AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ READING INTEREST DURING LEARNING FROM HOME AMIDST THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

This study aimed to analyze students’ reading interest during the learning-from-home policy in the Covid-19 pandemic time, and it was conducted at the English Department of the University of Kutai Kartanegara in Tenggarong. This descriptive study employed a qualitative approach with a survey design that involved 79 students from the second, fourth, and sixth semesters as participants. The data were obtained through a questionnaire and interview, and they were then analyzed descriptively. Results of this study showed that during the learning-from-home policy students liked to read anything but lecture materials. They argued that reading was tedious and difficult. They preferred reading fiction to reading non-fiction and preferred reading online to reading offline. They read 15-30 minutes a day and only read 1-3 books within five months of learning from home. Their reading materials came from online and offline sources, from websites, and print books by using smartphones. The type of material that was mostly read was novels especially romantic ones. This study suggests that teachers should present lecture materials in such a way that students would be interested in reading them for certain reasons academically or personally.


Learning
independently and staying at home for a long time during the COVID-19 pandemic have led to students' boredom and loss of effort. Regarding students' loss of efforts during learning from home, students in our English Department experienced some obstacles and problems in the home learning process, such as distractions when learning at home.
Since everyone was required to do remote learning, it could be noisy if there were people in their house who were also doing similar activities. How could the students concentrate on their lessons? The online mode of the university had been a stressful process for many students.
For those living in an area where internet access and Wi-Fi are inaccessible, they are stressed and worried if they could join online classes and do the lecturers' assignments. Therefore, remote learning has been difficult for some students.
Besides, they have encountered obstacles such as slow internet and feelings of isolation from their friends. While technology does allow them to interact with each other somewhat effectively, it could not replace face to face interactions. They often had to work for quite a long time, like at least five hours a day on all the assignments.
Based on the above situation, the authors were curious on how and what it would be when the students feel bored, how their reading interest during this situation would be, and how they read academic references to complete their assignments. Meanwhile, reading becomes one of the keys to accomplishing the assignments given in individual learning.
Alshumaimeri (2011) supported that reading is a crucial skill in learning and communication.
However, enjoying to reading process, students need to be firstly interested in it. It is also supported by Hidi (2001), who argued that students' interest has a vital role in the reading process. However, based on UNESCO data in 2012, the reading interest index for Indonesians only reached 0.001, which means that out of every 1,000 Indonesians, only one person is interested in reading. Referring to this phenomenon, the government must take some steps to cope with this problem. Teachers and lecturers should also stimulate their students' interest since it promotes active engagement in the learning process.
In regular times, the condition of the Indonesian people's interest in reading is indeed quite apprehensive. The results of the 2016 study of The World's Most Literate Nations (WMLN) indicated that the reading rank of Indonesians is the 60th out of 61 countries studied. The study, dubbed World's Most Literate Nations, puts Indonesia below Thailand in 59th and above Botswana in 61st position, even though in terms of infrastructure to support reading, the archipelago ranks above some European countries (Miller & McKenna, 2016).
Reading interest is a feeling that accompanies or causes special attention to reading. The students may actively read if they are interested in reading. Reading interest can make them consider the reading activity as a habitual activity for them. Generally speaking, interest is a motivational variable that involves not only the emotions but also the intellect, making it a powerful energizer indeed (Hidi, Renninger, & Krapp, 2004). Interest is the set of attending, the tendency to give selective attention to something. Interest arises through the interaction of basic needs and the means used to satisfy them. The students interested in reading satisfy the basic needs of personal adequacy or self-esteem, others' esteem, curiosity, or success.
Much research was conducted to deal with reading interest from the lowest education level until the highest level (e.g. Rumainah, 2018;Muhamad et al., 2019). Ali (2017), for example, found that students' reading interest in Universitas Sembilanbelas November Kolaka at USN's library was relatively low. 70 students, 60 students visited the library only once a week, eight students 2-3 times a week, two students never visited the library, and no students who visited every day of work.
Next, a descriptive study at the Psychology Faculty of the University of Diponegoro first semester students found that the participants mostly had a reading novel habit. Their habits of playing an online game and watching TV much could get their reading interest (Siswati, 2010). Yusof (2010) stated that family factors strongly and positively influence pupils reading habits and interests.
Of all those studies, the authors saw a research gap that majorities of the research about reading interest were conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic when the university operated normally.
Based on the above discussion, the authors were interested in conducting a study on reading interest during pandemic, especially to answer the following research questions: 1) How was the students' reading interest during learning from home?; 2) Why did the phenomena related to the

