THE DIFFICULTIES IN MAKING INFERENCES BY THE EIGHTH SEMESTER STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION BATCH 2017

Abstract

Lestari, Riana Ika. 2021. The Difficulties in Making Inferences by the Eight Semester Students of English Language Education Batch 2017. Sarjana’s Thesis, English Language Education Study Program, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Lambung Mangkurat University, Banjarmasin. The first advisor: Dr. Cayandrawati Sutiono, M.A, the second advisor: Dr. Rina Listia, M.Pd.

Keywords: Students’ Difficulties, Making Inferences.

Making Inference is one of the important aspects related to reading. The inference is an act or process to arrive at a conclusion based on what is already known or assumed, inference also known as a form of drawing implied conclusions. This research aimed to find out the students’ difficulties in making inferences. The design of this research was descriptive quantitative. This research was conducted at Lambung Mangkurat University. The participants of this research were 95 students selected from the Teacher Training and Education Faculty of English Language Education. In this research, the instruments used to collect the data were tests and questionnaires conducted on February 15th, 2021. Based on the result of the research, there are six types of difficulties in making inferences which have been sorted by researcher by highest to lowest difficulty levels. Those difficulties are understanding the grammatical role of unknown words, recognizing author’s bias, identifying the personalities and motivations of characters, constructing a conclusion based on the facts in the text, understanding the author’s point of view, and recognizing character’s tone. The researcher suggests that students should take their free time to learn more about making an inference, to practice more exercises regarding making an inference, and to read books they like to trigger their inference skills.