Luận văn thạc sĩ VNU ULIS reading strategies to improve reading comprehension of students at thai nguyen college of economics and technology

INTRODUCTION

Rationale of the Thesis

It is obvious that English language has been widely used in many areas such as politics, economics, tourism, telecommunication, culture, science and technology, and since Vietnam carried out the open door policy towards the regional and global integration, English language has become more and more important Therefore, it is necessary for Vietnamese students to have a good command of English to satisfy the growing requirements in a developing country like Vietnam

In the process of teaching and learning English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL), reading is an essential skill For many people, reading is the most important skill to gain the knowledge and the only means by which learners can access to further study So with well-developed reading skills, ESL/ EFL readers will have a chance to make greater progress and achieve greater development in all academic areas

Because under Vietnam circumstances, English language is taught and learnt in a non- native environment, reading is both a means to gain knowledge and a means by which further study takes place According to Carrell (1984:1): “for many students, reading is by far the most important of the four macro skills, particularly in English as a second or a foreign language” This is really true to the students at Thai Nguyen College of Economics and Technology (TNCET) They find that reading not only gives them a wide range of interesting information but also offers them chances to enlarge their vocabulary, structures and language expressions which are useful for developing other skills

Nevertheless, students at TNCET often have difficulties in reading lessons because of the lack of appropriate reading strategies which are essential for them – ESL/EFL readers

Researchers believe that effective readers are aware of the strategies they use and that they use strategies flexibly and efficiently Therefore, teachers should consider and choose effective reading strategies to teach students, and help them develop the given strategies effectively

In the present process of teaching methods innovation in Vietnam generally, and at TNCET particularly, equipping students with learning strategies can help them be more active, take charge of their own learning, and have more positive learning spirit

For these reasons, it would be necessary to have an investigation into reading strategies and classroom practice Through the study, we could recognize useful reading strategies and how efficiently they are used in an ESF/EFL classroom to improve reading comprehension skills of students at TNCET.

Aims of the Thesis

The aims of the study are:

 To investigate the reading strategies and equipping students with these reading strategies to improve students‟ ability of reading in English at TNCET

 To examine how efficiently the reading strategies are used in reading classes.

Significance of the Thesis

The findings of the thesis will be useful not only to the researcher, but also to the teaching staff and especially to the students at TNCET in learning reading skills Besides, the study will make a great contribution to improve the quality of teaching and learning English at

TNCET Further more, it will offer the theoretical basis for the application of reading techniques in classroom.

Scope of the Thesis

In teaching and learning a language as an ESL/EFL, there are many factors that influence the learners‟ success or failure A part from reading, there are also other main skills in language learning including speaking, listening, and writing However, due to the limited scope of a minor thesis, this study only focuses on the investigation of reading comprehension needs of students at TNCET in the process of teaching methods innovation, the limitation and difficulties of their reading activity, and the application of reading strategies in classrooms.

Research Methods used in the Thesis

To achieve the aims mentioned above, the author would like to employ tests and survey questionnaires to investigate how efficiently the reading strategies are used and analyze them through data collection instruments.

Design of the Thesis

There are three main parts in this thesis: introduction, development, and conclusion

The introduction provides the rationale, the aims, the significance, the scope, the methods, and the design of the thesis

The development consists of three chapters:

Chapter 1 presents a review of literature including definitions of reading comprehension reading strategies It discusses the three reading strategies: cognitive, metacognitive, and social/affective strategies; the importance of strategies in learning process; and strategies in teaching SL reading comprehension

Chapter 2 focuses on the methodology employed in this thesis including research questions, participants and instruments The instruments consist of tests and classroom observation

Chapter 3 reports the results of tests and classroom observation This chapter discusses in the three strategies

The conclusion provides a brief summary of main parts being present in the study, the conclusions drawn out and the limitations of the study It also suggests directions for further study.

