Résumé:
The current study aims at investigating oral reading difficulties faced by third year middle
school students. It additionally puts forward identifying the different areas of difficulties that
third year middle school students of Abadou Abd El Kamel encounter during their oral
reading performance. It is hypothesized that these students encounter difficulties during
reading aloud in English when it comes to pronouncing, decoding, and comprehending words,
which may result from the students’ lack of the reading aloud habit or merely to the fact that
they face many difficulties in the process of reading itself. Therefore, in order to figure out
these difficulties, qualitative research has been opted for. Two means of data collection were
implemented: the stimulated recall interview with students, and a semi-structured interview
with teachers. The choice of these two tools was purposeful: the stimulated recall interview
allows the participants to reflect on their thinking or experiences in a natural comfortable
setting, while the semi-structured interview enables the interviewer to have an open interview
where questions could be formed starting from the interviewee’s answer, so as to provide
further explanation or to add more information. The stimulated recall interview was
conducted with thirty two third year middle school students from an overall population of 111
students, and the semi-structured interview was done with four teachers of English at Abadou
Abd El Kamel middle school. The analysis of the data revealed that all students encountered
difficulties that vary from one student to another. These reading aloud difficulties are related
to a lack of comprehension, a lack of vocabulary, a lack of phonemic and pronunciation
awareness, shyness, vision and hearing problems, or difficulties in recalling previously learnt
items. Finally, the study ends with proposing some solutions along with further future
recommendations for both teachers and students to overcome the reading aloud difficulties
they face when reading aloud
