Luận văn thạc sĩ VNU ULIS THE EFFECTS OF USING AUTHENTIC MATERIALS ON STUDENTS READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT AT LE HOAN HIGH SCHOOL

Rationale

The study is based on the current situation of teaching and learning English reading skill of students at Le Hoan High School Having been working as an English teacher at Le Hoan High School for 5 years, the writer realizes an issue that utilizing only reading materials in the course books is not enough to help students improve their reading skill They find it difficult to learn vocabulary as well as the structures in these texts because of their unfamiliarity in real life Therefore, they have low motivation in learning reading and their reading comprehension cannot ameliorate over a long time This fact has been shown clearly in the results of entrance examinations at high school in the recent years since the form and structure of English test was changed Most of students at Le Hoan High School can not do the reading section well whereas this section takes account for approximately 50 percentages of the total scores Therefore the proportion of the students who get high mark in the exams at Le Hoan High School is very low And the only way to increase the number of high marks is improving students’ reading comprehension competence Although the English teachers at Le Hoan School have tried their best to encourage their students to learn reading skill and improve their achievement by using different positive teaching techniques, it seems not to bring about much effectiveness

Moreover, reading skill is one of the most important skills to each of students during their foreign language learning procedure To feature the importance of reading comprehension, Rivers (1981:147 ) asserted that “

Reading is the most important activity in any language class, not only as a source of information and a pleasurable activity, but also as a means of consolidating and extending one's which are knowledge of the language” In spite of its critical role, reading skill remains a challenge to students

Taglieber (1988) has indicated three major problems that interfere with students’ reading comprehension: (1) _ Lack of vocabulary (2) _ Difficulty in using language cues to meaning (3) _ Lack of conceptual knowledge

That is the reason why the question how to teach reading skill for students to get the best result is always controversial among the educators It has been said that suitable teaching materials play an important role in motivating students during their learning procedure and help them have certain amount of background knowledge about different topics which they can meet in different reading texts As a result, it can limit the problems that prevent the students from mastering reading skill well Implementing authentic materials in teaching reading skill has taken the concern of many teachers all over the world There has been a lot of research debating about this problem since the 1970s; however most of the findings can not be assured to be true to all learners Some of the previous studies carried out by Soliman (2013); Akbari

&Razavi (2016); Pandian (2011); Le Thi Huong Giang (2015); Vu Mai Duyen (2015) mention using authentic materials in teaching and learning a foreign language, they all confirmed that this type of teaching materials brought about positive effects Nevertheless the subjects of all these studies are college students; the findings needed checking again with the lower-level subjects The current research was desired to clarify the effects of authentic materials on students’ reading comprehension at Le Hoan High School It would help the writer to see whether it could have the same results as the previous research or not And the findings of the current study would be a base for the author to decide if authentic materials could be suitable teaching materials to students at Le Hoan High School

The research question and objectives of the study

When doing the study, there are a lot of issues which need finding out and making clear However, the most important one focused on the current study is investigating the effects of using authentic materials on students reading comprehension achievement at Le Hoan High School

To accomplish the objectives, the research mainly concentrated on answering the following research question: “What are the effects of using authentic materials on students’ reading comprehension achievement?”

The scope of the study

The study is a small-sized scale thesis, thus it can not cover all the issues related to the problem discussed The paper mainly focuses on the effects of using authentic materials on students reading comprehension achievement at

Le Hoan High School, Thanh Liem district, Ha Nam province The subjects in the study are 60 students of 10 th grade at Le Hoan High School They are randomly chosen and divided into two groups, one experimental group and one control group

An important point of the study needs emphasizing that authentic materials provided to experimental group is only used as a supplementary materials besides the reading materials taken out from the course book and the reading activities in class.

Significance of the study

The result of the study will be a foundation to help the English teachers especially the English teachers at Le Hoan High School who are looking for a new method in teaching reading skill to their students It supplies not only a large amount of valuable information about applying authentic materials but also some suggestions for the teachers in selecting suitable authentic materials.

Methods of the study

In order to determine the effects of authentic materials on students reading comprehension achievement, the researcher utilizes quasi- experimental with sixty 10 th grade students at Le Hoan High School The pretest and posttest are conducted at the beginning and the end of the research period The data collected is analyzed with SPSS.

