Factors Influencing Understanding English Breaking News by Iraqi University EFL Learners

English news headlines require considerable attention to understand as they are characterized by a special style in their formulation. The study aims to identify the factors that hinder comprehending English breaking news, a type of news headline, by Iraqi university EFL learners. To this end, the participants were 35 fourth-year learners whose major is English at the College of Education for Humanities, the University of Anbar for the academic year 2019-2020. In the form of a questionnaire sent to participants online, the participants were required to decide upon the factors influencing their understanding of breaking news. Ten breaking news headlines were collected purposively from the Euronews website. The data were qualitatively analyzed based on Donoghues (2009) classification of the factors that cause difficulties in comprehending news headlines. The findings showed that learners ascribe the difficulty of comprehending breaking news headlines to six main factors: purpose, being an active reader, the kind of text being used, quality of literacy instruction, interest and independent practice. The agreement variable occupies the highest percentage while the uncertain variable scored second place and the disagreement variable has the lowest percentage