Rationale
Vocabulary plays the most significant role in foreign language learning because it is an element linking the four language skills in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) In order to communicate well in a foreign language, students should acquire a great number of words and should know how to use and where to use them
Most EFL learners learn vocabulary passively which can be resulted from several factors although students realize the vital importance of vocabulary when learning language First, they consider the teacher's techniques such as explanation for meaning or definition In this case, language learners have nothing to do in a vocabulary learning section but to listen to their teacher
Secondly, students only focus on knowing the primary meaning of new words Thirdly, students usually only acquire new vocabulary through contextualized new words in their textbooks or when given by teachers during classroom lessons
It is clear that comprehension is one of the most fundamental reasons for reading, and vocabulary, in turn, plays significant part in comprehension
Vocabulary clearly makes a critical contribution to understanding what has been read One important way to develop vocabulary knowledge is through extensive reading By reading extensively, students will be exposed to variety scope of vocabulary which is necessary in reading comprehension Extensive reading (ER) is an important aspect of any English as a foreign/second language reading program Bell (2001) stated that ER is a type of reading instruction program that has been used in EFL settings, as an effective strategy of developing reading fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary development
The benefits of ER have been widely documented in studies which range in scope from large-scale implementation across whole school districts to a case study of single participant The effectiveness of extensive reading has been generally summarized to provide comprehensible input, to develop reading speed and comprehension which lead to learners' motivation and confidence and specifically to reinforce, confirm and deepen knowledge of vocabulary (Bell, 2001; Pigada & Schmitt, 2006; Rashidi & Piran, 2011; Richards &
Schmitt, 2002; Soltani, 2011) Since ER offers a large number of graded interesting materials of various topics in an anxiety-free learning environment for general language improvement, it increases learners' motivation and more positive attitude towards the target language It is believed that since the learner is reading for pleasure, he will be eager to see what happens next and will therefore try to read more rapidly Moreover, ER can help students to automatically recognize the words that frequently appear in the reading texts in a very pleasurable manner While reading extensively, learners are engaged in reading materials as naturally and comfortably as possible without compulsory or strict follow-up assessments or precise confirmation of meaning by teachers, so that learners experience fun and reward rather than stress during the ER process (Allan, 2009; Hill, 2001) which can help develop students‟ learning independence, confidence and autonomy (Bell, 2001;
It is the fact that until recently, Vietnamese learners have not paid enough attention to vocabulary learning (Tran, 2006) This is true with the context of my students at Hung Yen Teachers‟ Training College (HYTTC) Despite the schools for four years, their vocabulary, grammar and practical skills were limited When being informally interviewed, these students showed that they had never read outside the class However, these students expressed their willingness to join in the study since they were really in need of improving their vocabulary and reducing vocabulary learning stress All these have motivated me to carry the study “using guided ER to improve incidental vocabulary learning for first year English major students”.
Aims of the study
This action research mainly aims to improve first year English-majored students‟ incidental vocabulary learning in the aspect of word meaning at Hung Yen Teachers‟ Training College using guided extensive reading
To reach the aims, the researcher supposes two research questions as follows:
1 To what extent can the use of guided extensive reading improve the students‟ incidental vocabulary learning?
2 What are the students‟ opinions about the extensive reading program?
Scope of the study
The study was conducted on a class of first year English major students at HYTTC only The study focused on incidental vocabulary learning through a guided graded readers program (GRP) in the aspect of meaning Therefore, the findings of the research could just reflect the effects of the extensive reading program on the subjects in the context.
Method of the study
To find out the answers to the above research questions, an action research (AR) design was adopted The research followed the model of an AR program as McBride and Schostak (1991) The steps were carried out as follows: (1) identifying the problem, (2) collecting and analyzing the data, (3) planning and implementing the action, (4) collecting data to monitor change and (5) analyzing and evaluating.
Design of the study
The study is composed of three following parts:
This part includes rationale, aims, scope and design of the study to introduce and to appeal the readers
Part B Chapter 1- Literature Review– mentions some theoretical background about extensive reading, factors affecting the effectiveness of ER and vocabulary leaning This chapter aims to provide the readers background knowledge to have more understanding about the paper
Chapter 2 – Methodology– discusses the methods or approaches employed by the authors to collect the data for the study
Chapter 3 - Results and Discussions– analyses the data collected in the research process and introduces recommendations to make a good ER program
In this part, the author offers a summary of the findings, conclusion, recommendations, limitations, and future directions for further study.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Reading
It is a fact that reading helps in mental development and is known to stimulate the muscles of the eyes Reading is an activity that involves greater levels of concentration and adds to the conversational skills of readers It is observed that children and teenager who have habits of reading have comparatively higher intelligence quotients Therefore, reading skills are essential for not only students‟ academic success but also their social and business advancement Gradman and Hanania (1991) investigated between English as a Second Language learners‟ language achievement and forty-four background variables which include formal learning experiences, exposure to the language in class and outside, and opinions about English The results indicated that the strongest effect to be that of extracurricular reading
Walter (2004) stated that reading in a second language call for fast, automatic word decoding and access to the mental lexicon This means working on building speed and fluency and on learning to recognize at least 10,000 words in the new language By reading, students got familiar with many topics, acquired a lot of new words and were easy to deal with a number of reading text without difficulty Students would gradually be more confident about the topics in the text and could read and write well
Krashen (2005) mentioned to the power of reading in his work He referred to studies that consistently report a positive relationship between the amounts of free reading done and various aspects of second and foreign language competence as follows Lee, Krashen, and Gribbons (1996) regarding the acquisition of relative clauses; Stokes, Krashen, and Kartcher (1998) regarding the acquisition of the present subjunctives in Spanish; S Y Lee
(2001) regarding factors which make writing difficult To sum up, many researchers have agreed upon the vital role of reading in language learning