Research Design
This research employed descriptive design in the type of survey. Groves in Adiyanta (2019) states that surveys produce information that is statistically in nature. Survey research asks respondents about their trust, opinion, characteristics, and attitude that had happened or are happening. This research aimed to describe the students' reading interest phenomena during learning from home in March 2020 until July 2020. Quantitative and qualitative approaches were used to analyze the data.

Research Site and Participants
This research was conducted at the English Department at the University of Kutai Kartanegara, Tenggarong. The participants were taken from the second, fourth, and sixth semester in 2019/2020. Actually, from 115 active English Education Department students, only 79 students were willing to fill out the questionnaire because filling out this questionnaire was voluntary, so not all students participated in this research. 79 students who filled out the questionnaire, it consisted of 18 males and 61 females. Their ages were between 19 and 24 years old. Most of them lived in the downtown of Tenggarong, only a few of them lived in rural areas.

Data Collection and Analysis
To collect the data in this research, the researchers utilized the questionnaire and interview. The questionnaire questions were adapted from some sources (e.g. Mudjito, 2000;Hardianto, 2011;Siswati, 2012;Donal, 2015;Ali, 2017) and were adopted by the researchers themselves. Both questionnaires and interview were conducted online. Questionnaires were distributed to the participants by using Google Form. The link of Google Form was shared to the participants through students' WhatsApp groups.
The questionnaire consisted of 21 closed-ended questions which were divided into five categories, namely: 1) Feelings towards reading: 5 questions; 2) Reading preferences: 5 questions; 3)Time for reading and some books: 6 questions; 4)Reading sources: 4 questions; 5) Types of reading materials: 1 question.
After the questionnaire results had been collected, the researchers did some interview with ten students chosen as the samples of an interview to support the data. The interview was conducted http://journal.uinjkt.ac.id/index.php/ijee | DOI: http://doi.org/10.15408/ijee.v8i1.17157 P-ISSN: 2356-1777, E-ISSN: 2443-0390 | This is an open access article under CC-BY-SA license by using WhatsApp video call. For the interview, the researchers asked ten questions related to the reasons the students chose the answers provided in the questionnaire.
The data obtained were analyzed using descriptive analysis. The data from questionnaire were analyzed as well as presented in frequency and percentage tabulation, while the data from the interview were presented in narrative form.

Findings
The results in this study were presented in frequency and percentage tables and narrative form. The data were collected to answer the research questions related to (1) students' reading interest of the students during pandemic; and (2) the reasons why those phenomena happened.

Students' reading interest
From the results of quantitative calculations, the following descriptions were obtained:

Reasons why those phenomena happened
From the interview results, the researchers found why the phenomena on reading interest of the students happened, and those became the causes of the low interest in reading. Some of the reasons are as follows: 1. The students said that reading was hard for them because there were too many difficult words and sentences that made them slow to understand, especially in a foreign language, it is difficult for them to concentrate, needed extra focus, and were rarely and lazy to read.
2. The students did not like reading the lecturers' materials during learning from home because the materials were boring to read, too long and the language was difficult to understand, not exciting, and had to be read many times and needed a long time to understand.
3. The students felt that reading lecture materials were boring because the materials were too long and many, monotone and the language was too standard, not interesting, challenging to understand, the students had to read many times and had to think extra hard to understand the materials.
4. The students preferred to read anything else instead of reading lecture materials during learning from home because other readings were more interesting than lecturers' materials; there was no need to think extra, according to the heart's desire.
5. The students preferred to read fiction because it was more interesting, entertaining, no need to think extra, to increase imagination and creativity.
6. The students preferred to read from online sources because there were many reading choices to read, more interesting, always available, could be got anytime, efficient and straightforward, more comfortable to access and vary, easier to find reading that fit their wishes, they could not go to campus and district 7. The students spent just 15-30 minutes a day to read during learning from home because they were busy helped their parents to get extra income or to help their younger brothers/sisters to study online at home, they had no free time, it is difficult to share time with other activities, no need a long time to read to make it useful and avoid boredom and got headache.
8. The students could read only a few books (1-2 books) while learning from home because they did not have much time to read, spent more time on a gadget, did not have many books at home, did not find interesting books to read.
9. There were no fixed times to read. Students read anytime they wanted during learning from home, not necessarily every day depended on the situation, and had spare times.
10. In their spare times, they liked to open their social media and sometimes read when they found exciting readings, watch tv, sell online, learn cooking, help their siblings to finish their school tasks, play online games, take a rest and gather with family.

