Fictional Stories: The Learning Strategy to Mitigate the Challenges of Reading Comprehension for University Students.

Reading comprehension is the ability to understand a 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 a text. Hence, reading and reading comprehension are intertwined and embedded as a skill to analyse the meaning of the text in general and synthesise the interpretation of your own understanding of a particular text. Despite this prerequisite skill, there are challenges that impede reading comprehension, and as a result, 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 co-researchers were purposively sampled and interviewed in a free attitudinal interview. Equally, the results are analysed using critical discourse analysis, where it is established that lack of collaborative learning, exposure to informational text, students' prior knowledge and punctuation marks are the core attributes of the challenges of reading comprehension. In brief, the paper contends that the use of fictional stories as a learning strategy can enhance the reading comprehension of first-year students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]