Many studies have been made on working out a definition of ER Among them is the one done by Lewis and Hill (1992) in which extensive reading means that students have general understanding of the text without necessary understanding every word This definition fails to help learner imagine the whole picture of ER but an aspect of purpose of ER However, Bamford and Day (1997) defined ER as an approach to foreign language teaching in general, and to the teaching of foreign language reading in particular To follow Bamford and Day‟s (1997) ideas, Bruton (2002) suggested that ER can apply to a number of “amounts” The amount of new reading text which is read, the amounts of text consumed and the amount of time spent reading
Furthermore, the definition that seems to be more satisfying than those mentioned before is concluded by Robb and Susser (1989) They defined ER as a language teaching and learning procedure because it was reading (1) of large quantities of material or long text, (2) for global or general understanding, (3) with the intention of obtaining pleasure from the text, (4) with students choosing what they want to read, (5) the books are not discussed in class
After considering various definitions and the context of the study, our working definition is that extensive reading is reading authentic texts in the foreign language without help at students' own level of proficiency for general or global understanding with primary intention of obtaining pleasure from the materials and done out of class without the added pressure of a comprehension test to follow
To ensure students get the maximum benefit, extensive reading has to be consistent and sustained (Schmitt, 2000) Lee and Hsu (2009) however warned that many so called ER curriculums designed by Taiwanese educators last a relatively short time, fail to provide a large volume of books, and usually require some sort of oral/written reports or performance tests, which could reduce students‟ pleasure of reading Therefore, in planning an authentic ER program, they suggested teachers take into consideration the duration of time, amount of reading materials accessible for students and finance
Another key to successful ER is to supply materials that are comprehensible, relevant, interesting and varied (Nuttall, 1996; Waring & Nation, 2004; Shen, 2008; cited in Lee & Hsu, 2009) According to Shen (2008; cited in Lee &
Hsu, 2009), to accomplish those characters, teachers should have students involved in the book selection process
• Readability: The reading materials should be short and not far beyond students‟ current linguistic levels (Coady, 1997; Huang & Liou, 2007)
Nuttall (1996) stated that improvement comes from reading a lot of easy material
• Appropriateness and Authenticity: Because one‟s prior background knowledge has an essential impact on reading comprehension, (Blachowicz &
Fisher, 2006; Paynter et al., 2006) the selected materials should be culturally familiar and authentic (Coady, 1997)
• Attraction: The materials need to be appealing to the students (Elley,
1989) When supplied with materials of high interest, students not only read more (Glazer & Giorgis, 2005), they also apply more reading strategies (Coady, 1979)
• Variety: The reading materials should deal with a wide range of subject matter While narrow reading focuses on in-depth studying of one topic, extensive reading instead stresses exposing students to different subjects and genres in order to construct/expand their word schemata
The specific benefits of extensive reading are diversified and wide-ranging A large numbers of researched s have provided evidence through experiences for these effects of extensive reading in language learning Many teachers who have been deeply involved in this instructional approach for a very long time wrote about these benefits From Day & Bamford (1998), Hill (2001), Nation (2005), Robb (1998), and Waring (1997) the benefits of extensive reading were reported as follows (Porcaro, 2009)
• Extensive reading builds automaticity of word recognition
• Automatic recognition of a word allows lexical access – the automatic calling up from memory of a word‟s meanings and its phonological representation
• Extensive reading builds vocabulary knowledge
• Comprehension and fluent reading depend on automatic word recognition and vocabulary knowledge, and thus are advanced through extensive reading
• Fluent reading allows the reader to move from word-by-word decoding to the processing of ideas, which is essential to higher level reading and thinking skills
• Extensive reading builds awareness of grammatical structures and the ability to quickly and accurately process sentence structures
• Extensive reading enhances learners‟ background knowledge
• Extensive reading promotes learners‟ positive attitude toward reading It fosters their confidence and motivation to read
•Extensive reading increases exposure to English The important role of comprehensible input in foreign language learning has been strongly demonstrated by Krashen (1993)
• Extensive reading reinforces a grasp of language that is taught in class It provides students with an excellent opportunity to consolidate what they have learned, which is an essential aspect of foreign language learning
• Research studies also show that extensive reading improves learners‟ writing skills, listening and speaking skills, and examination results
Richard and Schmidt (2000) defined graded readers as a text written for children learning their mother tongue, or for second foreign language learner, in which the language content is based on a language grading scheme A graded reader (GR) may use a restricted vocabulary or a set of grammatical structures Currently, there are a wide variety of GRs‟ series available worldwide, like the Oxford Bookworm by Oxford University Press, Penguin Graded Readers by Longman, or Cambridge English Readers by Cambridge
According to Nation‟s (2005) observation, although the levels in these series are not identical with each other in number of levels, the amount of vocabulary at each level, or the vocabulary lists on which they are based, they share a lot of the vocabulary covered Therefore, it is not important to stick to only one series of GRs To many language teachers and learners, GRs are attractive option for several reasons GRs not only offer controlled, systematic, and comprehensive development of vocabulary and grammar, they also fulfill the different interests and levels of learners
After investigating the available materials at the bookstores and the level of my students, the researcher decided to choose GRs of the Oxford Bookworm Libraries Stories in the series seem to be interesting and suitable for the students in this study Moreover, there are pictures which illustrate the content of the stories Some of the stories are very famous and made into films or plays The researcher also took books a level 1 for my student, who have never had habit of extensive reading before.
Vocabulary
1.2.1 Vocabulary in second language learning
In the very first part of his book “Vocabulary”, Michael Mc Carthy (1990, p.2, cited in Quach, 2007) stated: “It is the experience of most language teachers that the single, biggest component of any language course is vocabulary No matter how well the student learns grammar, no matter how successfully the sounds of L2 are mastered, without words to express a wide range of meanings, communication in an L2 just cannot happen in any meaningful way” It is impossible to deny the role of vocabulary in communication in an L2 A leaner‟s vocabulary size plays a very significant part in his or her ability to communicate due to the fact that “words are the tools we use to think, to express ideas and feelings and to learn about the world.” (Johnson and Johnson, 2004, p.1, cited in Quach, 2007)
In the book named “Understanding Vocabulary” (2000, p.16, cited in Quach,
2007), Alexander wrote: “Comprehension improves when you know what the words mean” and “words are currency of communication A robust vocabulary improves all areas of communication – listening, speaking, reading and writing”
