is deeply reflected in their reading comprehension which is one of the tested components in the SPM examination. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the learners’ difficulties in ESL reading comprehension. Thus, a survey was conducted among 80 upper secondary students in Johor. Questionnaires were used in the survey and given out to the respondents involved. The data obtained from the survey were analysed using SPSS. There were five categories of reading comprehension difficulties among the upper secondary school students. Based on the analysis, it was found that most of the students have agreed that the main difficulty faced by them in ESL reading comprehension is related to the reading process. Finally, the implications of these findings on ESL reading comprehension difficulties were discussed from the aspects of what the teachers could do in their teaching practices to address this issue and provide ways to solve them.

excellent spellers through reading process. As we are all aware of, this skill indeed helps the readers to obtain the required information from the various types of reading materials, ease their thinking, acquire the necessary knowledge and amend themselves in terms of language command and vocabulary as well as it influences the development of the other language learning skills.
According to Inderjit (2014), reading skill has become a cornerstone for success in life. This is also emphasised by Merga & Roni (2018) who have stated that reading skill is an independent skill which promotes lifelong continued literacy engagement. In other words, this skill is seen as an important tool in every professional field around the world to be able to recognise, understand and comprehend written or printed materials, which helps the readers to get engaged with the world around them. Thus, it is undeniable that reading skill is the master of all language learning skills because without it, one is considered having no intelligence and blind in knowledge.
Practically, when one talks about reading skill, there are many kinds of reading materials that can be chosen by the readers such as magazines, storybooks, journals, newspapers, poems, novels, short stories and plays. It depends on the readers in choosing the materials they want to read. Besides choosing the materials to read, according to Nuttall (1982), he has emphasised that there are four ways of reading which are known as scanning, skimming, intensive reading and extensive reading. In order to achieve the reading goals, the best way of reading needs to be chosen by the readers. Thus, this proves that the purpose and way of reading are interrelated which depend on the readers.
As widely known, reading skill is the essential skill that must be acquired during the process of language learning. New Straits Times (2012) reported that statistics shown in 2010 has proven that Malaysians read between 8 to 12 books compared with only 2 in 1995. This is supported by Muhyiddin Yassin (2013) who had stated that Malaysians are still not reading enough and they like reading light materials such as newspapers and magazines only. Although years have passed, the data obtained have concluded that there is no change in the interest of Malaysians towards reading. This implies that in general, Malaysians regardless of their age and status do not read enough and reading skill is not acquired well by them.
The main issue that has been significant is that although reading skill is regarded as the most important skill in the academic sector, it is not promoted and not successful as expected among the students. This has brought to a scenario where the school students in our country are unable to comprehend reading texts not only during the teaching and learning sessions but also in the examination as well as it is one of the compulsorily tested components in the examination. If the students fail to comprehend a text, thus their language learning will not be successful as expected as the reading skill acts as the mother of all language learning skills. Therefore, it is found that analyses and researches have been done before on