DEVELOPMENT

This chapter reviews theories related to reading, reading comprehension, and reading strategies All of these serve as a basis for the aim of the thesis which is to use reading strategies to improve reading comprehension skills of students at TNCET

The act of reading is not easily understood and described In the most general terms we may say that reading involves the reader, the text, and the interaction between reader and the text (Rumelhart 1977)

The process of reading has been intensively studied, and there have been many different approaches to it, and the term „reading‟ has been given many interpretations

Mitchell has a basic definition of reading:

Reading can be defined loosely as the ability to make sense of written or printed symbols The reader uses the symbols to guide the recovery of information from his or her memory and subsequently uses this information to construct a plausible interpretation of the writer’s message

Goodman (1971:35) defines reading as a psycholinguistic process by which the reader, a language user, reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display

Simply and clearly, Eddie Williams (1984: 2) defines reading as “a process whereby one looks at and understands what has been written” This definition of reading does not mean that a reader needs to understand everything in text Reading can be a struggle after understanding, especially where language learners are concerned He emphasizes that part of the teacher‟s job is therefore to develop within the learner strategies that will help them in this struggle

From the ideas above, we can come to the conclusion that reading is a complex process which involves a triangular interaction between the reader, the writer and the text Reading is also an interaction between purpose and manner of reading, and it is an interaction through reading strategies (J.A Aebersold and M.L Field, 1997)

Literature Review

This chapter reviews theories related to reading, reading comprehension, and reading strategies All of these serve as a basis for the aim of the thesis which is to use reading strategies to improve reading comprehension skills of students at TNCET

The act of reading is not easily understood and described In the most general terms we may say that reading involves the reader, the text, and the interaction between reader and the text (Rumelhart 1977)

The process of reading has been intensively studied, and there have been many different approaches to it, and the term „reading‟ has been given many interpretations

Mitchell has a basic definition of reading:

Reading can be defined loosely as the ability to make sense of written or printed symbols The reader uses the symbols to guide the recovery of information from his or her memory and subsequently uses this information to construct a plausible interpretation of the writer’s message

Goodman (1971:35) defines reading as a psycholinguistic process by which the reader, a language user, reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display

Simply and clearly, Eddie Williams (1984: 2) defines reading as “a process whereby one looks at and understands what has been written” This definition of reading does not mean that a reader needs to understand everything in text Reading can be a struggle after understanding, especially where language learners are concerned He emphasizes that part of the teacher‟s job is therefore to develop within the learner strategies that will help them in this struggle

From the ideas above, we can come to the conclusion that reading is a complex process which involves a triangular interaction between the reader, the writer and the text Reading is also an interaction between purpose and manner of reading, and it is an interaction through reading strategies (J.A Aebersold and M.L Field, 1997)

Reading comprehension plays a very important part in teaching and learning reading a foreign language It is the ability to obtain the information as required in the reading lessons as efficiently as possible Thus, three elements – reading text, background knowledge of the reader, and the contextual aspects relevant for the interpretation of the text – are involved in the reading process

Research on ESL/EFL reading comprehension, there are some definitions of reading comprehension from researchers

Richard and Thomas, (1987:9), state: “Reading comprehension is best described as an understanding between the author and the reader”

A student is good at comprehension we mean that he can read accurately and efficiently so as to get the maximum information of a text with the minimum of understanding

In line with Swam, Grellet, (1981:3) accepts that

Reading comprehension or understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it as effectively as possible

The definitions of reading comprehension above are general ones In order to understand more about reading comprehension, it is necessary to take a closer look at actual process that really takes place in the reader‟s mind So far, several models of reading have been proposed to describe this process The next section is going to present these models of reading and their strengths and weaknesses

In looking for ways to describe the interaction between the reader and the text, researchers have created models that describe what happens when people read According to the researchers, there are three main models of how reading occurs

With the bottom-up model, reading was viewed as “the process of meaning interpretation” in which “the language is translated from one form of symbolic representation to another”

According to Carven, bottom-up model describes reading as being a linear process from graphic symbols to meaning responses, and the readers check words individually, and sound them out phonetically With this type of reading, the readers passively perceive input which progresses from the lowest level of reading – the interpretation of symbols – to the higher levels such as the assigning of meaning

According to Gough (1972), reading should be bottom-up He believes readers should follow five stages: eye fixation, absorption of the visual stimulus, letter identification, phonological representation, and understanding of words serially from left to right

Gough specifically assumes that the reader is not a guesser However, many researchers have shown his bottom-up explanations are not adequate

Rumelhart (1977a) showed that bottom-up models fail to allow for the fact that the comprehension of letters, words, and sentences are all affected by higher level processing