All the above quotations highly appreciate the important role of vocabulary in language learning, especially in second language learning Thus, teaching vocabulary should be a part of the syllabus and vocabulary should be paid more attention through well- planned lesson of language teachers‟ and serious learning behavior of learners
Most of the researches in the special matter of incidental vocabulary learning (Wesche & Paribakht, 1999) have considered incidental learning as something that is learned without specific focus of attention in a classroom context In Wesche and Paribakht‟s definition (1999), incidental vocabulary learning refers to the process in which learners focus on comprehending meaning of reading and listening contexts rather than on the intentional vocabulary learning and acquire vocabulary as a “by-product” without the learner‟s conscious decision, or intention to learn the words While, Nation (2001) has indicated that in incidental vocabulary learning the learners‟ attention is focused on some other feature, usually the message that is conveyed by a speaker or a writer Considerable vocabulary learning can occur even though the learners‟ attention is not directed toward vocabulary learning when the amount of unknown vocabulary is low in such messages
Another explanation of the incidental learning was set by Haynes (1998, cited by Wesche & Paribakht, 1999) The author considered attention rather than intention as the key to clarifying the construct, as well as a separation of teaching considerations from those of learning She proposed two continua, one of them from “indirect teaching” to “direct teaching” and the other from
“incidental learning” (or automated learning, involving the learner‟s peripheral attention while focal attention is elsewhere) to “attended learning”
Although many researchers have defined incidental vocabulary acquisition from different aspects, there is not an all-sided and authoritative definition of incidental vocabulary acquisition In this paper, the researcher adopted the definition made by Nation and Wang (1999) that incidental learning takes place when the focus is on the content of the story, not on vocabulary learning Learners‟ attention is on the meaning of the text and on developing reading fluency
1.2.3 Reading and incidental vocabulary learning
A case study implemented by Grabe and Stoller (1997) also found significant gains in vocabulary through incidental vocabulary learning through extensive reading
They examined the vocabulary development of an American man learning Portuguese through extensive reading The subject received three weeks of instruction and spent additional hours reading outside of class After being exposed to a large amount of vocabulary, he showed a 20% increase on the final vocabulary test five months later
They claimed that the study “strongly suggests that reading and vocabulary will develop as a result of extensive reading practice”
In the process of incidental vocabulary learning, word knowledge is thought to be cumulated and developed gradually through multiple exposures in various reading contexts Extensive reading, as a form of comprehensible input, has the effect of providing learners with rich contexts ideal for vocabulary learning During the reciprocal process of extensive reading, the acquisition of words is the result of successes in inferring word meanings from a meaningful context and through more reading experiences the developed and matured vocabulary inference ability could in turn contributes to reading level
According to Krashen (1993), extensive reading is considered beneficial for overall language competence and fundamental to vocabulary development as well in the L2 learning Researchers such as Krashen believe that similar to L1 word learning, reading is the major means for acquiring vocabulary and have thus strongly encouraged the implementation of extensive reading programs in an L2 learning environment (Krashen, 1989) The proposition that most vocabulary is learned incidentally has appealed to the default argument that learning from context is the only way to account for most vocabulary acquisition (Wesche & Paribakht, 1999)
Many studies results support the assumption of the important relationship between incidental vocabulary learning and extensive reading Milton and Meara (1995, cited by Nagy, 1997) estimated that advanced students could learn words at an annual rate close to 2,500 in a second language setting A substantial proportion of this growth is possibly from incidental learning
Elley‟s (1991) survey of “book flood” studies (the essential element of such studies is increasing the availability of books to the students) showed that L2 learners tended to benefit more from an increase in volume of reading than do L1 learners because they encountered unfamiliar words at a greater rate than L1 learners The study suggested that language learning was for the most part incidental, and it relied on essence motivation, primarily through the use of interesting, well-illustrated books
Horst, Cobb and Meara (1998) proposed a carefully controlled book-length reading treatment (34 low-intermediate learners in Oman read 21,232 words of the simplified Mayor of Casterbridge text in a ten-day period) when replicating the well-known study by Saragi, Nation and Meiter in 1978 The result showed that there was an average Furthermore, Xu Hong selected about one in every five new words and subjects with larger L2 vocabulary sizes had greater incidental word learning gains The study also found that L2 learners recognized the meaning of new words and built associations between them as a result of comprehension-focused extensive reading However, the results of Day et al (1991) demonstrated that exposure to previously unknown or difficult words through sustained silent reading for entertainment by Japanese EFL students had a positive effect on their ability to recognize these words in a vocabulary test
1.2.4 Difficulties in incidental vocabulary learning
In spite of the fact that extensive reading has an influence on incidental vocabulary learning, other researchers have found that reading for L2 vocabulary development may lead to some problems First, there were wrong inferences that vocabulary was learned cursorily which prevents learners from using words actively Some lexical items such as words with a deceptive morphological structure, idioms, words (Laufer, 1997) often misguide the learners and make them misunderstand the words It short-circuits readers‟ contextual guessing process
Second, to have an effective guessing, the context is well understood and almost all of the surrounding words in the text are known, which requires good textual clues and substantial prior vocabulary knowledge on the part of the learner Different from native speakers, L2 learners have some difficulties in guessing word meanings correctly, for they always have more opportunities to encounter new words within various contexts with their lack of sufficient word knowledge Moreover, correct guessing of word meanings depends on accurate recognition of surrounding words and good use of reading strategies (Huckin & Coady, 1999) However, learners always feel frustrated in comprehension when facing overwhelming texts in extensive reading, for their word knowledge is insufficient and lack active use of different reading strategies So the readers may decide to ignore the words, or cannot infer a word from context
Last, Huckin & Coady (1999) stated that the non-recurrence of new words cannot guarantee the acquisition of the vocabulary This can be accounted for by the fact that unlike native speakers, L2 learners have very few opportunities to be exposed to the unknown words repeatedly, apart from the high-frequency words Accordingly, they cannot pick up the features of the words incrementally to form the solid lexical knowledge in their mental lexicon.
