Exploring Types of Reading Comprehension Difficulties in Descriptive Texts

Eva Clara Ariani Silalahi (University of Singaperbangsa Karawang)
Evi Karlina Ambarwati (University of Singaperbangsa Karawang)
Fela Dafitri (University of Singaperbangsa Karawang)

Jurnal Educatio FKIP UNMA
Vol. 12 No. 3 (2026)

Reading comprehension is an essential skill that supports students’ ability to understand the information contained in a text. However, students still encounter various difficulties when reading descriptive texts, which can affect their success in understanding the content of what they read. This study aims to explore the types of reading comprehension difficulties students experience when reading descriptive texts. The study employed a qualitative case study design (Creswell, 2012), conducted at a public senior high school in Karawang. Nine 10th – grade students were purposively selected by the subject teacher across low, medium, and high reading ability levels: five of them (P1, P4, P5, P6, and P9) were retained for the final analysis because their responses were complete and sufficiently elaborated across all interview indicators, while the remaining four were excluded due to incomplete or minimal responses. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, then analyzed using thematic analysis. The results showed that students experienced four main types of difficulties: identifying main ideas, understanding vocabulary, finding detailed information, and making inferences. Unlike previous studies, which generally identified types of difficulties through quantitative approaches, this study provides a deeper understanding of how students experience and explain each difficulty based on their experiences while reading descriptive texts, including how these difficulties are entangled with the coping strategies students use to manage them and with the identification and description structure characteristic of the descriptive text genre. The findings indicate that these four types of difficulties are plausibly interrelated and collectively influence students’ comprehension of the text’s content, although this study did not systematically test cross category relationships. Therefore, reading learning should be designed using strategies that comprehensively develop students’ abilities to identify main ideas, vocabulary, detailed information, making inferences and making conclusions, while treating each difficulty and its associated coping strategy as analytically distinct.