In most cases, higher level processes are not suitable to lower level input It is clear that the process of reading can not be a simple linear progression from lower processes upwards

Having the same opinion with Rumelhart, Samuel and Kamil (1988: 31) pointed out the shortcomings of these models as follows:

Because of the lack of feedback loops in the early bottom-up models, it was difficult to account for sentence – context effects and the role of prior knowledge of text topic as facilitating variables in word recognition and comprehension

Due to this limitation, the bottom-up model of reading fell into disfavor

In this model, reading has been seen as the process in which reader moves from the top, the higher level of mental stages down to the text itself This theory focuses on the reconstruction of meaning rather than the decoding of form, the interaction between the reader and the text than the graphic forms or printed pages

Top-down theory argues that readers bring a great deal of knowledge, expectations, assumptions, and questions to the text and, given a basic understanding of vocabulary, they continue to read as long as the text confirms their expectations (Goodman, 1967)

Goodman also suggests that reading is driven by hypotheses – the readers follow a cyclical procedure of sampling the text, predicting what will come next, testing predictions, and adjusting of confirming them (Goodman, 1975)

Research Methodology

The previous chapter has presented a literature review on theory of reading comprehension, learning strategies in general and reading strategies in particular It has also provided a theoretical background for the present study This chapter presents the methodology and analysis of the study

This study seeks to answer the following research questions:

1 What are effective reading strategies that help students improve their ability of reading comprehension in English at TNCET?

2 How efficiently the reading strategies are used in reading classes?

II.2.2 Participants and setting of the study

The participants in this study are 30 first-year non-English majors specializing in

Economics and Business Management at TNCET Of them there are twenty-two females and eight males, who mostly come from the countryside and mountainous area Only two students are twenty years old and the other twenty-eight students are nineteen years old

All of them spent between 3 – 10 years learning English (two students learnt English for 3 years, twenty-one students learnt English for 7 years, and seven students left learnt English for 10 years) Their English proficiency levels were generally reported to be at pre- intermediate Table 2.1 summarizes the background information about the participants such as the genders, ages, number of years learning English and their self-assessed proficiency

Number of years learning English

Table 2.1.Background information about the participants

These students belong to the Department of Economics and Business Management They had high scores in the entrance exam to college, which means they are excellent in for these students, lasts from the first year to the third year of training at the college The course includes the GE (General English) course, which is delivered in two terms of the first year and the ESP course (English for Economics) delivered in the third year

Therefore, for these students, English is not a minor subject but plays an important role in their study at the college

There are some reasons for choosing the first-year Economics and Business Management students as the participants of this study The first is that the training quality of these students is always of great concern to both college administrators and teachers at TNCET

The findings of this study would provide essential information for teachers of English to help students improve their reading comprehension in particular and contribute to the overall training quality of these students in general Especially, it also makes a great contribution on the present process of teaching methods innovation at TNCET Secondly, the first-year Economics and Business Management students are suitable participants for the study because they had the higher entrance exam scores than the remaining students at TNCET and they are considered to have quite good reading abilities Last but not least, these students are the ones who I have been directly teaching and I understand their strengths and weaknesses, I will have favorable conditions to carry out all the steps of the study process

II.2.2.2 Settings of the study

This study was conducted from early February to mid May 2010 when the students were in the second term of the first year Up to the time of the study, they had been studying English at the college for more than half a year with 150 periods They had finished learning a series of units in New Headway – Elementary by Liz and John Soars and some other materials adapted to suit their proficiency levels such as Inside Out – Elementary by Sue Kay & Vaughan Jones, and Know How 1 by Angela Blackwell & Therese Naber At this time of the study, they were learning the last units in New Headway – Elementary by Liz and John Soars All of the textbooks and materials aimed at providing the students with basic knowledge of English and skills which serves as a foundation for the ESP course to be delivered in the third year

The present study includes tests and questionnaires to collect data on the reading strategies employed by the first-year Economics and Business Management students Firstly, the reading comprehension tests were given to the students in order to identify their reading proficiency before and after introducing reading strategies Then, the questionnaires were administered to identify their reading strategies and examine how efficiently the reading strategies were used in reading comprehension tasks

The reason why I chose tests and questionnaires to collect data is that different types of instruments may lead to the conclusions about reading strategies employed to improve the students‟ reading comprehension This combination of instruments would provide comprehensive overview of reading strategies used by my students Following is a detailed description of the given research instruments