Design of the study

PART A: Introduction provides the rationale, the scope, the research questions and objectives; the significance and the design of the study

PART B: Development, discusses the following contents of the study:

Chapter 1: Literature Review, discusses the literature relating reading skill; reading comprehension; authenticity and authentic materials as well as the use of authentic materials in teaching English reading skill

Chapter 2: Methodology, defines the methodology of the research including features of the participants, settings, research methods, data collection and data analysis procedure

Chapter 3: Results, presents and discusses the findings from the data collected

PART C: Conclusion, summarizes significant findings, highlights contributions of the research, addresses notable limitations, and puts forward practical suggestions for future research.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Theoretical background

The study focuses on studying the effects of using authentic materials on students reading comprehension achievement Therefore, in the writing there are some terms used frequently as the key words such as authentic materials, reading comprehension and reading comprehension achievement

There are a lot of different definitions of reading activity Although every linguistic gives out the definitions by their own words, most of them share the same idea that reading is a crucial skill in learning procedure and it is considered as an integral skill to help students to gain information and expand their background knowledge When reading, the readers can not just focus on the meaning of individual word; the most importance of reading is that they must use the knowledge of linguistics to find out the meaning hidden behind the printed text To support the idea Weir (1993) states that reading is seen as a selective process taking place between the reader and text, in which background knowledge and various types of language knowledge interact with information in the text to contribute text comprehension Another definition stated by Cooper et al (1988) is that reading, as one of the language skills to be taught, is a process of constructing or developing meaning of printed text In addition, Grabe and Stoller (2002) suppose that reading is the ability of drawing meaning and interpreting information in the printed page appropriate According to Williams (1989), reading is a process of looking at and understanding what has been written Similarly, Goodman (2009) contends that reading is an essential interaction between language and thought in which the writer encodes his thoughts as language and the reader decodes the language into thought Haris and Sipay (1980) considers, reading - (comprehending) as a result of interaction between the perception of graphic symbols that represent language and the readers’ language skill and knowledge of the world

In short, the term reading can be defined in many different ways with a certain difference in the opinion of the linguists However, most of them agree that a successful reading process must draw out the message behind the words used by the writer Thus, reading is an interaction between the readers and the writers

From the definitions of reading activity, the linguists also discuss reading comprehension According to Rubin (1993) reading comprehension is a complex intellectual process involving a number of abilities It means that reading comprehension is not simple; it asks the readers to use the different abilities to overcome the difficulties in finding unstated clues and implied meaning For this reason, each reader may have a different level of reading comprehension The factors such as age, motivation, awareness, and life experience or background knowledge can affect the outcome of reading comprehension Sharing the same idea with Rubin, Johnson et al., (2004) say that reading comprehension is an active process, directed by intentional thinking that allows young readers to make connections between their thinking processes, the textual content, and their own knowledge, expectations, and purposes for reading The students’ comprehension ability will guide them to understand the text, they will get the information, whether the information is clearly stated or implicitly stated

In a nutshell, reading comprehension is the ability of the readers in understanding the meaning of a text By gathering the information stated in the text with their background knowledge and some sub-reading skills, the students can draw out the implied message As stated by Suparman (2012) the sub-reading skills that a reader should master to deeply understand the text; for instance, identifying main idea, identifying details, understanding vocabulary, making inference and making reference are really important to students’ improvement

After finishing a reading course, reading comprehension achievement of students is what a teacher expects most To know whether or not the students make progress, an achievement test may be conducted As Grellet

(1996) says reading comprehension achievement can be defined as the successful result of students’ comprehension in guessing, predicting, and understanding the written text by doing such an achievement test The test is a tool to assess learning procedure of learners Therefore, reading comprehension achievement is expected to be good to fulfill individual improvement in academic performance

In addition, another linguist Mc Whorter (1989) supposes that reading comprehension achievement covers some aspects such as word comprehension, sentence comprehension, paragraph comprehension and text comprehension

As appreciated by many scholars, an individual may comprehend a text fully when he can:

1 Recognize the words and sentences of the text and know what these words and sentences mean (obtain literal meaning)

2 Associated meanings, both denotative and connotative from personal experiences with the printed text (obtain inferential meaning)

3 Recognize how all these meanings and/or his perceptions of them fit together contextually

4 Make value judgments about, and based on the reading experience (read critically)

It means that a good achievement test must inspect students’ comprehension about all aspects above

