Difficulties in reading comprehension faced by third-year international relations students in the course entitled English for interational affairs 1 at the academy of journalism and communication (AJC)

Abstract

This paper unveiled an examination of reading comprehension difficulties experienced by third-year International Relations students with respect to the course entitled “English for International Affairs 1”. Specifically, the study adopted the quantitative technique with a survey questionnaire to analyze the students‟ difficulties and look at all the feedback given to those 110 students. Afterwards, 15 students and 02 ESP lecturers were invited to join the semi-formal interview, which helped the researcher clarify their thoughts on the subject matter and investigate the causes, thus proposing recommendations for reading comprehension problems. The findings suggested that the majority of students had trouble with specialized knowledge and technical terminologies, while the common area of difficulties, such as reading strategies or text types, received less concern from informants. Finally, pedagogical implications and directions for future research were also under discussion