Literature has been used as a tool in teaching foreign languages widely, especially from the 20^th century onwards (Erkaya, 2005). In the time of the Grammar Translate Method (GTM), literary works were well-thought of material in English as foreign language teaching, but when Structuralism Approach and Audiolingualism were later used as substitutes for GTM, literature was downplayed as they concerned with the correctness of grammatical form and teaching speaking and listening rather than reading and writing (Collie & Slater, 1987). Later on, with the advent of the Communicative Approach, literature was neglected again. Dialogues and conversations were mostly aimed because the approach focused on using more practical materials and helping students in spoken language skills (Pardede, 2010). In the 1980s, literature returned to EFL (Duff & Maley, 1991). The integrating and using literature in foreigner language curriculums were firmly suggested by many study results (for instance, Hill, 1986; Collie & Slater, 1987; Lazar, 1993; Cook, 1994). Brumfit and Carter (1986) argued that there are some possible reasons for using literature in English language teaching. Literature could be highly motivating for the students. For instance, a powerful emotional response may be yielded from students by literary genres, such as poems.

Lazar (1993) explained that literature develops students’ interpretive abilities. A good source for developing student’s abilities to form meaning and to make interpretations is literature. Literary texts are rich in multiple levels of meaning. Sometimes a word in a short story has a figurative meaning beyond its dictionary definition. Thus, by encouraging students to understand the multiple ambiguities of the literary text, teachers can help to develop their capacities to form meaning. Furthermore, using literature to teach a foreign language has not only the linguistic benefits but may also have a wider educational purpose in the classroom in that, it can help to stimulate the imagination of students, to develop their critical abilities and to increase their emotional awareness (Lazar, 1993).

Chastian (1988) stated that short stories are the most suitable literary genre for teaching as students can follow the storylines and there is usually one plot, one setting and few characters. But poetry is not easy to grasp because it includes a lot of figurative of speeches, novels are too long to finish and dramas need acting out which may be difficult to do in crowded and time-limited classes.

Ghasemi and Hajizadah (2011) pointed out that one of the privileges of short stories is enhancing students’ reading proficiency. They sometimes make students feel awkward since there are hidden meanings which are left to the readers to draw implications not just reading lines and decoding them that is one of the features of non-literary materials.

The aim of the study is to investigate the mental processes students follow while reading short stories and the difficulties among the second-year university students in reading short stories. It aims to find out the most common problems in their reading and understanding process and how linguistic and extra-linguistic factors form those challenges. It also tries to find out what the reasons behind the challenges they face are. More specifically, the research aims at finding answers to the following questions:

1. What sort of questions do students find difficult to answer when reading short stories? What are the reasons behind these difficulties?

2. What major reading strategies do students employ

a) while answering reading comprehension questions?

b) while answering literary questions?

3. What extra-linguistic factors affect the way that students answer reading comprehension and literary questions?

To collect the data, a thinking aloud protocol was used. This is a method that allows the researchers to better understand the thought processes of the participants as they use a task, a product, a device or a manual. It also allows the difficulties, which the individual participants may be experiencing during the process, to be illustrated clearly (Van Someren, Barnard & Sandberg, 1994). In line with the qualitative nature of the study, the forms of questions used during the think aloud protocol were designed as open-ended questions and were based on verbal reports. After obtaining the data via the think aloud sessions with students, the important sections of the data were marked when the researcher went through the text and open coding was used as descriptive names were added. The data compared to each other to find relations, similarities then the data marked with appropriate codes for further analysis. The data was analysed descriptively to reveal the strategies the students are using and what they focused on while reading short stories. The participants of the present study were students of the English departments, Faculty of Education. The number of participants was 15 students (seven males and eight females) in three public universities. They were all Kurdish students and their educational background was homogenous. A short story by Dorothy Parker entitled “You Were Perfectly Fine” was used in the experiment. The criteria for the selection of this short story and the questions to be used were the period of the short story, its length, language, subject matter and number of characters involved. After careful consideration of the short stories studied and exams taken by the participants at their respective universities, it was decided that the short story was similar to those previously studied in terms of the pre-set criteria. The questions were based on the purpose of the study and selected as appropriate question to find the answer for the research questions and they were accurately examined. In addition to the printed materials used during the think-aloud sessions to assess the participants’ reading processes, an audio-recorder was also used to record their verbal responses as they answered the relevant questions. These recordings were later transcribed to be analysed in detail.

The present study found that as a consequence of poor skills in reading comprehension, students ignored some parts of the text as they were reading it. The general gist of the story caught the attention of the participants rather than the specific information because they regarded direct and very specific questions as difficult questions and not easy to be comprehended by reading once. There were some reading techniques which students employed frequently while reading the short story employed in this study. Predicting word meanings was one of them. The participants used contextual clues and grammatical clues to find the meaning of the unknown words. Furthermore, the participants used mental imagery to clarify their answers. It was revealed that their visualisations were based on their feelings or attitudes to characters, characters’ actions and surroundings. Besides these strategies, the findings indicated that the participants’ emotional involvement lead to learning of new words or expressions and utilising them in speaking immediately after reading. The participants mostly could not develop their own analytical statements and build their own analysis. Their attempts in making sense of the literary text were not successful enough. It was noted that the participants employed the same strategies which they used to answer reading comprehension questions while they were trying to answer literary questions. So, there was a big similarity between answers given to reading comprehension questions and literary questions. Both of them were mostly in the form of storytelling. The participants appeared to have answered some of the questions under the influence of their cultural background. This means that their cultural values, perceived social rules and religion had important roles in understanding the story, which was written in a western context. These standards caused emotional reactions in the participants while answering the questions.

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