2. Lack of support from the educational system:

1. The Ministry of Education is actually advocating exam oriented classes:

Allowing large number of students inside the classroom will leave the teachers with limited strategies to use with their students especially with the limited time available for every class. The decision to limit the number of students cannot be taken by the teacher alone. It should be the responsibility of the Ministry of Education to decide having smaller number of students (15 maximum) inside the class. The teachers are, also, restricted by the Ministry of Education to a limited number of classes (sessions) and there is no time to do some extensive or intensive reading about the texts involved in the book or any other book. Eventually, the readers (the learners) will not acquire the linguistic features of the language efficiently. Consequently, the leaning process inside Syrian schools becomes more deeply exam oriented rather than comprehension and efficiency oriented and the students will be only required to memorize few phrases, and passages to solve some reading and comprehension tasks or find some synonyms or antonyms. They, sometimes, have even to memorize the answers to some important questions which are highly considered as exam questions without understanding them. Again, they go back to the first problem which is the false conception and the triviality they think of the reading skill.

2. Lack of teacher resources:

School libraries don't have enough books in English that suit students at every stage of learning. The manager of every school, supported by the Ministry of Education, should provide materials that meet the students' needs on every stage of learning. Students in their first grade, for example, should have access to books or stories in English that suit their level of learning and the teacher can use these books throughout his/her classes and develop the learners' reading skills to enrich their knowledge of EFL. This way, the students will have more access to the language and the input they receive in reading and analyzing texts can be comprehensible.

2. Solutions:

As a solution for these problems I recommend the following:

1. Training programs for teachers:

One of the solutions to this problem is assigning obligatory training programs by the Ministry of Education for teachers before getting their positions at schools to equip them with the theories and practices they should use inside the classroom. J. Charles Alderson in his book Assessing Reading (2000) talks about monitoring one's developing understanding of text, preparing in advance how to read, paraphrasing what one has understood in order to see whether it fits into the meaning of the text and finally analyzing the structure of a paragraph or article in order clarify the author's intention in order to overcome comprehension difficulties.

Training teachers to use "top-down" or "bottom-up"² strategies inside their classrooms would motivate the students to do some guided reading of stories and books on their own as they find reading easier, not necessarily requiring any help from the teacher and thus the students may find it more enjoyable too. Considering reading as an act to solve task oriented problems like answering the following questions and finding synonyms or antonyms within a text doesn't make the student actually a reader. It is much more than that. It is about analyzing certain texts to find out certain syntactical rules within the target language as well as finding word collocations and enriching the students' lexicon with more vocabulary words as they struggle with the text to finally comprehend it.