Rismayanti Dewi Solihat
06211210028
The title of this paper is “A STUDY ON STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN
UNDERSTANDING NARRATIVE TEXT”. Narrative is one of the genres that is
used in teaching English. Its social function is to tell stories and entertain the
readers. Some teachers said it was hard for them to teach narrative and make
students understand and differentiate narrative text with the other texts, especially
with recount text because both to be similar. Based on the phenomena, we found
that students face difficulty in understanding narrative text. The aim of this paper
was to identify the students’ difficulties in understanding narrative text, to find out
the factors which cause the students’ difficulties and also to find out students’
effort in solving their difficulties.
The methodology of this research was qualitative research. This research
would be described by words rather than number. The writer used this method to
examine the events or phenomena of students, especially in students’ difficulties
in understanding narrative text. The techniques which were used in collecting data
were observation and interview. The writer observed the teaching learning process
to identify which students who had difficulties in understanding narrative text.
There were sixteen students who had difficulties in understanding narrative text.
Then observation was followed by interview.
Based on the data, there were five difficulties which are faced by the
students in understanding narrative text. The highest level of difficulty was
difficulty in understanding English text. Second was difficulty in identifying
generic structure of narrative text especially complication and resolution. Third
was difficulty in understanding teacher’s explanation about narrative text. Fourth
was difficulty in differentiating narrative text with the other texts, especially
recount text. And the last level was difficulty in understanding simple past tense
in narrative text. The result showed that, there were 5 factors which cause
students’ difficulties in understanding narrative text. The most dominant factors or
the major factors which cause the students’ difficulties are lack of vocabulary and
less understanding about the text and the generic structure of the text. The minor
factors are unclear explanation from the teacher, no media used in teaching
learning process and lack of motivation in learning English. And students also did
some efforts to solve their difficulties Such as, asking friends and teachers,
translating text into Indonesian, adding vocabulary and so on.