The role of discourse analysis in the enhancement of teaching reading comprehension in Iraqi EFL classes

Abstract EN

The study aims at investigating the role of discourse analysis on the performance of Iraqi EFL learners' reading comprehension to determine what areas of discourse analysis are relevant to teaching EFL reading in the Departments of English at the University of Kufa.

The researcher selected 100 EFL students at the mentioned departments basing on a preliminary English test and randomly divided them into two classes , each with 50 students .The researcher taught reading comprehension to both classes with the only difference that discourse analysisbased reading instructions was applied in one class, while the audio-lingual method is followed in the other class .All classes have been exhibited to (8) texts selected from the given resource .Thus, they got equal opportunity.

Post-test has been conducted to both classes to investigate the effectiveness of applying discourse analysis strategies on the skill of reading in a classroom .The results showed a wide difference between the two, whereby, the one which was exhibited to discourse analysis tools, gained higher fluency in reading than the other class.