Analysing Difficulties of Reading among Learners of French as a Foreign Language: Case Study of the Third Year Students at Omdurman Islamic University

Abstract

This study aims to identify difficulties of Reading among the students of Omdurman Islamic University. The purpose of this study is to reveal the important and effective role of reading among third year students, and then tackling an essential and useful question in French language, which is the problem of reading test and deep interest in revealing origin of these difficulties to help learners solve their problems in order to be a good reader and speaker of French language. The methodology used in this study is to set a theoretical framework based on the idea of reading. To carry out this study, the researcher followed descriptive and analytical method, after selecting samples from population of the study. This selection aims to investigate into hypotheses of study. The result obtained from this experiment is the subject of analysis which attempts to investigate into our hypotheses that impose existence and non-existence of any problems in reading process. The results that have been collected or obtained verify the hypotheses of the study. However, the analysis indicates that the leaners encountering many difficulties at reading level. The results that have been obtained confirm the validity of our hypotheses, and the analysis revealed that learners facing many difficulties in pronunciation and reading. Also it is observed that time allotted to reading session is insufficient. Therefore, lack of their knowledge in terms of phonetics is due to absence of French phonetics courses. French phonetics courses should be given to the students from the onset of their French learning and not in the final course (in the second year) because this does not usually happen at Omdurman Islamic University, until the third year, therefore, we offer some activities related to reading, phonetic correction, reading of difficult words written on the board, reading of syllables, to compartment the item, a process called (decoding). (Some activities that would help and enable the learner to distinguish the sound [ ] from other nasal sounds [ ], and [ ]. Speaking with slow pace to master the pronunciation that should be carried out from the onset of learning process. All this should be done for better learning of strange sounds and to avoid such mistakes detected in this study. Finally, after concluding to these main findings, the researcher suggests a solution for these difficulties in framework of teaching French language as a foreign language.