Exploring English Education Department Students’ Perception towards the Implementation of Pre-Class Reading Assignments

A pre-class reading assignment is one of the activities in English learning. Pre-class reading assignments are also well-known as an effective and valuable tool to comprehend reading materials’ understanding. The purpose of this research is to investigate the benefits and challenges of implementing pre-class reading assignments in the English learning process. This research used a qualitative approach to learn more about students’ perceptions and interview as the research instrument to find out the data. This research chose an English Education Department at one of the private universities in Yogyakarta as the setting of the research and participants that consist of students from batch 2018 who enrolled in classes using pre-class reading assignments, classes which provide students with assign reading for the next class. This research provided two major findings. The benefits students get from the implementation of pre-class reading assignments are getting prior knowledge, getting new information, promoting students’ confidence in the classroom, promoting students’ readiness, promoting students’ autonomous learning, enrich students’ vocabulary knowledge, and promoting students' good reading habits. The second finding challenges students faced in the implementation of pre-class reading assignments. The challenges in pre-class reading assignments are poor reading habits, low motivation, lack of vocabulary, and unfamiliar content.