Résumé:
Most secondary school EFL teachers in Algeria claim that their students encounter real difficulties to understand scientific texts inserted in their English textbook. This study has attempted to investigate the major factors that influence the scientific texts’ reading task and hinder the third year secondary school students’ ability to understand such type of texts. These factors incorporate mainly some English scientific text features, actual psychological handicaps that prevent students from having an easy access to scientific texts comprehension and major current teaching methods and conceptions as being applied by the English teacher with English scientific texts. To fulfil this aim, this research work approaches a systematic analysis based on theory and practice arranged into four chapters. Chapter one provides a description of the current learning situation of the target group of students and some of its related issues. Besides, it incorporates a brief explanation of the research tools used in the methodology of the thesis. Chapter two is dedicated to shed light on the major concepts related to English for Specific Purposes’ discourse and to the reading comprehension task of general English as a whole. This chapter ends up with the presentation of some specificities characterising reading English scientific texts which create problems and difficulties for secondary school students in particular. Chapter three represents the field work of the study. It includes the data analysis of the research tools which incorporate two different questionnaires addressed to the teachers and to the students respectively and an observation sheet. Chapter four is devoted to suggest some of the reading strategies that could help the“terminale” students overcome the problems they usually encounter when they read English scientific texts. Such strategies, of course, are the outcome of some prominent studies carried out by specialists in the field of EST teaching .The aim of incorporating such reading strategies is to facilitate the reading task of the English scientific texts to the EFL learners in general and to the secondary school students in particular.