Previous research
Regarding the benefits of ER on improving learners‟ vocabulary learning, a numbers of studies that range in scope from case studies of single readers to large-scale applications through a school were widely documented Within the scope of the thesis, the researcher would like to review the previous studies focusing on the way that those emphasized the benefits of graded readers to incidental vocabulary acquisition and the attitudes of learners towards reading and ER
1.3.1 Researches on incidental vocabulary acquisition
A famous research known as the Clockwork Orange Study by Saragi, Nation
& Meister, 1978 reported the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading 20 native speakers of English working in Indonesia participated in the study Students were asked to read a novel, A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess) within three days The novel contained a total of 241 different
Russian-based slang words called nadsat After reading the novel, they were given a multiple-choice test which contained 90 nadsat words and showed a 76% gain on average simply through incidental learning without referring to a dictionary
The study strongly supported the notion that extensive reading leads to “a substantial amount of vocabulary learning” (p 78)
Waring and Takaki (2003) examined the rate at which vocabulary was learned from reading the 400 headword graded reader A Little Princess To ascertain whether words of different frequency of occurrence rates were more likely to be learned and retained or forgotten, 25 words within five bands of differing frequency of occurrence (15 to 18 times to those appearing only once) were selected The spelling of each word was changed to ensure that each test item was unknown to the 15 intermediate level (or above) female Japanese subjects (e.g., beautiful into smarty, world into rumple) The full text of A Little Princess, with the substitute words, was printed for each subject and was put into book form along with a test booklet The subjects were asked to "read this story as usual and enjoy it." Three tests (word-form recognition, prompted meaning recognition and unprompted meaning recognition) were administered immediately after reading, after one week and after a three month delay The results show that words can be learned incidentally but that most of the words were not learned More frequent words were more likely to be learned and were more resistant to decay The data suggest that, on average, the meaning of only one of the 25 items will be remembered after three months, and the meaning of none of the items that were met fewer than eight times will be remembered three months later The data thus suggest that very little new vocabulary is retained from reading one graded reader, and that a massive amount of graded reading is needed to build new vocabulary It is suggested that the benefits of reading a graded reader should not only be assessed by researching vocabulary gains and retention, but by looking at how graded readers help develop and enrich already known vocabulary
In 2006, Pigada and Schmitt used 70 nouns and 63 verbs in their study in investigating incidental vocabulary acquisition with a participant, a learner of French, by using four graded readers in French Since the texts were short, the authors included only “the most common parts of speech found in natural text”, in the hope that further research would include other word classes They organized the two word classes into six different frequency groups according to the number of encounters and tested three types of word knowledge (meaning, spelling, and grammatical behavior) The measurement procedure was a one-on-one interview that allowed a very good indication of whether learning occurred They found that substantial word learning occurred during the ER, although the improvement was not uniform across the three types of word knowledge Spelling was enhanced in all noun frequency groups and in all but two verb groups For meaning, low-frequency nouns and verbs showed limited learning, and verbs were more limited than nouns Grammatical behavior knowledge was improved in all frequency groups of nouns, while the percentage of grammatical mastery of verbs was much lower than that of nouns Overall, the study indicates that more vocabulary acquisition is possible from extensive reading than previous studies have suggested
Kweon and Kim (2008) conducted an experimental research to investigate how and which unknown words can be incidentally learned and retained while Korean learners of English read substantial amounts of authentic text over a long period of time 12 Korean learners of English read authentic literary texts and were tested on their knowledge of vocabulary before reading (pretest), immediately after reading (Posttest 1), and 1 month after Posttest 1 (Posttest 2) The results showed a significant word gain between the pretest and Posttest 1 and that most gained words were retained at Posttest 2 Of the 3 different word classes that were used, nouns were a little easier to retain than verbs and adjectives, the authors came to an important conclusion that words can be learned incidentally but that most of the words were not learned More frequent words were more likely to be learned and were more resistant to decay The data suggest that, on average, the meaning of only one of the 25 items will be remembered after three months, and the meaning of none of the items that were met fewer than eight times will be remembered three months later The data thus suggest that very little new vocabulary is retained from reading one graded reader, and that a massive amount of graded reading is needed to build new vocabulary Finally, the authors suggested that the benefits of reading a graded reader should not only be assessed by researching vocabulary gains and retention, but by looking at how graded readers help develop and enrich already known vocabulary
Tiryaki and Tütüniş (2012) conducted a research on extensive reading and vocabulary development, and they focused on vocabulary learning of reluctant elementary level students The study investigated whether extensive reading would make any noteworthy distinction in the vocabulary development of these students To this respect, a small-scale classroom research was carried out at a private university in the fall term of 2010-2011 academic year A hundred elementary level students were chosen and they were divided into experimental and control groups With experimental group the materials for extensive reading were selected Those materials were four graded readers Control group was not exposed to any extensive reading during the fall term whereas students of the experimental group were asked to read those graded readers until the end of the fall term However, both groups were responsible from the syllabus which was designed by school administration and it involved studying three units of a main course book until the end of the fall term Then both groups took a pre-test at the beginning of the term to display that they were at elementary level and a post-test at the end of the term to present whether any improvements were observed in their vocabulary or not Finally the results were analyzed and compared to find out whether any difference occurred between two groups in terms of vocabulary development The results of the data analysis showed that extensive reading improved the range of the words of the reluctant learners in the experimental group who were asked to read graded readers However, when the results analyzed and compared it was observed that the control group who were not obliged to read, distinguishably performed worse in the vocabulary test both in the first part and in the second part
In another study by Eghtesadi and Momeni, situated in an EFL context, seventy five elementary learners of English were randomly selected with the authors‟ aim at discovering the ways purposes behind reading activities influence vocabulary knowledge gain and retrieval The participants were assigned to three groups of „free reading‟, „reading comprehension‟ and
„reading to summarize‟ The input text „A good night’s work’ was selected from a graded reader series Reading Comprehension 4 by Louis Fidge The text was administered to all the three groups The data in both immediate and delayed post-test revealed that both vocabulary learning and retention were greatly influenced by the purposeful reading activity The Scheffe post-hoc test revealed that the mean scores of the „summarizing‟ and „reading comprehension‟ groups were significantly different from the mean score of the „free reading‟ group But the results did not indicate any significant differences between the mean scores of the two groups of „summarizing‟ and
„reading comprehension‟ However the strength of association for the immediate post-test and the delayed one showed that a large part of the variance between the three groups could be explained by the reading purpose
The findings of the present study generally provided positive support of the role of readers‟ purpose on incidental gain of vocabulary knowledge
Furthermore, the low rate of incidental vocabulary learning and retention in
English as a foreign language context extremely suggested the explicit teaching of new lexicon on the part of teachers along with encouraging the learners toward ER Finally, it should be noted that since the participants in the study were female elementary language learners, the results may face problems of generalizability
1.3.2 Researches on attitudes towards ER
The effects of ER on learner‟s motivation and attitude are impressive Study after study shows how attitudes changed toward reading in English and how the students became eager readers Numerous studies have found favorable attitudes toward ER classes and GRs Students with high motivation naturally like the experience of ER In regard to less-motivated students reporting positive attitudes, their positive feelings are primarily due to the satisfaction they felt at their unexpected accomplishment But many of these students stop reading books in English when the motivation provided by an instructor‟s homework assignment is absent But this stoppage should not mean that they do not like reading GRs The students‟ reading success and the opportunity to practice English generates the positive attitudes and intentions mentioned above This method also introduces students to a different way of developing their English proficiency
Murphy (2010) conducted a study among first and second-year non-English majors at a national university in western Japan In the first class, students were timed as they read a chapter of the graded reader The Good Earth,
(Heinemann Intermediate level) In the second to last class of the semester, they were timed again reading a different chapter of the same book Both chapters were similar in setting and characters Students were also asked about their reading habits In the last class of the semester, students were interviewed in small groups in English or Japanese, and interviewed about their attitudes and opinions toward the class The findings in this study confirm that ER should be one of the fundament of L2 curriculums
Furthermore, communicative activities can easily be incorporated into an ER course, with graded readers providing a treasure chest of content and ideas for discussion Students also enjoy feeling successful in the L2 The high levels of positive attitude toward this type of approach seems to suggest that a communicative approach with ER is an obvious path toward better student performance (versus intensive-only reading classes) and attitudes toward reading in the L2 and the language and culture in general
Pellicer-Sánchez and Schmitt (2010) conducted a research to explore the degree to which relatively advanced L2 readers can acquire spelling, word class, and recognition and recall of meaning from reading the unmodified authentic novel Things Fall Apart The participants were twenty Spanish in the last year of their undergraduate degree from a university in Spain Readers were simply asked to read the book for pleasure without paying special attention to any aspect of the book for around one month Finally, a section on participants‟ attitudes was included so as to have the possibility of examining the relationship, if any, between readers‟ attitudes and vocabulary acquisition
METHODOLOGY
Participants
The subjects of the study were 25 students (girls only) of English 2013 class (TA13) The participants‟ overall English proficiency was roughly at the level of pre-intermediate judging from their results of the English test in the university entrance examination and those of their Reading skill 1 final tests at the end the first semester In addition, I was also their English teacher in charge of Reading Skill 1 subject Another important factor is that the students were willing to take part in the research Before this program, they had not involved in any English extensive reading activity They were selected in the second semester with the assumption that they could get used to the teaching and learning environment at college after graduating from high school.