A test is a procedure used to collect data on subjects‟ ability or knowledge of certain disciplines In a second language acquisition research, tests are usually used to collect data about the subjects‟ ability in and knowledge of the second language in areas such as vocabulary, grammar, reading, metalinguistic awareness and general proficiency In this study, two reading comprehension tests were given to the first year Economics and

Business and Management students in two months The first reading comprehension test was given to the students to investigate their reading strategies and the second one was given after equipping them the reading strategies The reason for using tests and test scores as a main data collection instrument for my study was that the investigation and the equipment of the reading strategies among the students was very important to the success of the study and the only way to do it was by using tests and test scores

As the tests and the test scores play such an important part in this study, I had to choose good reading comprehension tests that can help me identify the reading strategies appropriate for my students When deciding the tests for my students, I had to take into consideration their reading abilities At the time of the study, their English proficiency was at the pre-intermediate level Thus the reading comprehension tests chosen for them should be suitable for this proficiency level

The two reading comprehension tests were taken from Insights for Today by Lorraine C

Smith and Nancy Nici Mare (1993) The two reading tests are included in Appendix 2 The reason for selecting them as the reading tests for my study is that all of these can be regarded as standardized tests They are high-beginning reading skill texts and they are developed by experts and therefore considered to be well constructed However, I have made some replacement and substitution from the book in order to satisfy the study‟s aims

The two reading comprehension tests used in this study have the same form Each reading comprehension test consists of a pre-reading preparation, a reading text, and twelve questions in the three tasks of Main Ideas and Fact-Finding Exercise, Reading Analysis, and Information Recall The three tasks represent for metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies respectively The first task includes three questions (From question 1 to question 3) representing for planning, monitoring, and evaluation strategies

The second one consists of eight questions (from question 4 to question 11) including repetition, grouping, deduction, imagery, elaboration, transfer, inferencing, and summarizing strategies respectively The last task, question 12 refers cooperation strategy

Data Analysis and Discussion

The previous chapter presented the methodology used for the study including the participants, data collection instruments, and data collection procedures By using such instruments as tests and questionnaires, the researcher collected three sets of data on the participants‟ reading strategies In this chapter, results of the two tests and questionnaires are analyzed and discussed respectively

As mentioned in chapter 2, in this study two reading comprehension tests were given to the first year Economics and Business and Management students The first reading comprehension test was given to the students to investigate their reading strategies and the second one was given after the reading strategies had been introduced to them The following parts present the results of the two tests in terms of metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies

Metacognitive strategies with planning, monitoring, and evaluation strategies were designed in the first tasks of the two reading comprehension tests (from question1 to question 3) Bar chart 3.1 presents the percentage of the students who gave correct answers

Chart 3.1.Test Results – Metacognitive Strategies

The data presented in chart 3.1 revealed that students‟ metacognitive strategies used in reading comprehension were generally not very good in the first test As for planning, there were 63.3% of the students who did the correct answers As regards to monitoring, nearly

70.0% of them were correct Particularly, only 43.3% of them gave correct answers in question 3 regarding evaluation strategy After they were guided and practiced these reading strategies with teacher‟s guidance, their results increased significantly in Test 2

For planning, more than four fifth of the students (83.3%) did correct answers Nearly 90.0% of them gave well-done answers for monitoring and for evaluation, the percentage of the students who gave correct answers increased remarkablly from 43.3% to nearly 73.3% The data show that their reading strategies were improved with the teachers‟ help and guidance

Results from the students‟ tests about cognitive strategies are shown in bar chart 3.2 below

Repitition Grouping Deduction Imagery Eleboration Transfer Inferencing Sumarizing

Chart 3.2.Test Results – Cognitive Strategies

Chart 3.2 clearly demonstrated the two test results from the participants In comparison with metacognitive strategies, their cognitive strategies were much worse in Test 1 The cognitive reading strategies with the highest percentage of the students who gave correct answers were summarizing and inferencing (66.7%, and 75.0%) As for repetition strategy, only more than half of them were correct For imagery and transfer strategies, nearly 60.0% of them gave correct answers The cognitive strategies with the lowest percentage of the participants who gave correct answers were grouping (36.7%), elaboration (36.7%), and deduction (41.7%)

