An Analysis of Students’ Ability in Reading Comprehension by Using Barrett’s Taxonomy at English Department Universitas Negeri Padang

This research aims to analyze students' ability in reading comprehension using Barrett's taxonomy at English Department Universitas Negeri Padang. The population of this research was students of the 2018 Academic Year English Education study program who had taken reading classes ranging from Basic Reading, Intermediate Reading, Advanced Reading, Critical Reading, and Extensive Reading. The sample of the research was 28 students using simple random sampling technique. This research used a reading comprehension test and questionnaire as research instruments. This research uses Barrett's taxonomy as an indicator consisting of five levels, namely: Literal, Reorganization, Inferential, Evaluation, and Appreciation. This research is a descriptive study with a quantitative approach. The results of this study indicate that the students' ability in reading comprehension is in the poor category with a total average score of 53.86. The findings of this study indicate that majority of students face difficulties in comprehending the questions in form of evaluation. It is proved by the data that students have a low ability in understanding evaluation with a total average score was 31.79%. In addition, the highest percentage is in Appreciation comprehension with an average score was 56.55%. Then, factors affecting the students‘ reading comprehension ability are the students‘ linguistic knowledge (65.48%), students‘ perception (63.04%), lecturer influence (62.50%), family influence (46.88%), and environment (59.52%). Therefore, lecturers are expected to be able to improve students' ability in reading comprehension, especially in understanding the questions in form of Evaluation by providing a lot of practice both inside and outside the classroom.