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Volume 13. Issue 3
Article 7

Title
The strategic needs of Iranian students in reading literary and non-literary texts: A dialogic approach

Katayoon Afzali, Manoochehr Tavangar,
Mohammad Amouzadeh, and Abass Eslami Rasekh
Isfahan University

Bio data
Katayoon Afzali is an instructor at Sheikhbahaee University and a PhD student at Isfahan University in Iran, teaching reading, writing, short story, translation, and conversation at Sheikhbahaee University. She has a BA in TESL from Isfahan University, and an MA in TEFL from Isfahan University.Her research interests lie in the areas of contrastive rhetoric, genre analysis, reading literature, pragmatics and discourse analysis.
E-mail: k.afzali@shbu.ac.ir

Manoochehr Tavangar has a BA in English language and literature (Esfahan University, Iran), an MA in General Linguistics (Tehran University, Iran), an MA in Applied linguistics (Lancaster University, U.K.), a B.Ling. in Theoretical Linguistics (Manchester University, U.K.).He has been teaching linguistics, grammar, and translation (literary as well as non-literary) in the Department of English at the Faculty of Foreign Languages of Isfahan University since 1992. His research interests lie in the areas of lexical semantics, discourse analysis and translation theory.
E-mail: tavangar@engl.ui.ac.ir

Mohammad Amouzadeh is Associate Professor of linguistics at the University of Isfahan, Iran. His areas of interests include sociolinguistics, contrastive linguistics, semiotics, and Persian linguistics. His scholarly writings in English have appeared in various journals, including the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics, ITL Review of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Language andPolitics, Language Sciences, and Languages in Contrast.

Abass Eslami Rasekh is an Assistant Professor at Isfahan University. His areas of interest include sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and teaching English for academic/specific purposes.

Abstract
The current study sets out 1) to investigate the strategic needs of participants in reading literary and non-literary texts; and 2) to shed light on the differences of reading literary and non-literary texts. To achieve this aim, thirty participants read three literary and two non-literary texts and wrote down the questions for which they could not find any answer.Next, these questions were categorized in five groups: Scripturally implicit, textually implicit, textually explicit, linguistic and miscomprehension. The findings suggest that the dominant problem of participants lies in textually implicit aspects of the text. Finally, a Kruskal-Wallis test was applied in order to compare the frequency of question types across literary and non-literary texts. The difference of all question types proved to be statistically significant across both literary and non-literary texts.

Keywords: Reading strategies, discourse analysis, dialogic approach, reading literature, genre analysis.