However, their cognitive strategies were gradually advanced as represented in Test 2 As shown above, the numbers of the students who did correct answers for repetition strategy increased incredibly from 51.7% to 90.0% Having the same percentage of the students who gave correct answers with repetition, elaboration strategy increased by 40.0% (from

36.7% to 76.7%) As regards to grouping strategy, 60.0% of them gave the correct answers instead of 36.7% in Test 1 On the other hand, the percentage of deduction strategy also increased rather higher than the other strategies accounting for 35.0% (from 40.0% to

76.7%) The percentage of the remaining cognitive strategies such as imagery, transfer, and inferencing slightly increased

Social/affective strategies are now believed to be very important to students in the present process of teaching methods innovation As already mentioned in the previous section, cooperation strategy was utilized in this study The following chart will present the percentage of the participants who did correct answers for this strategy in the two tests

Chart 3.3.Test Results – Social/Affective Strategies

Bar chart 3.3 clearly reveals the students‟ cooperation strategy in test 1 and test 2 More than half of them (53.3%) gave the correct answers in Test 1 It was found that they did not know how to work together effectively to solve the questions However, their cooperation strategy improved significantly with the teacher‟s specific guidance The percentage of the students who gave correct answers increased from53.3% to 86.7%, over 30.0% increase in percentage as compared to Test 1

The questionnaire that was administered to 30 readers included 16 questions, of which, the first three questions asked about students‟ personal opinions on the importance of reading comprehension, their evaluation on their own reading speeds, and their ideas of some factors affecting reading comprehension The remaining 13 questions examine the reading strategies that they used while reading

II.3.2.1 Readers’ attitudes to reading comprehension

Question 1 asks the participants how important reading comprehension is to their purpose of English learning

Chart 3.4 presents the percentage of the students‟ answers to the first question

Not important at all Not important

A little important Important Very important

The data in chart 3.4 indicates that all of the students appreciated the importance of reading comprehension to their learning English purpose The majority of them (86.7%) thought reading comprehension was very important There was a small percentage of them (13.3%) thought reading comprehension was important to their purpose while none of them (0%) thought it was not important to their purpose of English learning

Question 2 asks the students to evaluate their reading speeds

Chart 3.5 shows the participants‟ answers to the second questions

Very slow Slow Average Fast Very fast

As shown in chart 3.5, no one evaluated their reading speed as very fast or very slow Over half of students (56.7%) evaluated to be at average level themselves Some of them

(20.0%) thought they read slowly and the remaining students (23.0%) judged their speed as fast

Question 3 asks the participants to indicate the importance of the following factors to reading comprehension

B have a good knowledge of English grammar

C have a good knowledge of the reading topic

D have effective reading strategies The results of participants‟ answers to the 3rd question will be presented in the following chart

For question 3A, as shown in the chart, 43.3% of the students assumed that having a large

English vocabulary was very important, and more than half of them (56.7%) thought this factor was important For question 3B, the same percentage of the participants (43.3%) responded that having a good knowledge of English grammar was very important 53.3% of them thought this factor was important Meanwhile, there was a small number of students (3.3%) thought it was a little important

Test Results – Metacognitive Strategies

The data presented in chart 3.1 revealed that students‟ metacognitive strategies used in reading comprehension were generally not very good in the first test As for planning, there were 63.3% of the students who did the correct answers As regards to monitoring, nearly

70.0% of them were correct Particularly, only 43.3% of them gave correct answers in question 3 regarding evaluation strategy After they were guided and practiced these reading strategies with teacher‟s guidance, their results increased significantly in Test 2

For planning, more than four fifth of the students (83.3%) did correct answers Nearly 90.0% of them gave well-done answers for monitoring and for evaluation, the percentage of the students who gave correct answers increased remarkablly from 43.3% to nearly 73.3% The data show that their reading strategies were improved with the teachers‟ help and guidance

Results from the students‟ tests about cognitive strategies are shown in bar chart 3.2 below

Repitition Grouping Deduction Imagery Eleboration Transfer Inferencing Sumarizing

