ASSESSING FACTORS AFFECTING THE PRACTICE OF TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION SKILLS IN EFL CLASSROOM: THE CASE OF GENETE SECONDARY SCHOOL IN LEGAMBO WOREDA SOUTH WOLLO ZONE AMARA REGIONAL STATE

This study assessed factors that affect the practice of teaching of reading comprehension skills in Genete General Secondary School. The purpose of this study was to find out the practice of teachers on teaching reading and the difficulties teacher faced while teaching reading comprehension skills. In this research, descriptive research design was used with the mixed research method of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. The subjects of the study were both grade nine students and English language teachers of the aforementioned school. 60 students randomly and five teachers purposively were selected as a source of data. To collect the necessary information from the subjects, three data collection instruments (classroom observation, questionnaire and interview) were used. The findings showed that EFL teachers did not employ the teaching methods that assured students’ active involvement in the reading activities, which provided enough opportunity for students to interact with each other in pairs and groups, i.e. the teachers did not employ the classroom procedures which help students comprehend the text better and practice the important sub skills (such as skimming and scanning). Only oral question and answer work, where the role of majority students was not that of active participant was the predominant classroom practice of the teachers. Besides this, the teachers predominantly practiced reading aloud instead of silent reading. Most of the class time of reading lessons was employed for reading aloud by students. The result from the investigation also showed students ’poor back ground knowledge, lack of interest and motivation, lack of vocabularies ,teachers’ less application of reading techniques and large class size were found as common challenges. Based on the findings it was conclude that EFL teachers do not seem to employ the techniques and procedures that experts and researchers of reading propose. And most of the students were not interested to participate in different reading comprehension activities.