Measuring Arabic Reading Skills of New Students in Islamic Senior High School at Pandemic Era

Abstract

The Senior High School (SMA) period is a significant transitional period for some youth in Indonesia. This condition is a challenge for teachers, especially in teaching Arabic language skills, including reading skills of the Qur'an. The Qur'an is a holy book that contains a collection of information from God. Therefore, learning the skills to read the Qur'an is very important, especially for Muslim students. This article is a descriptive qualitative research type that aims to describe the techniques and results of observations of the academic abilities of new students at MAN 4 Banyuwangi in the academic year 2020/2021 in terms of reading Arabic texts namely the Qur'an. The results of this study indicate that: 1) the technique used to measure the academic ability is the performance test of reading the Qur'an, Surat al-Mujadilah verses 11-13, and 2) based on the test results, out of 118 students, a total of 54% or 64 students have high academic abilities and total of 46% or 54 students have low academic abilities. It shows that academic ability of Arabic reading skills in MAN 4 Banyuwangi need to be corrected and developed to get higher score.