YOSEFINA LASAM Pengarang NOVRIANI RABEKA MANAFE Dosen Pembimbing 2 Alexander Home Kabelen Penguji 1 Novriani Rabeka Manafe Penguji 2 John Bhae Ketua Penguji

The problems of this study are (1) what difficulties of reading comprehension skills are faced by the second-semester students of the English Study Program of Nusa Cendana University in the academic year 2021/2022? (2) What factors that affect the difficulties of reading comprehension skills faced by the second-semester students of the English Study Program of Nusa Cendana University in the academic year 2021/2022? The study’s aims are (1) To find out the difficulties of reading comprehension skills faced by the second-semester students of the English Study Program of Nusa Cendana University in the academic year 2021/2022 (2) To find out the factors affecting the difficulties of reading comprehension skills faced by the second-semester students of the English Study Program of Nusa Cendana University in the academic year 2021/2022. The method used in this study was qualitative and quantitative. The subjects of this research were 35 students of the English Study Program of Nusa Cendana University from class A. The data were collected by using a test and an interview. The questions on the test were designed based on 13 reading comprehension skills. The research results show that the students have difficulties in mastering reading comprehension skills. The difficulties are classified into very low, low, average, high and very high criterion. The major difficulties of reading comprehension skills faced by students were finding the definitions from structural clues (85.71%) that classified into very high criterion, answering the main idea of text (75.71%) and answering the transition questions (71.42%) that classified into high criterion. In addition, the student's lack of reading comprehension skills was affected by some factors including difficulty in understanding the long sentence in the text, lack of vocabulary, environmental influences, unfamiliar vocabulary, and lack of motivation. Keywords: Difficulties, problems and reading comprehension.