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The primary objective of this book is to investigate the reading comprehension difficulties experienced by freshman EFL students attending the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University. The book attempts to integrate notions of strategic, linguistic, discourse and sociolinguistic competence into the construct of reading: a first approximation at adjusting a model of reading ability to a model of communicative language ability. To examine the reading difficulties and the related factors, the author investigated the sub-competencies of reading comprehension in the four components of Communicative Competence. The results showed that students´ difficulties frequently originated from discourse competence, followed by sociolinguistic, strategic and linguistic competencies, respectively. The results also had some practical implications for the language classrooms and also for teacher trainers: They should be focusing more on the discourse and sociolinguistic components of CC (communicative competence) and also on a larger variety of reading skills and strategies in an interactive and critical manner.

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Hasan Bayraktar completed his Ph.D. in English Language Teaching at METU, Ankara, TURKEY. He worked as a Fulbright teaching assistant at the University of Richmond, USA. His research interests include second language reading and writing, vocabulary teaching, language testing, ELT materials development and language teacher education.

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