Action research
Wallace (1998) defined an action research is done by systematically collecting data on teachers‟ everyday practice and analyzing them to make some decision regarding future practice According to him, AR can be helpful because of the three following reasons: (1) It can have a specific and immediate outcome which can be directly relate to practice in the teacher‟s own context, (2) the findings of such research might be primarily specific (it means that it is not claimed that they are necessarily of general application and therefore the method might be more free-ranging than those of conventional research Nunan (1992) stated that AR is problem focus, mainly concerned with a single case in a specific situation and tries to find solutions to the problem in focus An AR as defined by Kemmis and Mc Taggart
(1998) is a teacher initiated classroom research which seeks to increase the teachers‟ understanding of classroom teaching and learning then brings about improvement in classroom practice
This action research model is a cycle and continuous process These stages are not separate but embedded within action and reflection In addition, action research can be carried out within the everyday context of the classroom
An AR program should be flexible as different researchers may have variety of processes in different certain situations An AR study can have a number of steps of phrases The researcher decided to use the model of an AR program as McBride and Schostak (1991).The process consists of the following steps:
FIGURE 1: Action research model of Bride and Schostak (1991 )
In this study, an AR was conducted based on the above process The stages of this AR were described in details:
The researcher‟s experience, her discussion with learners and her observation helped her find out that one of the students‟ problems is lack of vocabulary
Therefore, this feature was selected to be the focus in this study
2 Collecting and analyzing the data
To have more information, the researcher had to collect the data relating to students‟ vocabulary knowledge, their reading habits and their reading ability
First of all, the researcher found out that her students often complained about having difficulties in reading in English Secondly, she investigated the course book of Reading Skill 1 Thirdly, the researcher had small interviews with students in order to know about their reading habits and opinions about reading outside the class All came to a hypothesis that her students‟ lack of vocabulary items may be the result of their poor extensive reading in English habits Another question was raised that if their vocabulary would be improved when they read extensively
3 Planning and implementing the action
Based on the literature review relating to the topic, a procedure of an AR was carried out to bring the improvements in the context of the researcher‟s situation The researcher decided to use graded readers to help her students to improve their vocabulary The procedure of the action was described as follows
Table 1: The Graded Readers Program
1 Introduce the graded readers program
2 Deliver the first story “ Goodbye Mr Hollywood”
Deliver “ Mutiny on the Bounty ”
Deliver “ The Phantom of the Opera ”
Deliver “ The Witches of the Pendle ”
Carry out immediate-posttest Hand out Questionnaire
In this activity, the teacher introduced the ER program, its aims and benefits to all participants and encouraged them to read the GRs extensively outside the classroom By doing this, the researcher was able to monitor the participants' reading with the belief of Vietnamese that learners had worked better under the time pressure The researcher integrated with investigating students' attitudes and past experience of vocabulary learning Students were also suggested not to use dictionaries to look up unknown words What the researcher deeply sought for was students' personal experience of what they had read, for example, how interesting they found the materials especially the ways they dealt with new vocabulary encountering during reading the selected books Also, the researcher was in search of comprehensive understanding why and how ER worked well or not to help students enhance their knowledge of vocabulary, especially whether ER could work to increase students' engagement and motivation in learning vocabulary In this section, the vocabulary test was carried out
Week 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7: Students' reading and doing worksheet
Each week, the participants were handed over one 400-headword story and encouraged to read the materials immediately Students' reading and writing worksheet were done outside the classroom To help students have fuller understanding of the stories, a number of pre, while and post reading activities designed at the end of each book were suggested for students to accomplish
With every graded reader chosen, students were asked to keep book reports in which students expressed their personal experiences of what they had read i.e whether and why they found the materials enjoyable, whether the reading was easy or difficult for them and especially the ways they dealt with new vocabulary during reading through vocabulary learning strategies Through these activities, students had chance to review and recycle vocabulary from what they had read which helped the teacher assess their progress in learning vocabulary
The researcher arranged regular Saturday meetings for about one hour with all participants in the school library at which the students and teacher spent most of the meeting time discussing about students' reading and talking with some prominent/ less interested students about their progress in vocabulary acquisition, their opinions or motivation towards ER, difficulties they encountered while reading for more encouragement to read extensively
Week 8, 10: Questionnaire, immediate protest, and delayed protest
After having finished all the GRs, the students took the immediate posttest and answer the questionnaire After two weeks, they did the delayed posttest in order to check their words retention
4 Collecting data to monitor change
The instruments used in this study included (1) the graded readers, (2) the tests and (3) the questionnaire To collect the data, the researcher asked the students to read the selected graded readers, do the tests and answer the questionnaire
The data was analyzed to evaluate the action plan to find out whether the hypothesis is correct or not Based on the findings of the AR evaluation, some conclusions and recommendations would be made for further research
After considering Day and Bamford (2002) Top Ten Principles for Teaching Extensive reading, the researcher made a decision on selecting the materials for this study following these criteria: (i) the books should contain a lot of visual, pictorial support to provide contextual cues for guessing the meaning of the unknown words and be attractive to the participants; (ii) the content of the books should be within the participants‟ intellectual levels and various in genres; (iii) the books should not be too long to distract students from reading as well as to allow students to finish reading in a short time and experience frequent success
In this study, the researcher decided to use graded readers because they were well within the subjects‟ current reading-ability level (i.e., texts in which 96% to 99% of the running words were already known) This would constitute ideal conditions for successfully inferring the meanings of unknown words from context (Laufer & Sim, 1985) A 400-headword graded reader should not have presented any major lexical problems for the pre-intermediate subjects In this way, it could be assumed that the surrounding co-text for the test items would be familiar, and therefore investigating the rate of acquisition that took place based solely on the test items could proceed Six graded readers from the 400-headword, level 1 of the Oxford Bookworms Library were selected: Goodbye Mr Hollywood by John Escott, Mutiny on the Bounty by Vicary, The Elephant Man by Vicary, The Phantom of the Opera by Jennifer Bassett, The Witches of Pendle by Joc Potter and Andy Hopkins, and The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy It was further determined that none of the subjects had read, listened to or seen these stories before.
