Ensuring the profound value of reading to foreign language acquisition within higher education programs, the current paper delineates a research study on reading within EFL contexts. The study was conducted for almost one academic semester at the institution where the researcher works. The impact of reading literary versus general texts on enhancing EFL university students’ performance in the reading skill was explored involving two groups: experimental and control. The experimental group students were exposed to literary texts whilst the control group students were exposed to general texts. To measure effectiveness of experimental treatment, the researcher administered a pre-posttest using paired samples t-test. Based on the statistical findings, the experimental group students’ performance on the communicative reading competency pre-posttest was significantly better than their counterparts of the control group. In light of the study findings, a number of implications and recommendations have been proposed for EFL researchers and specialists to take into consideration.
Keywords: : Communicative Reading Competency, English as a foreign language, General Texts, Literary Texts
