Exploring Students’ Weaknesses in Reading Through Diagnostic Test

This thesis is entitled “Exploring students’ weaknesses in reading through diagnostic test”. Reading is the ability to achieve the meaning from written material. Reading is a substantial skill that needs to be taught in junior high school based on the ministry of the national education’s policy. Diagnostic test is used to identify students’ strength and weaknesses. This research is aimed to know whether Diagnostic Test could identify the problems faced by the students’ in reading. This research utilized quantitative approach by using test as an instrument. The population of this research was the second year students of SMP Negeri 5 Banda Aceh, and the sample was the students of class VIII 1. To collect the data, the researcher gave a test to the students. To analyze the result of the test percentages formula was used. Based on the findings, diagnostic test could find out students problems in reading. The result indicated that most of student (less than 50%) in understanding reading text, functional, but have serious problems in understanding main idea, supporting idea, synonym words and the purpose of the text(100%)