1.1.4 Types of reading comprehension question

There are a number of reading comprehension question types that the test takers often have to deal with in the reading section To overcome these types of questions well, the examinees need to recognize the question types quickly, and understand the aim of the questions as well as the common traits of correct and incorrect answers According to Peterson’s (2000) and the forms of the questions often appearing in the test, the test takers often meet the main types of questions as follows

The main idea question requests the test taker to make out what the passage or the paragraph is discussing about It is often found in the topic sentence which is at the beginning or at the ending of the passage It includes a topic and a something about the topic Thus, the test taker must be able to identify the thesis of the passage and those ideas that support this thesis

Supporting idea question, in fact, is the question about the specific information stated in the passage It often begins with “according to the passage” or “the passage states that” The answer to the question is contained in two or three sentences If the test taker has a better ability to find a specific piece of information, he will be able to find the answer more easily

Inference question is said to be one of the most difficult questions in the reading section because it does not ask directly stated information in the passage Actually, the candidates must make conclusion based on the directly stated information Most these questions are often prefaced by "the passage implies" or "the author implies", where "suggests" is sometimes substituted

The tone question is the one which refers to the predominant emotion or absence of it displayed by the author Answering this type of question is that the examinee must specify the attitude of the author toward the subject or the character in the passage Naturally, the tone can be classified as subjective or objective If the author has an objective attitude, he will not choose any side

On the contrary, his attitude will be subjective

Passage structure is the way the author arranges the supporting ideas in the paragraph Any arrangement of the ideas also reflects the author’s purpose when writing the paragraph Thus, the key to this type of question is the relationship between the ideas with the passage Only when the test takers understand this, they can find out the logical order

Reference question is considered one of the easiest question types It requires the examinees to determine what a noun, a noun phrase, a pronoun or an expression refers to Normally, it is used to replace another noun preceding it; however, the answer is not always the noun or the expression which is closest to it

Vocabulary-in-context question is the one that asks the candidate to make out the suitable meaning of a specific word in the passage based on the context A single word may have more than a meaning, but only the most suitable one can be used in the paragraph

1.2 Overview on authentic materials 1.2.1 Definition of authentic materials

Literature review

As mentioned above, authentic material has been the subject of a lot of science research The authors of these studies tried to investigate its effects on foreign language acquisition of students Most of the findings of these investigations demonstrated the advantages of authentic material in language lessons Students’ results were also improved after working with this teaching material not only with reading skill but also with other language skills such as speaking, listening and writing In a research carried by Soliman (2013), he said that the learners get not only many significant advantages from using authentic materials but also higher level of motivation as well as interest in language learning

Khoirul Farari Marwan (2013) conducted a research to check the improvement of students’ English reading comprehension through authentic materials To achieve the aim of the study, he used an action research The study only focused on a particular problem and a particular group of students in a certain classroom It means that before implementing the research, the researcher needs to identify any problems really found in the classroom

There are some steps in the research including reconnaissance, planning, implementing and observing, and reflecting In the first step, problems were determined by conducting observations and interviews The researcher collected data through observing teaching-learning process and interviewing

32 the students as participants The author also had discussions and interviews with the English teachers Besides, the data were collected from scores of reading tests, field notes and interview transcript After analyzing the data, the results gained showed that students’ reading comprehension was improved remarkably The students were also interested in reading and doing exercises with authentic materials because of the familiar number of words which they could meet in real life In conclusion, applying authentic material in teaching English reading skill could help students perform better in their reading tests

Another research carried out by Siao-cing Guo (2012) tried to investigate the effects of extensive reading using authentic materials on students’ English proficiency particularly with regard to vocabulary and grammar

In the study, fifty fourth-year students from two intact classes at a five- year college in Taiwan were recruited as the participants These two classes were randomly assigned to be an experimental group and a control group

Although all students in two groups received the same classroom instructions, only students in experimental group could get extensive reading as extra activities outside of classroom The supplementary materials given to experimental group was a set of 10 online reading materials related to the course topics during three months To check whether students of two groups were at similar level, the teacher let them take a pre-test After three months of studying the participants took a post-test The test results collected were analyzed using SPSS to find out the relationship between extensive reading through authentic materials and vocabulary and grammar The findings demonstrated that extensive reading through authentic materials improved students’ vocabulary but not grammar In addition, the study also confirmed positive attitudes of students and teachers toward this type of teaching materials

