This research aims at investigating: (1) the characteristics of effective
readers in reading course books at English Education Department of FKIP
UNS Surakarta 2013 / 2014 and (2) their learning achievement.
This case study employed purposive sampling that data were collected
through observation conducted to 6th semester students, interview, and
documents analysis. It is analyzed using interactive model involving data
reduction, data display, and drawing conclusion. The sources of the data are
events, informants, and documents. The conclusions are drawn as follows: (1)
the characteristics of effective readers in reading course books at English
education department of FKIP UNS are: (a) the effective readers have high
motivation in reading; (b) they have good habit in reading which is influenced
by their environments (family, friends, lecturer, social groups, or school
environment); (c) they plan the schedule to read and try to create a good mood
to make a good reading; (d) they decide their reading preferences (the choice
of texts or passages that they read); (e) they have their reading strategies as
follow: text books marking, making notes, solve the reading problems with
friends or lecturers, re-read when face vocabulary difficulties, focus in
information that they seek, try to understand the whole context if they do not
know the meaning word by word and do not have proCHAPTERility to open
the dictionary, reading multiple sources to develop their reading
understanding. (2) Learning achievement of effective readers is good. By
reading, it is giving positive effects to the students’ learning achievement that
(a) the effective readers actively ask or answer the lecturers’ questions during
learning process, (b) they can response what are the lecturers’ explanation and
friends’ arguments well, (c) they participate well (giving opinion, giving
suggestion) during the discussion process with lecturers and friends.
Keywords: effective readers, learning achievement.