Instruments
A pre -test and post-test design was used for checking vocabulary retention before and after the treatment Analyzing and comparing the results from these tests aimed at measuring the students‟ improvement in incidental vocabulary acquisition by using graded readers The tests were adopted from Horst (2005) which examined students‟ vocabulary knowledge The tests simply required participants to register levels of confidence in their ability to the meanings of listed items by marking one of three options: YES (I know what this word means); NO (I don‟t know what this word means) and NS (I have an idea about the meaning of this word, but I am not sure) The NS option would let the students to register partial knowledge of words and it was intended to encourage honesty The tests allowed for quick assessment of a large number of items It was also easy to construct, administer and score
The 118 word items selected from the 142 key words listed at the end of the six graded readers and the most 90 high-frequency words which the researcher scanned from the materials In the pretest, participants were required to mark a check before they took part in the ER program The posttest was given after the students had finished all the readings to evaluate the students‟ vocabulary learning through the program However, the order of these 118 tested words was different from which was displayed in the pretest
Ary (2002) states that questionnaire is the major means of data collection for a survey It is important that the instruments used be valid and reliable
Therefore, the questionnaire should be formatted so that it is attractive and easy for the respondents to read, answer, and convenient for the researcher to code and score
A questionnaire, which was adapted from Anh (2007), was used as a complementary tool to obtain their feedback on the program and their suggestions for future programs The questionnaire consists of two parts and was delivered to the students after the program The first part of the questionnaire includes 8 questions aimed at examining students' opinions about the program The second part includes items seeking students' suggestions about the future extensive reading program In this part students were also encouraged to give other suggestions in addition to the five items in the questionnaire
These questions were designed under the format of a Likert-scale and the categories are different from each question There are 5 levels of agreements: strongly agree, agree, not sure, disagree and strongly disagree The questionnaire was translated into Vietnamese in order to avoid any language difficulties due to lack of English proficiency that might affect the objectiveness of the research results The English and Vietnamese versions of the questionnaire are in Appendices 5 and 6.
Data presentation and data analysis
To present and interpret the collected data of the tests and the questionnaires in a logical form, the researcher decided to formulate a suitable data interpretation scheme
In this study, the vocabulary test was adapted from Horst (2005) then the results were analyzed according to his Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS)
Each word has three rating options YES, NO, and NOT SURE corresponding certain point (YES = 2, NOT SURE = 1 and NO = 0) The total score that each student gained for each word-class was calculated as follows:
Mean score = (total score of student 1 + total score of student 2 + total score of student 3 + …… + total score of student 25) / 25
To find out the differences between the results of the pre-test and post-test, the researcher made a comparison the mean score of each word class in the two mentioned tests
The percentages of the maximum possible scores in each word-class were also calculated as following principle:
The percentage of the maximum possible score = (mean score/ maximum possible score) x 100%
For instants, the mean score of the nouns in the pretest is 52.4 The maximum possible score that students can gain for 59 nouns is 59 X 2 = 118 Then the percentage of the maximum possible score is (52.4 /118) X 100% = 34.5 %
After comparing the percentages of the maximum possible scores, we can see the differences more clearly and we are able to eliminate the effects of the different numbers of words in each word-class
In this study, Statistic Package for Social Science (SPSS) was chosen because it is among the most widely used programs for statistics analysis in social science To check student‟s vocabulary acquisition, the t-test was used to analyze the data, basing on the assumption that the data met the rule of normal distribution The results of the pretest and posttests were compared
After that, the results of the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest were also compared
The study was carried out under the assumption that the null hypothesis is true Thus, the alternative hypothesis was directly tested by means of t-tests using SPSS, version 20.0 based on the following rules:
The significance level used for this study is 0.05 (P = 0.05) If the probability value - P value (which is a number obtained from the research results using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), version 20.0) is less than or equal to the significance level (P ≤ 0.05), then the researcher rejects the null hypothesis and tentatively accepts the alternative hypothesis The researcher also concludes that the finding is statistically significant On the contrary, if the probability value is greater than the significance level (P > 0.05) the researcher cannot reject the null hypothesis The researcher can only claim to fail to reject the null hypothesis and conclude the research finding is not statistically significant.
Chapter summary
So far, this chapter has presented in detail the context of the study as well as some description of the variables, the subjects, the tests used as tools of collecting data, the detailed introduction of the graded readers program applied as the experimental treatment of the study as well as the specific steps of conducting the study In the next chapter, readers will be provided with results and discussion of the study.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The results of questionnaire (Research question 2)
As mentioned previously, a questionnaire was administered to the students in order to gather their evaluative and suggestive opinions of the GRP, which were put into two categories: their valuation of the program as a whole, and their suggestions for future GRP The results of the questionnaire were in the following sections
3.2.1 Results of the first part of the questionnaire
Table 6: Students' opinions about the graded readers program
1 The GRP gave me pleasure in learning English 16
2 I wish I had been encouraged to read extensively before
3 If I had been given a choice, I wouldn't have participated in this GRP
4 If this program does not continue in the following school-year, I will keep on reading extensively
5 The GRP helped me to gain more self-control of my English study
6 My background knowledge has been widened due to extensive reading
7 Reading extensively helped to improve my English vocabulary
8 GRP helped me to develop a reading habit 23
Table 6 indicates the results of the first part of the questionnaire on the students' attitudes to the program By using Likert scale in the questionnaire, the researcher found out that GPR had a positive effect on the students As can be seen in the table above, the majority of the students indicated that the GRP promoted their pleasure (64%) Up to 96% of them confirmed that they wanted to be encouraged to read extensively before This expressed their enjoyment to this program when it was applied in their class However, there were three students (12%) who did not really want to take part in the program
