PBI UMY STUDENTS’ CRITICAL READING LEVELS

Despite the importance of critical reading, English Education Department (PBI)
Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta (UMY) did not strongly encourage its
students to be critical readers. In fact, the majority of PBI lecturers only gave
assignments to read text books and understand their contents, but, analyzing and
giving arguments toward reading texts were rarely applied. The critical reading
term refers to students’ activities in reading which include analyzing, reflecting,
and evaluating texts. This study investigated students’ critical reading levels at
PBI UMY. Specifically, this research focused on critical readers’ population and
students’ ability in critical reading. The analyzing, evaluating, and creating levels
of revised Bloom’s Taxonomy was used to classify students’ critical reading
levels. In this descriptive quantitative study, 264 questionnaires were distributed,
and all were returned. The respondents were PBI UMY active students from batch
2011 – 2014. SPPS 22 and Microsoft Excel were used to analyze the population
of critical readers and students’ ability. The results show that 92% out of total
population was critical readers, which consists of 35% students at the analyzing
levels, 23% students at the evaluating levels, and 33% students at the creating
levels. The study also showed that students of PBI UMY had a high ability in
analyzing a reading text. Meanwhile, in evaluating text, students of PBI UMY had
moderate ability. Furthermore, in creating text, students of PBI UMY had low
ability