The significance of developing reading skills and the use

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succeed in their learning process at school and in their lives in general (Dechant, 1991).

For years, several authors have studied the ways in which reading could be taught effectively. At the beginning, the conception of reading was merely that of a decoding process (Carrell, 1998). In contrast, authors such as Dechant (1991) claims that reading is about meaning and comprehension of meaning. As she says “comprehension is the goal and purpose of reading. Without it there is no reading” (p. 9). Indeed, reading involves not only the recognition of printed symbols but the development of meaning to the words the writer intends to transmit. Comprehension of the text is the essence in the reading process.
One of the most important goals for today’s educators should be to train individuals with good literacy who can comprehend and question what they read, because there is a close relationship between literacy and academic achievement (Grove & Hauptfleisch, 1982; Moreillan, 2007).
A good reading competence is a necessity for those studying English for academic and occupational purposes and many curricula therefore must devote large amounts of time to reading lessons in order to achieve such competence.
Good readers have automaticity in word recognition and discrimination (Garrod & Pickering, 1999; Pilten, 2009). It can be argued that readers having difficulty with word recognition and discrimination may lose the meaning of the text. Poor readers having reading difficulties as a result of a lack of skills such as perceiving the unity of meaning, using strategies and connecting prior knowledge to new information; hence, they experience reading difficulties (Bonds & Bonds, 1992; Jitendra, Hoppes & Xin, 2000; Moddy, Kennedy & Brady, 1997). The students having reading difficulties are observed to distract their attention and feel anxious during reading. The main goal of reading is comprehension. As reading difficulties increase the anxiety of individuals, they make reading comprehension more difficult; hence, such have more limited reading experience and this hinders the development of vocabulary knowledge and information accumulation (Lyon, Shywitz & Shywitz, 2003).