Iraqi EFL learners' Ability in figuring out inferring questions in literary texts Farah Abdulsada Jebur, Lihadh Abdulameer.

Abstract EN

It is clear that reading is an essential skill that is needed in the context of teaching / learning a foreign language.

For that, literary texts are often included in EFL curriculum.

This study is set out to find out whether Iraqi EFL learners face difficulties in inferring literary texts exploring the problems and difficulties encountered by them.

Therefore, the researchers' intention in conducting the current study is to bring these problems and difficulties into focus of evaluation as much as possible to provide evidence of how language is learned which would hopefully help EFL teachers in their task.

For that, 200 EFL secondary school pupils were set as the participants for the present study.

They were set to a written test including a number of inferential questions as well as literal ones.

The collected data were analyzed using SPSS program.

The results confirmed that the participants do face problems in inferring literary texts and that it is more difficult for them to answer inferential questions than the literal one.

More over the study found that both male and female are equal in their ability to infer literary texts.