The Application of Pragmatic Inference in Teaching Reading Comprehension to Kurdish EFL Students: An Experimental Study

Abstract Reading comprehension is an essential skill in learning a foreign language, and it is one of the most important means for language learners to acquire information. The ability to comprehend any reading text requires interpreting it by making accurate connections between the linguistic representations or literal meaning of words and sentences and their pragmatic outcomes, which enable learners to infer the intended meaning of the text. The present study takes Relevance Theory as the theoretical basis and examines the implementation of pragmatic inference in teaching reading comprehension to EFL university students. This study seeks to explore a) whether the pragmatic inference approach to teaching reading is more effective than the conventional one; b) whether teaching pragmatic inference improves students’ reading proficiency. The study employs a quantitative quasi-experimental design in which a pre-test, post-test, and reading proficiency test were used for the purpose of data collection. The samples were (56) Kurdish EFL second stage students majoring in English at the University of Sulaymaniyah. The students were from two classes: the experimental class and the control class. The two classes were taught using different reading teaching methods within six weeks of experimental teaching. The key findings of the study revealed that there are significant differences between the two groups of the study; the experimental group outperformed those in the control group quite significantly and with tangible improvement in their reading proficiency. The study can be of great significance for teachers and curriculum designers since it draws their attention to this ignored area of study.