This research is trying to investigate whether students' difficulties in comprehending high-order questions are related to the readability of the reading text and the difficulty of the questions. The subjects in this research are freshmen in Institut Teknologi Kalimantan. Using random sampling, students with different levels of reading skills are chosen. This research asked students to answer reading comprehension tests, consisting of questions ranging from literal to evaluative questions, with reading texts ranging from easy to difficult. The result shows that in almost all levels of reading texts, inferential and evaluative reading questions are considered as the most difficult, as shown by the few numbers of correct answers. The level of text readability also influences students' comprehension with the 'easy' text has the most correct answers and the 'difficult' text the least. It can be seen that students need to be introduced to a variety of texts and to be taught to answer questions with different levels of difficulty.

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A collaborative learning approach has been identified to lessen anxiety and allow more comprehensible inputs to be processed cognitively to result in meaningful outputs. This study specifically examines the effectiveness of the collaborative learning approach and its best fit model supplemented with several techniques to improve students’ mastery of the mental lexicon of the word association. This Classroom Action Research involved 60 college students in their senior years in Institut Teknologi Kalimantan. The data collection involved two cycles in which each cycle employed planning, implementation, analysing learning activities and learning outcome and finally reflection. To gain insight through each cycle, a cloze test and a survey were administered. Furthermore, the result was analysed qualitatively and the finding reveals a significant improvement in terms of the mental lexicon of word association repertoire especially in cycle 2. The percentage of the students meeting the criteria of success doubled at 71.67% while the students’ learning perception throughout each cycle was successfully maintained. Collaborative learning also helped most students to create a positive perception to level up their mental lexicon mastery