The Causes of Reading Difficulty: The Perception of Iranian EFL Post-graduate and Under-graduate Students

The results of the frequency analysis showed that post-graduate students, with higher level of language proficiency, attached less importance to linguistic knowledge as the factor helping reading comprehension success, but most importance to socio-cultural and conceptual knowledge. Index Terms-conceptual knowledge, linguistic knowledge, socio-cultural knowledge, post-graduate students, under-graduate students I. INTRODUCTION Reading is the primary source of language input for most of EFL learners since they are living in a context in which English is not spoken. Reading is not a single-factor process; it is a multivariate skill involving a complex combination and integration of a variety of cognitive, linguistic and non-linguistic skills ranging from low-level processing abilities to high-order knowledge of text representation and integration of ideas with global knowledge. The factor that makes a reading text difficult for post-graduate students was lack of content knowledge, while under-graduate learners thought of unknown vocabulary to be problematic. Since post-graduate students are of a higher proficiency level than junior students, it is quite logical to think that unknown vocabulary or syntax is not a factor that may cause difficulty; in other words, the importance of basic knowledge of English vocabulary or syntax maybe diminished for them while juniors are still struggling with the lexical meaning in a text.