An Investigation Into the Iranian English Language Student's Reading Problems: A Case Study

Reading is the fundamental skill upon which all formal education depends. Nowadays, more and more university students throughout the world are required to learn EFL in order to read textbooks and professional journals which are written in English. On the other hand, efficient reading is not only a hard work; it is an extremely complex and challenging mental task. Hence, in order to provide support to readers to handle this task, it is necessary to identify their specific areas of difficulty and their strength and weaknesses. Therefore, based on the metacognition and self- assessment conceptualizations, this research was conducted to further our understanding of the Iranian student's self-reported reading difficulties. The data were collected by asking 20 M.A English teaching students from a university in Kermanshah city to have a self- reflection and write about their difficulties in English reading skill. The reported statements were codified and analyzed, and the frequency of each reported difficulty was calculated accordingly. Results, at the word level, indicated that students mostly mentioned limited vocabulary knowledge and difficulty in retrieving a word that they have already stored in memory (dysnomia) as their topmost reading difficulties. At the text level, lack of fluency in reading, lack of familiarity with the subject matter, difficulty level of the text (readability) and lack of use of proper reading strategies were mentioned as topmost reading difficulties.