Feelings towards Reading
Based on table 1, related with the first indicator of reading interest, feelings towards reading seemed that the students still had enthusiasm in reading, it was shown that 63.3% of students liked to read at home during learning from home. As much as 68.4% of students liked to read anything. According to Nathanson, Pruslow and Levitt (2008) as cited in Siswati (2012, p. 130) this favorite is related to enthusiasm.
As an enthusiast, individuals who claim to like reading mean having a pleasant experience while doing these reading activities. For the first two questions, the students just said they liked reading at home and liked to read anything during learning from home, but they did not prove their reading activities in the next questions.
Unfortunately, 73.4% of the students did not like reading academic books or lecture materials that mostly written in English given by their lecturers during learning from home and 81.1% of the students said it was boring. They had some reasons for this. It is because the materials were not attractive, too many and long materials, boring to read; it is difficult to understand the language, especially in English, they had to read over and over until they had understood and of  Khairuddin (2013) that the participants in this study were the Form Four students in Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Belara (SMK Belara) Kuala Terengganu had a relatively low interest in reading English materials.
In addition to that, there were a tiny number of students who read English reading materials. The students still also had a negative mindset that reading was hard for them. 83.6% of students stated it. Because the reading contained many unfamiliar and challenging words or sentences, mostly English text, they should think harder and full of concentration, besides that their laziness to read makes them into trouble and made them think that reading is difficult or challenging.
Attitude plays a vital role in reading.
More or less attitude influences someone's reading interest. Dislike feeling, think hard, feel bored are negative mindset. Their perception about reading which then made them lazy in reading. Much research examined relationships between pupils' attitudes toward reading and the development of reading skills have already been explored (Martinez et al., 2008;Petscher, 2009). Reading attitude significantly predicted reading achievement.

Reading preferences
From table 2, during learning from home, the students preferred to read fiction because it was entertaining, more interesting, could increase imagination and creativity and they no need to think extra hard to read fiction readings.
Reading fiction, like romance/novel and mystery, could release stress and boredom because the participant in this research was mostly dominated by female students, 61 female students, and no wonder if their favorite reading was romance or novel. The finding of this study is also similar to a study conducted by Sapiah (1987) as cited in Khairudin (2013) who mentioned a significant difference in terms of the choice of genres based on gender. Female students tended to choose romance, for example, novel as their most favorite reading. It was also supported with Siswati (2012) research that the first semester students of Psychology Faculty at University of Diponegoro consisted of 92 students, 71 females and 21 males, 61 students chose the novel their favorite reading and 34 students chose romance.
From table 2 number 4, the students also preferred reading from online sources. This is in line with the study by Ansari (2018)  that most respondents (88%) indicated that reading on the internet improves their professional skills. 80% of respondents perceived reading on the internet improve their language skills. Ajayi, Shorunke, and Aboyade (2014) studied the influence of electronic resources on reading culture and reading pattern of the students of Adeleke University. The research discloses e-resources influence reading culture. Most of the respondents answered that it increases their reading habit; it makes reading further enjoyable and enhances their reading possibility and independent lifelong reading skills.
By looking at the data in table 2 number 5, the researchers assumed that the students' reading interest on lecture materials given by the lecturers during learning from home was very low. From 79 students, only 18 of students preferred reading lecture materials during learning from home. This is unfortunate because the students' knowledge of certain learning materials will not increase optimally if the students do not have a high reading interest in reading the learning materials, which will affect their academic achievement. Of course, this still needs further research to prove it. However, many research pieces had proven that there was a significant influence between reading interest and learning achievement of the students. One of them was research conducted by Permadani and Latifah (2016). There was an effect of reading interest on Economic learning achievement by 12.11% of SMA Negeri Kendal's tenthgrade students in the 2014/2015 school year.

