Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to assess the practice of teaching reading in English at second
cycle primary schools with special focus on grade 5 students. The study was conducted to
find out the major problems that influence the implementation of the reading tasks and to
investigate the attitude of learners towards learning reading skill and doing reading tasks.
Netsanet Birhan and Hamle 1 Primary Schools were purposively selected to be the setting
of the study in Addis Ababa Kirkos sub-city. Descriptive method was employed to establish
the existence of phenomena by explicitly describing them. Two grade five English
language teachers and 52 grade five students were involved in the study. The data were
collected using two tools: questionnaires and interview. Both quantitative and qualitative
data analysis methods were employed to analyze the data. The study showed that there were
a number of challenges that contribute not to implement teaching reading skill. According to
the findings, there were a number of problems that challenge to implement reading skill in
classroom. The major challenges were, lack of motivation of teachers to teach reading, poor
teaching strategy, inadequate teaching of reading skill, the students background knowledge,
students interest towards reading skill, shortage of text book in the schools, and shortage of
time to cover the text books were the main problems to teach reading comprehension. Most
of the students know learning reading skills and being good at reading skills help them to
learn their education in a better way and to study other subjects. In general, all concerned
bodies: the school management, English language teachers, students and parents are the
most responsible to overcome the challenges and make improvement to implement
reading tasks. Recommendations were made based on the findings.