Test Results – Cognitive Strategies

Chart 3.2 clearly demonstrated the two test results from the participants In comparison with metacognitive strategies, their cognitive strategies were much worse in Test 1 The cognitive reading strategies with the highest percentage of the students who gave correct answers were summarizing and inferencing (66.7%, and 75.0%) As for repetition strategy, only more than half of them were correct For imagery and transfer strategies, nearly 60.0% of them gave correct answers The cognitive strategies with the lowest percentage of the participants who gave correct answers were grouping (36.7%), elaboration (36.7%), and deduction (41.7%)

However, their cognitive strategies were gradually advanced as represented in Test 2 As shown above, the numbers of the students who did correct answers for repetition strategy increased incredibly from 51.7% to 90.0% Having the same percentage of the students who gave correct answers with repetition, elaboration strategy increased by 40.0% (from

36.7% to 76.7%) As regards to grouping strategy, 60.0% of them gave the correct answers instead of 36.7% in Test 1 On the other hand, the percentage of deduction strategy also increased rather higher than the other strategies accounting for 35.0% (from 40.0% to

76.7%) The percentage of the remaining cognitive strategies such as imagery, transfer, and inferencing slightly increased

Social/affective strategies are now believed to be very important to students in the present process of teaching methods innovation As already mentioned in the previous section, cooperation strategy was utilized in this study The following chart will present the percentage of the participants who did correct answers for this strategy in the two tests

Test Results –Social/Affective Strategies

Bar chart 3.3 clearly reveals the students‟ cooperation strategy in test 1 and test 2 More than half of them (53.3%) gave the correct answers in Test 1 It was found that they did not know how to work together effectively to solve the questions However, their cooperation strategy improved significantly with the teacher‟s specific guidance The percentage of the students who gave correct answers increased from53.3% to 86.7%, over 30.0% increase in percentage as compared to Test 1

The questionnaire that was administered to 30 readers included 16 questions, of which, the first three questions asked about students‟ personal opinions on the importance of reading comprehension, their evaluation on their own reading speeds, and their ideas of some factors affecting reading comprehension The remaining 13 questions examine the reading strategies that they used while reading

II.3.2.1 Readers’ attitudes to reading comprehension

Question 1 asks the participants how important reading comprehension is to their purpose of English learning

Chart 3.4 presents the percentage of the students‟ answers to the first question

Not important at all Not important

A little importantImportantVery important

Questionnaire Results: Question 1

The data in chart 3.4 indicates that all of the students appreciated the importance of reading comprehension to their learning English purpose The majority of them (86.7%) thought reading comprehension was very important There was a small percentage of them (13.3%) thought reading comprehension was important to their purpose while none of them (0%) thought it was not important to their purpose of English learning

Question 2 asks the students to evaluate their reading speeds

Chart 3.5 shows the participants‟ answers to the second questions

Very slow Slow Average Fast Very fast

As shown in chart 3.5, no one evaluated their reading speed as very fast or very slow Over half of students (56.7%) evaluated to be at average level themselves Some of them

(20.0%) thought they read slowly and the remaining students (23.0%) judged their speed as fast

Question 3 asks the participants to indicate the importance of the following factors to reading comprehension

B have a good knowledge of English grammar

C have a good knowledge of the reading topic

D have effective reading strategies The results of participants‟ answers to the 3rd question will be presented in the following chart

For question 3A, as shown in the chart, 43.3% of the students assumed that having a large

English vocabulary was very important, and more than half of them (56.7%) thought this factor was important For question 3B, the same percentage of the participants (43.3%) responded that having a good knowledge of English grammar was very important 53.3% of them thought this factor was important Meanwhile, there was a small number of students (3.3%) thought it was a little important

As for question 3C, there were 20.0% and 53.3% of them responded that having a good knowledge of the reading topic was very important and important respectively A small number of the students accounting for 26.7% thought this factor was a little important

Particularly, as regards to question 3D, all of the interviewees appreciated the importance of reading strategies on reading comprehension

The next 13 questions asked students about their reading strategies The strategies were classified into metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies on the basis of O‟Malley and Chamot‟s framework (1990) As already mentioned in the previous section, the following analysis utilized this framework and the two reading tests‟ form in order to clarify the effectiveness of the reading strategies employed by the participants

The first part deals with the questionnaire results of the participants‟ metacognitive strategies As discussed before, the metacognitive reading strategies were categorized into three subtypes including planning, monitoring, and evaluation and there were four questions for these subtypes coded in items 4, 5, 6, and 7