Time for reading and number of books
As stated in table 3 about time for reading and the number of books, it was found that the duration of time used to read during learning from home was relatively low. 74.7% of students answered that the time set aside for reading each day was between 15 to 30 minutes, while 10% answered 30 minutes to 1 hour per day and only 9% spent more than 1 hour to read each day. Even 3.8% did not read unless they were forced to read, and 2.5% of students did not read at all.
Meanwhile, the duration for reading in a week during learning from home was also low. Only 13.9% of students could read every day, 3.8% 5-6 days, 32.9% 3-4 days in a week. The most were 48.1% or 38 students who read 1-2 days a week. There was 1.3% of student who never read in a week during learning from home. This analysis results were the same as the results carried out by Donal (2015) who found that 79% of FKIP of University of http://journal.uinjkt.ac.id/index.php/ijee | DOI: http://doi.org/10.15408/ijee.v8i1.17157 P-ISSN: 2356-1777, E-ISSN: 2443-0390 | This is an open access article under CC-BY-SA license Pasir Pangaraian students spent their time not more than 1 hour for reading. In contrast, 20% of students spent 2-3 hours each day of their time to read.
When the students were asked about why the duration of time for reading each day and each week during learning from home was too short, they said those because they had to accompany and help their younger siblings study at home through online. They were busy helping their parents get extra money because, in this Covid-19 pandemic time, many sectors of works were affected, many students whose parents lost their jobs and income. Others argued that they had no free time; it is hard to split the time with other activities. There was a student who did it purposively. She did not read for a long time to make it useful and avoid got headache and boredom.
Still, about time spent on reading, it was found that 67.1% of students of English Education Department mostly spend only 15-30 minutes to read for college assignment per day. According to their answers in table 1, question number 3 and 4, 73.4% did not like to read lecturers' materials during learning from home because 77.2% thought that reading lecture materials were boring. In contrast, 57% of students could spend more than 1 hour per day reading for pleasure. It is appropriate with their answers in table 2, question number 3, that they preferred to read other reading materials rather than reading lecture materials.
From these data, the researchers analyzed that the habit of reading every day, which only ranged from 15 minutes to 1 hour, and every week was only about 1 to 4 days, is considered insufficient when it is seen from the demands of campus assignments. It supposed that the students could have more time for reading to fulfil their campus assignments. The biggest obstacle to reading habits could not be done longer because they also spend much time on other activities, such as helping their parents get money and helping their siblings do homework, and so on.
Unfortunately, the students also could not use their spare time to read. In their free time, they liked to open their social media mostly not to read something useful but to sell online, play online games, update status, or check someone's status in their timeline to help their siblings learn online. They also watched tv, learnt cooking, took a rest and gathered with their family in their spare time during learning from home.

151-155
http://journal.uinjkt.ac.id/index.php/ijee | DOI: http://doi.org/10.15408/ijee.v8i1.17157 P-ISSN: 2356-1777, E-ISSN: 2443-0390 | This is an open access article under CC-BY-SA license Discussed the number of books the students read during learning from home in table 2, question number 5 and 6, there were 69.6% of students who read 1-10 pages of book chapter//lecture materials/parts of literature in a day, 16.5% read 11-20 pages and only 10.1% who could read more than 20 pages in a day. What is even more concerning is that 6.3% of students not reading any books, 59.5% of students were only able to read 1-3 books during five months of learning from home, 19% of students could read 4-6 books, 6.3% 7-9 books, and only 8.9% who could read more than ten books during learning from home started from March until July 2020. However, most of the students' books were fiction books in the form of novels and romances and not academic books.
When they were asked why they only read few books during learning from home, they reasoned that they had no time to read, spent more time using a gadget, did not find interesting books to read, and did not have many books at home. This study's results seem to confirm further the statement made by Sri Sulastri (2013) that the Indonesian people today are less fond of reading.

