A review article on english reading difficulties among grade six students in Ethiopia

Reading is not only a cognitive, psycholinguistic activity, but also a social activity. Reading is a complex cognitive process requiring visual, auditory and motor skills to enable a child to recognize words and symbols, to associate them with the appropriate sounds and to invest them with meaning derived from previous experience. Reading achievement is related to the skill of the teacher, and that the child taught by untrained, inexperienced and unskilled teachers tend to be especially backward in reading (Reid and Donaldson, 1977).Lovett, Steinbach and Frijters (2000) state that a reading difficulty is an individual’s failure to acquire rapid, context-free word identification skills, whilst for Shaywitz and Shaywitz (2004) it is characterized as an unexpected obstacle in reading for children who possess the intelligence, motivation and education necessary for developing accurate and fluent reading. The term ‘reading difficulties’ is, in most instances, equated or used synonymously with ‘reading problems’, and in the context of this review the former refers to problems associated with reading, whether it be the mechanical skill of the reading process or the comprehension of what is being read. There are many different and usually very complex factors affecting learners’ different reading levels, some of which are beyond the school influence (Geske and Ozola, 2008). Socio-economic factors exacerbating reading difficulties in Ethiopian schools are: family conditions, poverty, instability, resources, teacher competence and attitude towards education (MoE, 1994). Hence, this review helps to fill the gap by reviewing the student’s status of reading proficiency or difficulty in English language among grade six students, which is the transition to the grade level where the medium of instruction is English. Moreover, the possible measures for student reading difficulty problems were explored.