A Survey Study on Indonesian High School Students’ Reading Attitudes

Abstract

Reading is one of the important skills that students need to master in language learning, especially for students in Indonesia who consider English as a foreign language that is difficult to learn. Reading is a basic skill that unlocks learning and gives individuals the means to pursue knowledge and enjoyment independently. The students have good attitudes towards reading but they need to improve their awareness of reading, thus, they can read not only for homework or academical purpose also to find knowledge. The objectives of this study is to identify the reading attitudes of senior high school students. This study was conducted in Senior high school students’ in one of the school at Yogyakarta and took 92 respondents. The method used in this research was quantitative research and survey study. In this study used the Adult Survey of Reading Attitude (ASRA) questionnaire which was developed by Smith (1991) by using google form translated into bahasa indonesia. Respondents answered statements based on a Likert scale (5 = "strongly agree"; 1 = "strongly disagree") (11 items about reading activities, 9 items about reading enjoyment, and 9 items about anxiety and difficulty in reading) to measure students' attitudes and interest in reading. The results revealed in terms of reading habit of the students: surfing internet 58%, playing games 12%, reading 11%, watching television 3%, sports 6% and other activity 10% for their leisure time. The majority of them read approximately per day: (30 minutes – 1 hours 59%), (1 - 2 hours 23%), (2 – 3 hours 10%) and more than (3 hours 8%). The respondents preferred reading online material such as journal and e-book 44%, newspaper 3%, comics 21%, textbooks 12%, magazine 7%, and others 13%. Most of the students preferred reading in Indonesia language 70%, English 26%, and others 4%. The other findings of reading attitude through quantitative analysis revealed that: the activity of reading (Mean = 2.87, SD = 1,03), the enjoyment of reading (Mean = 3.08, SD = 1,02), and the anxiety and difficulty (Mean = 2.59, and SD = 1,02)