In addition, most of participants (88%) showed their willingness to continue their extensive reading even though the program will not keep on in the next school year The autonomy or self-control in their language study was considered with great pleasure (92%) This showed that most of the students were aware of the benefits of extensive reading Indeed, the first five questions indicated that most students was interested in the GRP and hoped to have chance to read extensively
According to the subjects‟ evaluation of the program in the relation with their language abilities, it was encouraging to know that 96% of them agreed that GRP helped to widen their background knowledge; 76% of them confirmed that reading the graded readers helped to improve their English vocabulary
Furthermore, up to 92% of the students admitted that the GPR helped them develop a reading habit In other words, they felt passionate about reading more after applying GRP
In summary, the results of the first part of the questionnaire have showed that almost all the research participants seemed to have positive opinions about the GRP that had been carried out The results also revealed that most students were interested in and enthusiastic to take part in the GRP
3.2.2 Result of the second part of the questionnaire
The suggestive opinions made by students who participated in the program were important and essential for the researcher to evaluate the success of the program and determined whether the students want to join the program in the future and give some suggestions for further studies The second part of the questionnaire aimed at investigating such valuable information from the subjects who had taken some experiences from this program
Table 7: Students' suggestion for future program
1 The teacher should choose reading materials more carefully
2 The teacher should have more books and more copies of the same books
3 Students should be given more encouragement during the GRP
4 Instructions on activities in the GRP should be explained more clearly
5 The program should be in a longer period of time
As shown in Table 7, most students (88%) thought that the reading materials which the teacher chose were suitable for them to read On contrary, only a small proportion (12%) stated that the teacher should choose the materials more carefully Relating to the numbers of books, the majority of the student (96%) suggested that there should be more books or copies of the same book available for them to read This shows that the participants wanted to read more books to gain better achievement Besides, the table demonstrates that there were 20% of the students thought that they did not need to be encouraged more whereas same number of the student wanted to be encouraged more frequently in the GRP Meanwhile, up to 80% of the participants who were uncertain that they needed to be encouraged more or not in the GPR Especially, most of the students (84%) were not sure about the instructions that were given be the teacher should be explained more clearly These reveal the large role of the teacher in orienting, explaining and guiding the students in this program At the same time, the participants recommended that more time should be given to the activities in the reading lessons in the future program 88% of them expressed that the program should be carried out in a longer period of time This figure showed that the majority of the students were excited with this program
Further suggestions were made in relation with the teacher‟s available books
In addition, three of the participants would like to borrow the books from the teacher to read during the summer holiday because they could have more time to enjoy the content of the stories without any pressure of study Eight students also thought that teacher should suggest them different genres of books and the higher levels of the books and others punishers More than half of the class expected that other ER programs to be carried out in the next school year.
Discussion
This research tried to apply a program for first year students to get them into the habit of reading extensively Both the researcher and her students took part in the study with great efforts in a period of time and the results are follows:
At first, the results of the vocabulary tests provided strong support for the hypothesis that students who participated in extensive reading will perform better overall in posttests and will have some improvement in their vocabulary acquisition This means that the graded readers helped broaden the students‟ vocabulary knowledge
Secondly, the questionnaire results indicated that reading graded readers had such a positive effect on the students‟ opinions about reading In addition, the responses to the questionnaire also revealed that the majority of the subjects found their background knowledge, their vocabulary as well as their reading habits improved thanks to extensive reading These findings proved that the GRP was beneficial to not only English vocabulary teaching and learning but also reading habits among the participants at HYTTC.
Chapter summary
To sum up, Chapter 3 has reported the results that the study brought about
Critical discussion and contrast analysis of the major findings of the study were employed in the study to interpret and assess the collected data The findings as shown explicitly throughout the chapter indicated that the study has enabled to reject the null hypothesis and give answer to the research questions
Summary of the findings
In general, reading plays a very important role in developing students‟ language competence to learn a foreign language when English currently considered as the global language For this reason, learners would have been well aware of the importance reading and put much effort to get more vocabulary for effective reading In fact, a number of methods to promote the teaching and learning reading have been shown so far, and extensive reading has been proposed as an effective tool to help learners improve English proficiency and their vocabulary knowledge
First of all, basing on the teaching process, the researcher realized her students‟ vocabulary shortage Therefore, the researcher decided to do this action research with the 25 participants at HYTTC To carry out this study, the researcher investigated the textbook, observed and listened to her students‟ opinions By reviewing the literature, she found that guided extensive reading may be the effective way to solve the problem Then, the GRP was conducted in ten weeks The instruments for the study were vocabulary tests and attitude questionnaire Since the data were collected and analyzed, the effects of the program were evaluated as follows
The slight improvement of the aspects which were investigated possibly helped the researcher address the research questions Firstly, the results of incidental vocabulary acquisition occurred through reading graded readers It could be inferred that graded readers helped to widen students‟ vocabulary knowledge as well as improve their vocabulary acquisition This means that the first research question was answered Then, regarding to the questionnaire results, the GRP had positive effect on the participants‟ attitudes This led to answer the second research question The findings proved that this program had some advantages to vocabulary learning and teaching among first year major in English students at HYTTC in some extent
All things considered, the results of this study suggest that ER can be an option to solve the problem of students‟ lack of vocabulary which coincided with Soltani‟s (2011) suggestion that ER should be an addition to the curriculum, providing the students with a rich input of natural language by which most textbooks are not able to provide them with (p.116).