Literature Review
According to Rumelhart (1977), the involvement of the text, reader and the relationship between the mentioned two aspects is called reading skill. Reading skill is also said as the skill which is used by the readers to interpret written and printed words in the reading materials to achieve their reading goals. In other words, reading is the process which connects thoughts and language as well as there is a need to be acquired by the students in order to become competent in it.
Without this skill, the readers will be unable to achieve their reading competency.
One of the components of reading skill is reading comprehension. The definition of reading comprehension varies from one source to another. According to Goodman (1970), the only goal of reading skill is comprehension. Readers are required to use all syntactic information, graphic information and semantic information since they are the objectives of reading comprehension. Hence, according to Bernhardt & James (1987), reading comprehension is giving connection to the unknown and the known information. This is further supported by Koda (2005)  Now, the old view of comprehension has been replaced by a conceptual model that has been influenced by the research on recall and memory. According to Anderson (1999), there are three different types of reading models. They are known as bottom-up, top-down and interactive models. Anderson (1999) has explained that the readers are very used to two models which are the bottom-up and top-down approaches but he has also emphasised that the best description of the model is the interactive model.
Nuttall (2005) In terms of reading comprehension strategies, Oxford and Crookall (1989) have defined the mentioned strategies as various techniques which make the language learning more effective and efficient. They are also known as recognising words, using world knowledge, reading for meaning, guessing about the meaning, monitoring comprehension, identifying or inferring main ideas, distinguishing main ideas and paraphrasing. These strategies make the learning better and improve the comprehension as well as overcome the comprehension failures (Singhal, 2001). According to Nuttall (1982), he has classified the strategies into skimming, scanning, extensive reading and intensive reading.
The primary identified issue in reading skill is reading comprehension problem. There has been a list of difficulties that students face in ESL reading comprehension. According to a research conducted by Davoudi and Yousefi (2015), they had emphasised that the causes of reading comprehension difficulties for many learners include environmental, instructional, and biological sources. To keep it comprehensible, according to Gunning (2002), a prominent scholar has identified and categorised these problems as lack of reading process which means the students do not know the processes that they go through during skills, but the habit of reading is still below the satisfactory level. This leads to a situation that the students are labelled as struggling readers which shows and proves that they have low confidence level in reading skill and do not regard themselves as avid readers even for examination purposes. This scenario does not only occur among the school students but also among the tertiary level students. This is proven by Nezami (2012) who had said that the main issue faced by teachers among the tertiary level students is insufficiency in reading comprehension which affects their academic performance.
Therefore, this implies that most students in Malaysia are able to read but they do not utilise it for the sake of their self-development. They often relate reading as restricted for their studies only and not for any other purposes. Thus, to put it in a nutshell, it has been obvious that the main difficulty in regards to ESL reading comprehension needs to be identified in order to solve the issue from engulfing the students.

Research Design & Instrument
This research was a quantitative research which enabled the researcher to quantify the obtained data and generalise results from the samples chosen for this research. This research was conducted using the survey method which allowed the researcher to derive the needed data in a specified period of time. A questionnaire was adapted and adopted from Xiubo Yi and Dan Zhang (2006)  represented strongly agree. The score of 4 meant agree. The score of 3 indicated that the respondent was unable to decide whether he or she agreed or disagreed with the item. The score of 2 meant disagree and the score of 1 represented strongly disagree with the item.

Population and Sampling
This survey was conducted in one of the 43 secondary schools in Johor. This study primarily focused on upper secondary school students. The chosen population with 100 people was aged between 16 to 17 years old who are in Form 4 and Form 5. The population was chosen based on their availability on the day of conducting the survey. Since population consisted too many individuals, there was a need to draw specified number of samples for this using a sampling technique. According to Dale (2006)

Data Collection and Data Analysis
The survey was conducted in a supervised setting by which the researcher distributed the questionnaires to all respondents, explained on what was expected from them in the study, guided them throughout the session to ensure that the respondents answered all items in the questionnaires and complete them at ease.
There was one research question in this study which was to identify the learners' difficulties in ESL reading comprehension problems faced by the upper secondary school students. All items in the questionnaire reflect the difficulties faced by the secondary school students in ESL reading comprehension.
The main goal in this research was to answer the research question by using descriptive statistics which involved the calculation on frequency of scores, percentages and mean was the medium to analyse the data obtained from the questionnaires. These statistics were chosen to observe the characteristics of the samples based on the items in the questionnaire that was used as the instrument of this research. The data obtained from the items answered by the respondents was analysed using the (SPSS) which stands for Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 21.0.

