INVESTIGATING READING COMPREHENSION DIFFICULTIES AMONG EFL LEARNERS: THE CASE OF GRADE ELEVEN STUDENTS AT LAGATAFO SECONDARY SCHOOL

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to investigating reading comprehension difficulties among EFL Learners: The case of grade eleven students at Lagatafo Secondary School. For this study, the descriptive research design was used. The study was conducted in the school with a sample of 60 randomly selected participants of students. The students were selected using systematic random sampling method. To collect the required data for this study, a questionnaire and interview were employed. The questionnaire that was administered for the students consisted of 17 items which depend on the aspects of reading comprehensions, the difficulties that students face in their reading comprehension and the causes of these difficulties in the reading comprehension. The result of the questionnaire showed that the majority of grade 11 students of Lagatafo Secondary school had difficulties in reading aspects such as identifying detailed information, identifying inferences/implied meanings and guessing new words from the context. In addition the findings of questionnaire also showed that the students’ difficulties in reading comprehension were caused by some problem such as, problem of using the reading strategies, the complexity of grammatical structure and due to the students’ poor mastery of the vocabulary, and lack of back ground knowledge. In addition, it was recommended that teachers should teach, implement and let students apply the strategies in the reading classroom. Furthermore, students should practice combining clues from the text with their back ground knowledge, understand and apply reading strategies, practice reading different materials in English that help them to build assumption and conclusions when they make inference and find detail information in reading comprehension.