A Suggested Programme for Teaching Reading Comprehension to EFL Learners at a Secondary School Stage in Iraq

Abstract

Reading Comprehension is challenging for the majority of EFL learners due to their poor reading ability, limited vocabulary, and lack of the language competence. Moreover, the modern trends of teaching English which give priority to spoken language at the sacrifice of the written language weaken learners' ability in writing. Consequently, the learners either neglect answering the questions on the reading passages which appear as the first question in every school and ministerial examination or answer them carelessly. The study proposes a training programme for those learners, It was built on the above- mentioned situation which necessitates adopting a simplified way for teaching this activity and using learners' native language in some occasions to overcome the difficulties they face and clarify some difficult points, they suffer from. The learners have incomplete knowledge or faulty knowledge of the target language. The programme was applied on a sample of (46) students at Al-Shareef Al-Radhi Preparatory School for Boys in Dayala Governorate. The students were exposed to pre- and post-tests during the academic year (2022-2023). The Findings revealed that there was a significant difference in the performance of the students in the post tests. The mean score of the students in the pre-test is (3.173), whereas the mean score in the post-test is (5.086) which is obviously higher than the pre-test and the calculated t- value is ( 9.91 ) higher than the scheduled t- value (1.96 ) .