The aim of this research were to find out the students‘ ability and the
problems of the sixth semester students of English Education Department University
of Muhammadiyah Purwokerto in Academic Year 2015/2016in identifying main
ideas and supporting details in reading text. This research used descriptive
quantitative method and the population of this research was 104 students. The writer
used proportional random sampling by taking 26 students as a sample. The
instruments used in this research were multiple choice test items and interview. Based
on the result of the test, it was found that (1) the students‘ ability in identifying main
ideas and supporting details was fair category. It can be seen from mean of student
ability was 59%. (2) The results of interview show there were five problems faced by
the students in finding main idea and supporting details: 1. there werelacked interest
in identifying main ideas and supporting details, 2. length of sentences, 3. lack of
vocabularyand 4. difficulty in finding inferred ideas and 5.lack of strategy.