Chart 3.7 presents the percentage of responses given by the participants

Chart 3.7 Questionnaire Results: Metacognitive Strategies

As shown above, most students employed the three given metacognitive strategies while reading

For planning, coded in item 4 and item 5, 86.7% of the students previewed the headings and illustrations to get the main idea of the text before reading In addition, 90.0% of them skimmed through the text to understand the main ideas before focusing on details The second strategy, monitoring, coded in item 6 had the same percentage of the students who practiced this strategy in comparison with item 5 There were 90.0% of them checking their comprehension or checking the accuracy of the written production during reading

The third strategy, as the result shows, 86.7% of them checked their answers after reading

The second part shows the questionnaire results of the cognitive reading strategies performed by the participants There were 8 subtypes including repetition, grouping, deduction, imagery, elaboration, transfer, inferencing, and summarizing coded from item 8 to item 15 respectively The students‟ responses will be demonstrated in the following chart

Item 8 Item 9 Item 10 Item 11 Item 12 Item 13 Item 14 Item 15

Chart 3.8 Questionnaire Results: Cognitive Strategies

The results in chart 3.8 show some differences and similarities among the responses given by the participants

For repetition, 70.0% of them performed this strategy by focusing on a new sentence pattern and putting it in their knowledge For grouping, 80.0% of them could recognize some words that had the same group of meaning while reading Nearly all of the students accounting for 90.0% performed deduction strategy For imagery strategy, 23.0% of the students did not use their own visual images to understand or remember a new word, or information while reading

There was the same percentage of the students who practiced elaboration and transfer strategies accounting for 86.7% For the strategies of inferencing and summarizing, there were 83.3% of them using these strategies They could guess meaning of new words using the available information and mentally summarize the main ideas of the texts after reading

The last type of reading strategies to be discussed is social/affective strategy As mentioned earlier, only one strategy namely cooperation is discussed in this part Chart 3.9 illustrates the questionnaire results of cooperation strategy

Chart 3.9 Questionnaire Results: Social/Affective Strategies

As indicated in chart 3.9, 90.0% of the participants worked together with their classmates to solve the questions in the reading texts The statistical figure clearly revealed the importance of this reading strategy to the students

Based on the results of the study, some issues regarding the students‟ attitudes to reading comprehension and reading strategies will be discussed below

Firstly, the results from questionnaires gave an interesting point that is almost all students confirmed the importance of reading comprehension in their learning English language

When being asked to give opinions about factors affecting their reading comprehension, nearly all of the students confirmed the importance of having effective reading strategies

Secondly, as presented earlier, the students‟ reading strategies will be discussed in terms of the three types of reading strategies including metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies

Regarding the metacognitive strategies including planning, monitoring, and evaluation in the two reading tests and the questionnaires, the results proved that the students could practice and acquire these reading strategies effectively The results of Test 1 showed that their metacognitive reading strategies were not very good at first, especially for the evaluation strategy for many of them did incorrect answers However, after over two months for absorbing and practicing the given strategies, there was a significant progress in

Test 2 The results in the questionnaires also proved that fact in these reading strategies In order to introduce these strategies to the students, the researcher designed some reading texts with the questions regarding the strategies One of the reading texts was implemented in a classroom for a period of 60 minutes The researcher guided the students these strategies and helped them answer the reading comprehension questions Other reading texts were given to students to practice at home

Concerning the cognitive strategies including repetition, grouping, deduction, imagery, elaboration, transfer, inferencing, and summarizing, the effectiveness of applying these reading strategies was also shown in the data analysis of tests and questionnaires The results in Test 1 revealed that the students‟ cognitive reading strategies were worse than their metacognitive reading strategies Nevertheless, their cognitive reading strategies results increased in Test 2 Some of their cognitive reading strategies improved with high results, such as repetition and elaboration However, according to the data collected, the strategies of transfer and imagery did not improve much though the students responded in the questionnaires that they had practiced them carefully This is perhaps due to some possible reasons that can be listed below The first is that the students had some limitations in their reading comprehension competence They were lack of effective reading skills for years Another possibility is that most of them came from the countryside and mountainous areas They might not have many opportunities to practice English language and there were not many English materials for them