Investigating Reading Comprehension among EFL Libyan Students: A Case Study of the First-Semester Students in the Department of English at the Faculty of Education at the University of Benghazi

Abstract

This study investigated the core difficult reading strategies for the first-semester EFL students at the Department of English at the Faculty of Education at the University of Benghazi. It aimed to identify the primary reasons behind these difficulties and determine whether different teaching approaches were effective in helping students overcome their reading difficulties. Grounded in a positivist paradigm, the study collected quantitative numerical evidence through conducting a questionnaire and a true experiment. Findings revealed that the ability to derive meanings from complex words through their components emerged as the most difficult reading strategy, deducing the meanings of new words through contextual clues and identifying main idea questions ranked as the second most difficult strategies. Answering detailed questions was third in terms of difficulty, while accurately identifying implied detail questions was found to be the least difficult among the assessed strategies. The results also indicated that a lack of knowledge of appropriate application of reading strategies contributed to students' reading comprehension difficulties. Therefore, the study has proposed an integral learnercentered reading model. The effectiveness of this designed model was tested during the study experiment. The results of paired samples T-tests and ANOVA conducted using SPSS indicated that both the control and experimental groups demonstrated improvements in their reading comprehension abilities. However, the experimental group achieved superior results compared to the control one. Additionally, the study provided recommendations to inform stakeholders, learners, teachers, curriculum designers, decision-makers, and future research to develop teaching and learning English language reading skills.