An Investigation into EFL Students Reading Aloud Difficulties

Abstract

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