A part from these two particular studies, some others in Vietnam conducted by Tran (2010), Nguyen (2009) pointed out the improvement of students on reading and listening skill after authentic materials were applied into foreign language classes

In conclusion, there are thousands of earlier studies investigating the effects of authentic materials on students’ language acquisition Most of the findings showed positive effects It not only has great influence on a particular language skill but also on most aspects of student’s learning

However, this effectiveness has been proved mainly on students in Foreign Language Major or college students Applying authentic materials has been strongly debated because of its complexity in vocabulary and structures especially for lower-level students For above reasons, it is recommended that using authentic materials as extra reading activities to teach reading skill to tenth grade students at Le Hoan High School who often get the slowest range of marks in the entrance examination should be conducted.

METHODOLOGY

Methodology

The study was conducted with quasi-experimental method in order to know whether or not applying authentic materials can improve students’ reading comprehension at Le Hoan High School

Quasi-experimental research is the method which the researcher uses to evaluate the impact of an intervention on its target population but that do not use randomization It means that every subject does not have an equal chance of being assigned to experimental or control group of study subjects on a random basis

Quasi-experimental designs are generally used to establish the causality (effects of independent variable on dependent variable) in situations where researchers are not able to randomly assign the subjects to groups or for various reasons no control group is for an experimental study.

Research design

The current study was a quasi-experimental research conducted on 60 tenth-grade students at Le Hoan High School Because of being a quasi- experimental research, there was no random assignment to the subjects in the study Two variables included in the research were the use of authentic materials in teaching reading skill as the independent variable and the students’ reading comprehension achievement as the dependent variable

The aim of the study was to assess the effects of the independent on the dependent variable In other words, the study tried to find out the influence of authentic materials on students’ reading comprehension achievement

The participants were divided into two groups, one was the experimental group and the other was the control group Both groups received the same classroom instructions, the same teaching techniques in the morning obligatory lessons For learning activities carried in the study, the experimental group was given extra authentic texts as special treatment outside of classroom while the control group just did supplementary exercises for the reading lesson in course book The pre-test and post-test were carried out to both of groups The pre-test was to determine the reading ability of the two groups before applying authentic materials into teaching and the post-test was to check the effects of the treatment The data collected were analyzed with SPSS The mean score was compared at 0.05 level of significance to determine the effects of treatment or the effects of authentic materials

2.1 The subjects of the study

The subjects of the research were 60 tenth-grade students at Le Hoan High School Of these students, 30 students were assigned to the experimental group and the rest were to the control group All these 60 participants were the students who had studied in Grade 10 at Le Hoan High School for 5 months At Le Hoan High School the students were divided equally into classes in order to make sure that there is no big difference in students’ competence among classes It can be said that the students’ level was rather similar Moreover most of the students live in the villages near the school so they share a lot of common things in motivation, culture and living conditions

The teaching materials used as authentic reading materials to investigate its impact on students’ reading comprehension achievement were taken from the website www Breaking News English com The selected reading passage for each lesson has between 300 words and 450 words When selecting the reading passage, the researcher also thought of the topics of the texts, the level of difficulty as well as the types of reading questions so that they were suitable with the students’ competence and the students would feel interested in working with them In order to know which topics would take more attention of students the teacher made a survey In the survey there are some familiar topics which the students learnt in course book such as home life, culture, education, jobs, nature and sports In addition, some other unfamiliar topics like news, discoveries, fashion and foods are also listed

According to the results of the survey, most of female students like the reading texts related to fashion whereas most of male students like the topic about sports New discoveries became one of the most favourite topics to both of sexes because they quicken their curiosity Therefore, when choosing the reading texts, the teacher tried to find out the passages belonging to this topic

The sources of authentic materials that can be used in the classroom are infinite, but the most common are newspapers, magazines, TV programs, movies, songs and Internet For the authentic materials to be effective, they should not be chosen randomly There must be an aim in using them and the chosen materials should meet the objectives of the lesson Nuttal (1996) gives three main criteria when selecting authentic materials to be used in the classroom: suitability of content, exploitability and readability

 Suitability of content can be considered the most important of the three, in that the materials should interest the students, motivate the students as well as be relevant to their needs

 Exploitability means that the materials facilitate the development of language skills in order to help the students become competent and independent learners

 Readability is used to describe the combination of structural and lexical difficulty of a text, as well as refer to the amount of new vocabulary and any new grammatical forms presented It is important to assess the right linguistic level for the right students

