What Make a Text Difficult?

INTRODUCTION Reading is an interactive process which involves many factors like the text, the reader, fluency and strategies. In this process the readers have to combine the information from the text with their background knowledge to comprehend the content of the text. However the text sometimes is above the readers’ level, this makes them difficult to achieve its content. And so comprehension may be broken down. To help learners solve this problem during their learning process, the teacher should be careful in selecting a text so that he can create his learners’ interest to go through the text. As a teacher of English I recognize that one of the factors influencing the reading process is the text itself. Giving students reading material that is ‘too difficult’ is damaging to the learning process, and demotivating to the students. However, what may be a frustrational text for this person will be an independent text for another. Additionally, a text will also change categories for a student as he increases his reading ability. So it is difficult to say what a difficult text is. In my opinion to assess the difficulty of a text is not easy because it includes many factors which sometimes depend on the text itself but sometimes on both readers and the text. That is the reason why I choose the topic ‘What makes a text difficult?’ In this paper I will present some literature review relating to this topic and some application in teaching reading process to make the text less difficult.

I. LITERATURE REVIEW

In this part I will present a set of factors that makes a text difficult. These factors reflect the difficult that readers may have in comprehending a text. However, some of these factors may be largely inherent in the text itself and the others involve both the reader and the text. As Burmeister (1987, p31) noted that “there is a definite interaction between factors found in written materials and factors found within the person who is reading”. He