Limitations of the study and recommendations for further studies 45 REFERENCES I APPENDICES V APPENDIX 1: VOCABULARY TEST V APPENDIX 2: THE VOCABULARY PRETEST RESULTS IX APPENDIX 3: THE VOCABULARY IMMEDIATE POSTTEST RESULTS X APPENDIX 4: THE VOCABULARY DELAYED POSTTEST RESULTS XI APPENDIX 5: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE XII APPENDIX 6: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE (VIETNAMESE VERSION) XIV CÂU HỎI ĐIỀU TRA XIV APPENDIX 7: BOOK REPORT WORKSHEET XVI APPENDIX 8: A SAMPLE OF LESSON PLAN
In spite of the significant findings that supported the alternative hypothesis of the positive effect of extensive reading on students' vocabulary acquisition, there existed some limitations to the study
Firstly, there were no methods used to measure students‟ level before the program to be reflected in the research They were considered to be at pre- intermediate level of competence This shortage may have caused some disadvantages to the GRP such as difficulty in monitoring students‟ reading It is more reliable to have another pretest to measure the students‟ vocabulary and reading comprehension
Secondly, it is quite essential to choose reading materials in the context of this study Because the subjects of the study were supposed to be at pre- intermediate level, the researcher chose the books by herself For this reason, the participants would have to face up with the factors as new words, grammar structure and topics which they would think it was not suitable for their taste and their vocabulary knowledge This may cause the variety in the posttest results among students It is suggested that the researcher should build a library with different genres of books at different levels in order to satisfy the students‟ concerns and ability
The third limitation is the number of the participants Due to the small population of 25 participants from a class in English Department with a short period of time, the findings of this study can not be generalized to major English students at other colleges and universities Thus, the researcher may not know whether the same program could be applied with other subjects or not It is strongly recommended that further studies on the same issue conduct the research with larger populations to make the findings more reliable
Finally, this study only concentrated on the vocabulary retention in terms of form-meaningknowledge of the target words and the opinions about program since the application of the reading action research Nevertheless, the study did not explore whether extensive reading enhances other aspects of word knowledge such as collocational, morphological, and syntactic knowledge that might also be improved unconsciously through reading (Webb, 2005) The other researches may take consideration in different aspects of the word knowledge
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Do you know these words? Tick on your choice (Y= I know this word; NS=
I’m not sure about this word, N= I don’t know this word)
APPENDIX 2: THE VOCABULARY PRETEST RESULTS
Name ADJECTIVES NOUNS VERBS % ADJECTIVES % NOUNS % VERBS
APPENDIX 3: THE VOCABULARY IMMEDIATE POSTTEST RESULTS
Name ADJECTIVES NOUNS VERBS % ADJECTIVES % NOUNS % VERBS
APPENDIX 4: THE VOCABULARY DELAYED POSTTEST RESULTS
Adapted from Anh (2007) This questionnaire is designed to collect data to our study into how students deal with ER and the opinions about GRP All your responses to the questions are highly appreciated
Part 1: Students' opinions about the Graded Readers Program (GRP)
Following are eight statements about the GRP We would like you to indicate your opinion about each of them by putting a tick (√) in the column that best suits you
Strongly agree = 1 Agree=2 Neutral = 3 Disagree = 4 Strongly disagree =5
1 The GRP gave me pleasure in learning English
2 I wish I had been encouraged to read extensively before
3 If I had been given a choice, I wouldn't have participated in this GRP
4 If this program does not continue in the following school-year, I will keep on reading extensively
5 The GRP helped me to gain more self-control of my English study
6 My background knowledge has been widened due to extensive reading
7 Reading extensively helped to improve my English vocabulary
Part 2: Students' suggestion about the future Graded Readers Program
In your opinion what should be done to make the future GRP more enjoyable and useful? Put a check (√) in the column that best indicates your response to each proposed suggestion
1 The teacher should choose reading materials more carefully
2 The teacher should have more books and more copies of the same books
3 Students should be given more encouragement during the GRP
4 Instructions on activities in the GRP should be explained more clearly
5 The program should be in a longer period of time
Thank you very much for your corporation!
8 GRP helped me to develop a reading habit
(VIETNAMESE VERSION) CÂU HỎI ĐIỀU TRA
Bản câu hỏi này được thiết kế nhằm thu thập dữ liệu cho nghiên cứu của chúng tôi về việc sinh viên đối mặt với khăn như thế nào khi đọc rộng và ý kiến của họ với chương trình đọc rộng Câu trả lời của bạn được đánh giá cao và được giữ bí mật
Hoàn toàn đồng ý =1 ; Đồng ý= 2; Trung lập = 3; Không đồng ý = 4;
Phần 1: Ý kiến của sinh viên về chương trình đọc tài liệu theo cấp độ
Dưới đây là 8 câu nhận định về chương trình đọc tài liệu theo cấp độ Chúng tôi muốn bạn cho biết ý kiến của mình bằng việc đánh dấu (√) vào cột mà bạn thấy hợp lý
1 Chương trình đọc tài liệu theo cấp độ tạo được hứng thú cho tôi trong việc học Tiếng Anh
2 Tôi mong muốn trước đây tôi đã được khuyến khích đọc mở rộng
3 Nếu được lựa chọn tôi đã không tham gia vào chương trình đọc tài liệu theo cấp độ này
4 Nếu trong năm học tới chương trình này không tiếp tục tôi vẫn tiếp tục đọc thêm tài liệu
5 Chương trình đọc tài liệu theo cấp độ đã giúp tôi tự chủ hơn trong việc học Tiếng Anh
6 Kiến thức nền của tôi được mở rộng nhờ chương trình này
7 Việc đọc tài liệu theo cấp độ giúp cải thiện từ vựng tiếng Anh của tôi
8 Chương trình đọc tài liệu theo cấp độ đã dần dần giúp tôi có thói quen đọc
Phần 2: Gợi ý của sinh viên về chương trìnhđọc tài liệu theo cấp độ
Theo ý kiến bạn thì có thể làm gì để chương trình đọc tài liệu theo cấp độ được ưa thích và có ý nghĩa hơn Bạn hãy đánh dấu (√) vào cột chỉ ra câu trả lời của bạn với mỗi một gợi ý
1 Giáo viên nên lựa chọn tài liệu cẩn thận hơn
2 Giáo viên nên có nhiều sách và và nhiều bản phô tô của các quyển sách
3 Sinh viên nên được khuyến khích nhiều hơn trong suốt chương trình
4 Các hướng dẫn cho hoạt động trong chương trình nên được giải thích kỹ lưỡng hơn
5 Chương trình đọc tài liệu theo cấp độ nên kéo dài hơn
Chân thành cảm ơn sự hợp tác của bạn!
Please provide as much information as possible about your reading selected books
3 Length of time of reading: ………
4 Your expectation from the book title:
5 Main theme of the book:
6 Who is/are your favorite character(s)? Your feelings about your beloved character(s) in the story:
7 How interesting you find the book: (put a tick where applicable)
□ not at all interesting □ not very interesting
□ a little interesting □ interesting □ very interesting
8 How difficult you find the book: (put a tick where applicable)
□ very easy □ a little easy □ a little difficult □ difficult □ very difficult
APPENDIX 8: A SAMPLE OF LESSON PLAN
To encourage extensive reading outside of class time
create student interest in the story
Extensive reading: The Elephant Man by Vicary (students had read at home)
The Phantom of the Opera by Jennifer Bassett
(students will read the following week)
Unfamiliar vocabulary might cause problems in understanding the story
Some students are slower readers than others
This type of story may not usually be of interest to some students
The same story reading may cause students copy the book report from their friends
Questions on the reading done in class
A report form to encourage outside reading
Class profile: 25 students of TA13
T1 Asks students prepare a four minute report on a book for homework and give the report in class to a partner
Ss: give an oral report on a book they have read for four minutes
T2 Asks student then gives the same report in three minutes to a different student
Ss: Change partners and give their reports in three minutes
T3 Asks students to deliver the report in two minutes to a third student
Ss: Change every partner one last time and gives their reports in two minutes
T4 Gives a list of adjectives describing characters from the book and asks student to decide who it is
Ss: Find out the characters
T5 Introduces Elephant Man movie trailer Ss: Watch the trailer
(T may encourage students to watch the movie at home)
B TALKING ABOUT STUDENTS DIFFICULTIES IN READING AT HOME
T6 Asks students about their difficulties which they encountered during the extensive reading
Ss: Express their opinions T7 Asks Ss to explain their difficulties and help them