A Survey Study of Reading Habits and Attitudes of Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Reading is a fundamental skill that unlocks learning and provides individuals. Many researchers have been conducted studies specifically about reading habit and attitude. Reading habit and attitude become an interest topic to discuss because it can be the key success in learning. The objectives of this study is to identify the reading habits and attitudes of undergraduate university students. This study was conducted in English Language Education Department in one of the universities at Yogyakarta and took 290 respondents from batch 2015, 2016,2017 and 2018. The method used in this research was quantitative research and the design was survey study. This study used Smith (1991)’s Adult Survey of Reading Attitude (ASRA) as adapted by Ahmed (2016) to collect the data and was calculated using validity and reliability tests Cronbach’s alpha was found at 0.79 results. The results revealed in terms of reading habit of the undergraduate students: surfing the internet 56%, reading 14%, sports7%, watching television 2%, playing games 10% and others activity 11% for their leisure time. Major of them read approximately per day: (1 – 2 hours 57%), (2 - 3 hours 23%), (3 - 4 hours 11%) and more than (4 hours 9%). In terms of reading preferences: the respondents preferred reading online material such as journal and e-book 35%, magazine 8%, newspaper 2%, textbook 5%, comic 17% and others 33% such as novel. Most of the students preferred reading in the Indonesian language 67%, English 29%, and Malaya 4%. The other findings of reading attitude through quantitative analysis revealed that: the activity of reading (Mean = 3.05, SD = 0,05), the enjoyment of reading (Mean = 3.55, SD = 0,07), and the anxiety and difficulty (Mean = 2,85, SD = 0,06)