Findings
In this study, there were 57 males and 23 females who had participated as respondents. They were among 16 and 17 years old, studying in Form 4 and Form 5. Furthermore, the respondents were also chosen from all races to avoid racial   Based on Table 3, the mean value for each category of reading comprehension difficulties was obtained and the category with the highest mean value deduced that the upper secondary school students have the most problems related to reading process compared to the other categories. This was followed by problems related to the lack of reading strategies, their background knowledge, language knowledge and finally, the least mean value was obtained by problems related to motivation which implies that the respondent does not perceive reading motivation as the most problematic factor in reading comprehension.
On the other hand, the category with the highest mean value has three items (items 18 -20). Each item has been represented by a table and a pie chart below for a better data representation of the respondents. These items have shown that   the respondents are unanimous in answering these items as all of them have agreed to the items which are inclined towards the problems related to reading process. Thus, this has given a clear view to the researcher in answering the research question.
Item 18 projects the statement: "I thought that I understood the passage quite well, but it turned out that I gave wrong answers to several comprehension questions after it".
Based on Table 4, item 18 has recorded the response of "strongly agree" with the highest percentage of 33.8%, followed by agree with 25%, undecided and disagree with 18.8% and strongly disagree with 3.8%. The percentiles have been Item 19 projects the statement: "I cannot concentrate myself till the end of a passage. When reading a long and boring passage, I often forget the former part when I read the latter part".
Based on Table 5, item 19 has recorded the same response of strongly agree   Item 20 projects the statement: "After reading a passage once, I seem to forget what I have already read, and have to move backward and reread it". Based on Table 6, item 20 has recorded the response of agree with the highest percentage of 48.8%, followed by strongly agree with 28.7%, undecided with 10%, disagree with 8.8% and strongly disagree with 3.8% as shown in Figure 3.

Discussion
Based on the categorical average mean values obtained, the highest value is 3.7958 which showed that the respondents are inclined towards difficulties related to reading process. According to the result, the respondents do not know the proper reading process of comprehending the content of the texts based on   the items 18 -20 in the questionnaire. This finding also supports the research conducted by Davoudi and Yousefi (2015) who had argued that learners who face reading difficulties have comprehension problems that could be due to imprecise or ineffective word recognition and decoding methods in their reading process. When this happens, the students are unable to tackle reading comprehension. In order to solve this, the students must be exposed to the appropriate ways of reading process so that they will be able to answer the related questions based on the reading comprehension accurately.
The next difficulty is related to reading strategies which has a mean value of 3.4188. According to the result, the students have proven that they have obstacles in scanning the main idea and understanding the content of the reading comprehension based on the items 15 -17 in the questionnaire. As mentioned by Oxford and Crookall (1989) earlier, these proposed reading strategies aid the readers in their language learning to become more effective and efficient learners without which reading comprehension goals will not be achieved. Thus, the students need to identify the proper strategies and improve them for their reading comprehension.
This, on the other hand, is followed by a mean value of 3 The other two reading comprehension difficulties are related to language knowledge and motivation which had mean values of 2.9208 and 2.7875 respectively. These two mean values are considered low which indicated that the respondents are not inclined towards ESL reading comprehension difficulties which are related to either the knowledge of language or motivation. In other words, these two categories are perceived as the least factors to cause difficulties in ESL reading comprehension. This implies that the students have the motivation for reading and the language knowledge to comprehend it.

Conclusion
To put it in a nutshell, the research objective was achieved and the research question was answered via the collection of data and findings. This has given an insight into the difficulties faced by the students in reading comprehension.
Therefore, this research was seen as highly significant for many parties in this country. As mentioned by Inderjit (2014), reading skill helps to improve the academic achievement of the students and so, shared efforts are seen as necessary between the Education Ministry, policymakers, teachers, learners, society and private bodies to strategise ways and find solutions to solve the identified difficulties for the students to feel at ease in reading comprehension.
This research focused on learners' difficulties in ESL reading comprehension from one of the secondary schools only via the survey method using a questionnaire. Reading is an ongoing life-long skill, so this research could be expanded to the other secondary schools as well as higher learning institutions to identify the other reading comprehension difficulties by using other methods such as in-depth investigation or a direct assessment. This helps the researcher to avoid overgeneralisation because it involves different groups of samples as respondents.