Reading sources
Based on table 4, 55.7% of students got reading materials from both online and offline, 38% from online and only 6.3% form offline during learning from home. Online sources that the most widely used were from a website (50.6%), followed by Google Classroom (44.9%) and WhatsApp (33.3%). Some students chose Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Podcast, News Portal, and others to get reading materials online.
The exciting thing from the data above is that the students' journal should be read last. 6.4% or only five students chose the journal as their reading source. It seemed that the students did not like reading journals. This result was the same as Hardianto (2011) research that only 3.65% or 3 out of 82 students of Fakultas Ilmu Pendidikan Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta chose journal as an exciting reading. The others seemed dislike to read the journal with various reasons, such as journal was challenging to get, and the language used was boring.
Then, for the medium used in the reading activity, the students ranked based on the order of their interest, as follow: reading from a smartphone (40.5%), reading from a tablet (31.7%), reading from print media (17.7%) and the last was reading from a computer (10.1%). The use of gadgets in today's technological advances is commonplace, especially during Covid-19 pandemic where gadgets are essential tools for the learning process from home, although not all learning processes from home must use gadgets. Almost all students have gadgets, either smartphones or androids, so it is not surprising that students do many reading activities from their gadgets.

Types of reading materials
From data in table 5, it was found that the types of reading materials read by the students during learning from home this semester were varied. The type of reading materials that the most read by the students during learning from home were novel/romance (67.1%), while the next three types selected were manga/ comics/ humor/ biographies/ true stories/ horrors/ mysteries and textbooks/ lecture materials, and the less read by the students was poetry (13.9%).
The most read types of reading are novels/romances. The topic of love is the most exciting part to read. This is probably because most of the participants are women, according to Croston (2005) as cited in Siswati (2012, p. 131), female research subjects are more interested in romantic topics rather than humor, adventure, sports, news and others.

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION
Based on the results of data analysis and discussion of research results, the following conclusions can be drawn: First, about feelings toward reading, it seemed that the students still had enthusiasm in reading, more than half of the students liked to read and liked to read anything at home during learning from home. Unfortunately, 73.4% of the students did not like reading academic books or lecture materials that were mostly written in English given by their lecturers while learning from home because it was boring. Second, regarding reading preferences, the students preferred to read fiction read from online sources, their most favorite reading was romance/novel; they preferred reading others than reading lecture materials. Third, related to time for reading and number of books, during learning from home they read 15-30 minutes a day, 1-2 days a week, they could spend more than 1-hour reading for pleasure, but only could spend 15-30 minutes reading for a college assignment. They read 1-10 pages of reading materials in a day and only could read 1-3 books during learning from home from March until July 2020. Fourth, their reading sources were from both online and offline.

153-155
http://journal.uinjkt.ac.id/index.php/ijee | DOI: http://doi.org/10.15408/ijee.v8i1.17157 P-ISSN: 2356-1777, E-ISSN: 2443-0390 | This is an open access article under CC-BY-SA license Trough online, they got the reading materials mostly from a website, while through offline print books became their first source. According to their interest, they put reading from a smartphone on the top of the rank. Fifth, types of reading materials that the students read during learning from home were varied. Novel/romance was the most read by the students. Many reasons why those phenomena happened, but broadly it can be concluded that those were due to the presence of information technology which can have a positive or negative impact on students' reading interest, then due to the lack of awareness of students to read for reasons of not having the time and supporting facilities for reading activities.
Suggestions are delivered to the students of English Department of the University of Kutai Kartanegara to be more aware to the need of reading for their future, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, which is uncertain when it will end, in which students will continue learning from home. Students should further improve reading activities, especially to read more their academic books and journals related to their field of study.
Suggestions are also given to the lecturers at English Department and generally the University of Kutai Kartanegara. Adopting a reading habit development strategy (Siregar, 2008), the researchers suggest that each lecturer selects and recommends reading materials that the students must read in one semester. The lecturer assigns the students to read all or part of the recommended reading then the students make a report on the analysis of the book they read. By doing this strategy, it is hoped that the students will read many books or reading materials related to their academic needs, whether they want it or not.