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Reading is a cognitive process which involves decoding a series of written symbols to obtain meaning from them. It is an important academic language skill for EFL students as it can lead to their personal, professional, and social development. When EFL students become good readers, they are likely to be more successful in learning English (Akyel & Erçetin, 2009; Khonamri & Karimabadi, 2015). According to Chen et. al. (2011), comprehension is the main goal of the reading. It is a process that occurs before, during and after reading to construct and extract meaning from the written text through the reader's interaction with this text. The text is being comprehended when the reader can decode what he is reading by connecting between what he reads and what he already knows. Therefore, reading comprehension skills have become very important to help EFL students to understand and interpret what they are reading. As these skills help the students to be good readers by obtaining much information about what they are reading. To comprehend the reading of the written text successfully, the student must be familiar with some reading comprehension skills such as:
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Making predictions about the text.
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Deducing the overall impression of the text.
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Determining the meaning of an unfamiliar words from the context.
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Distinguishing between facts and opinions.
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Developing awareness about synonyms and antonyms.
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Answering deductive questions.
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Recognizing author's attitude or tone.
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Identifying the language of the text.
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Distinguishing main idea from supporting detail.
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Deducing the relations between parts of text.
McGregor (2007)
stated that thinking has become an urgent demand considering modern trends of education, so developing thinking skills has become the most important responsibilities of modern education. Creative thinking is the ability to solve the problems and look at things differently by using new ways. According to Cropley (2001), the promotion of the creative thinking in the classrooms is part of educational efforts that aims to develop the individuals who can achieve maximum self-fulfillment. The basic goal of education is to teach students to become creative thinkers. Therefore, the students must be equipped with lifelong learning and acquired the necessary thinking skills to function successfully in a highly technical society (Adair, 2007). As a result of the emergence of modern technological methods for teaching students all over the world. Curriculum development has become a natural occurrence in all countries of the world so, it has become necessary for students to be familiar with some creative thinking skills such as fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration (Fishkin et al., 1999).
Typically, students spend most of their time in the classrooms listening to their lessons and taking their notes using paper and pen which leads to their feeling of boredom and fatigue. As a result, the use of multimedia in traditional learning environments has become increasingly attractive to schools (Brotherton & Abowd, 2004). Multimedia is a combination of two or more different content forms such as text, audio, music, images, animations, 3-D graphics, videos, and interactive content (Maddux et al., 2001; Walsh, 2010). Nowadays, media technologies provide the students with various educational media such as audio files, videos, and images by creating, distributing, and managing them in a relatively short time (Odhabi & McCaleb, 2011). The multimedia improves the quality of education by providing new teaching and learning methods that enable teachers and students to break free from the restrictions of the whiteboard and textbooks (Mayer, 2009).