An assessment of reading

Abstract EN

Reading comprehension, together with the other linguistic skills, is supposed to be improved by the syllabuses adopted in the departments of English / Colleges of Education.

It is expected that all subjects within the departmental courses support improving this skill since all imply the process of reading with comprehension; but students in these departments do not seem to have good ability of reading comprehension.

The study tackles this problem implying the hypothesis that students of the departments of English / Colleges of Education fail to make progress in their reading comprehension skill on both the literal and inferential levels after studying their specialized courses in these departments.

Syllabuses and methodologies are supposed ti encourage improving these two levels of reading comprehension skill inter alia.

The procedure followed in this study is conducting a multiple -choice reading comprehension test on a sample of 180 informants in three departments of English in three colleges of Education in Iraq.

Thirty first-year and thirty fourth-year students in each department were asked to respond to the test within one hour.

The test consists of a reading passage followed by ten multiple-choice questions; each two questions imply a reference to a sub-skill within the two levels under study: literal and inferential.

A computer package OXSTAT II (Oxford statistics II) was used to implement the required statistical processes such as T-test so as to show the significance of the informants' results and whether the students have really improved the reading comprehension skill on these levels .

In conclusion, results show that the students in departments of English ', Colleges of Education in Iraq make no progress in their reading comprehension, skill after having their specialized study in these departments.

One reason cai» certainly be that the syllabuses studied and the methodologies adopted do n°| encourage the students improve this important linguistic skill i.e.

readin| comprehension on literal and referential levels.