Abstract
Understanding breaking news necessitates a special attention, since they are written with a special style. The study aims at identifying the difficulties faced by the Iraqi university EFL learners in comprehending English breaking news. The study included 10 fourth year students enrolled at the Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Anbar. Thus, a questionnaire as a research instrument, was sent online to the students. The questionnaire points were related to the identification of difficulties faced by the learners in comprehending English breaking news. The data of the study were (10) headlines selected purposively from Euronews website. The data were qualitatively analyzed based on quantifying the quality procedure. The findings showed that (54%) of the total number of the students stated that the headlines are difficult to understand, and (46%) considered them easy. Based on these findings, the study has concluded that students faced four main difficulties: neologism, difficult vocabulary, ellipsis, and passive voice when reading news headlines. Neologism has scored the highest percentage (32.4324%), while passive voice has been the lowest (5.4054%).
Highlights
Journal of the College of Education for Women-University of Baghdad-Iraq The corresponding author: Juma’a Q
Encapsulating a story in a short number of words may lead EFL learners to experience many difficulties in their attempt to understand the headlines. These difficulties arise from the unusual structure of the headlines, which is characterized by certain features like ellipses and passive voice
Mohammed, N. (2019) evaluated the quality of the Kurdish translation of English breaking news. She adopted House’s (2007) model in the analysis of data. She found that the socio-cultural and the linguistic structure were the main reasons that cause the disagreements between the Kurdish translations and the original breaking news
Summary
Journal of the College of Education for Women-University of Baghdad-Iraq The corresponding author: Juma’a Q. Encapsulating a story in a short number of words may lead EFL learners to experience many difficulties in their attempt to understand the headlines. These difficulties arise from the unusual structure of the headlines, which is characterized by certain features like ellipses and passive voice. Mental Theory was employed by Rosalina (2014) to investigate the readers’ difficulties found in the headlines of the Jakarta Post newspaper She found that students were unable to understand 80% of the headlines because of the existence of irregular structures, special vocabularies, short sentences, and journalism terms. Hamza and Kadhim (2019) revealed that EFL learners encountered difficulties in mastering block language at the two levels, production and recognition
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