Abstract
The paper discusses to what extent the benchmarks and reading competencies proposed in existing National Curriculum for English grade ten are achieved by the matriculation learners. To be more specific, the study was designed to examine and investigate learners. reading performance after receiving four months reading instruction. Consequently, this study was undertaken to investigate secondary school matriculation students. reading comprehension performance with a particular focus of, main idea. retrieval after completion of an academic program. In this study three private non-elitist secondary schools were selected from one town which was based on maximal variation sampling. To do so, only grade ten students. reading performance were investigated. All respondents of the selected schools were already formed in intact groups which were selected by the schools. principals. In order to assess respondents. main idea as a comprehension skill, discreet-point approach was adopted. To execute a comprehension test, ten short passages in conjunction with multiple choices were given as intensive reading tasks. The data were analyzed through a percentage study. Data analysis revealed that among three selected schools, 58.19% respondents were failed to retrieve main ideas from 10 given short texts, however, only 41.81% respondents were successful in intensive reading tasks.