Fictional Stories: The learning strategy to mitigates challenges of reading comprehension for university students

Abstract

Reading comprehension is the ability to understand the text, decode and infer its meaning according to reader’s level of comprehension. Similarly, reading is the ability to deduce, critique and construct the attributes of the text, hence reading and reading comprehension are intertwined and embedded into the skill to analyse the meaning of the text in general and synthesize the interpreting of your own understanding in particular to the text. Despite this prerequisite skill; there are challenges which impede the reading comprehension and as the results the paper intimates these challenges of reading comprehension using critical theory as a conceptual framework. It further employs participatory action research as a technique whereby participants were purposively sampled and interviewed in a semi-structured interview. Equally, the results are analysed using critical discourse analysis were it was established that lack of collaborative learning, exposure to informational text, students’ prior knowledge and punctuation marks are the core attributes to the challenges of reading comprehension. In brief, the paper contends that the use of fictional stories as the learning strategy can enhance reading comprehension of first year students.