Besides the three main criteria given, presentation also influences the effectiveness of authentic materials Whether the text appears authentic or not, depends much on how it is presented to learners The authentic presentation, by using pictures, diagrams, photographs, etc helps put the text into the context This helps learners understand not only the meaning of the text better but also how it would be exploited A more “attractive” text and interesting ways of introducing it will appeal to learners, grab learners’ attention and motivate them to get engaged in the discovery and learning process

Other factors worth taking into consideration when selecting authentic materials for the classroom can include whether the text challenges the students’ intelligence without making unreasonable linguistic demands, the language reflects written or spoken usage, the language in the text is natural or it has been distorted to include examples of particular teaching points or to draw inferences in a particular context

Above all, selecting authentic materials are supposed to make learners want to read or listen for themselves, tell themselves something they do not know as well as to introduce new and relevant ideas to them Therefore, being aware of different types of authentic materials, what these materials can offer and how to incorporate them into classrooms is very important to every language teacher When selected and used properly in the language environment, authentic materials may have many benefits for both teachers and learners

There are 8 reading texts selected to teach for students in 8 weeks

Week 1: “Women do not get enough sleep”

Week 2: “Half of world population will be short-sighted”

Week 3: “Plants can make intelligent decisions”

Week 4: “Study shows there are two divorce seasons”

Week 5: “Cats are just as clever as dogs, says study Week 6: “Astronauts' brains change shape during spaceflight”

Week 7: “Online gaming may improve school test scores”

Week 8: “Sitting may be dangerous for your health”

As mentioned above, the study was conducted in an 8-week period

Because this research was conducted outside of the school schedule so the teacher asked the principle’s permission for doing reading lessons at two groups in the afternoons In the mornings, the participants in two groups took the obligatory lessons in course book as planned in their timetable In the obligatory lessons, the teaching techniques, amount of learning time as well as any other treatments were equally applied to both groups

The attendance of students in the experimental group and control group was voluntary Once a week the students in the control group just got some more extra exercises on the same topics they had learnt in the course book to consolidate vocabulary and practice doing reading exercises Meanwhile the researcher applied authentic reading materials chosen and designed to teach reading skill for the students in the experimental group Each week the researcher delivered students in experimental group an authentic reading passage Enclosed with the reading text, there are some reading exercises including a true or false exercise, a multiple choice exercise, and a question answering A part from these, the teachers also widened the amount of students’ vocabulary with two small vocabulary exercises such as synonym matching and phrase matching The researcher believed that vocabulary played an important role in helping students to better their reading skill

During the teaching procedure, the teacher also provided them some new words in the paragraph, some tips to deal with each type of reading question appearing in the reading task After that the students were required to read the text carefully and do the tasks following When students finished the task, the teacher would ask one by one to give out their answers and explained The further comment or explanation of the teacher to the common errors of students or to the important points of the lesson would be given out after each section of reading exercise In addition to, the teacher also tried to get students’ attention to the differences between each pair of words by giving them a small activity This activity is the reading text they have read but it is modified some pairs of words which the students often get confused about their usages The students would be asked to read the text to decide which word could be used and told the whole class why they chose it This task is considered as a supplementary activity to improve students’ awareness of the language usage Thanks to that, the ability of the students’ reading comprehension can be progressive

RESULT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Result analysis

The pretest scores play an important role in a quasi-experimental research

Based on the results of two pretests, the researcher can evaluate the homogeneity of two groups before conducting the study Only when the investigator can assess homogeneity between the control group and experimental group, is the result of the research really valuable After marking the paper tests of the students, the teacher classified them into 4 groups including group of bad marks from 0 to under 5, group of average marks from 5 to under 6.5, group of fair mark from 6.5 to under 8 and group of good marks from 8 to 10

The following bar chart shows the scores of two pre-tests

As shown in the bar chart, it is clear that the pretest score of control group is slightly better than that of experimental group Whereas the good marks of control group takes account of 10 percentages, this rate of experimental group is only about 7% Both groups have the same rate of fair mark (20%) The average and bad mark percentages of pretest control are 40% and 30% in turn These rates of experimental group are 50% and 23%

Therefore, the number of students in the experimental group who got average mark is higher 10% than this number in control group The data collected also proves that at the beginning of the research the control group performs slightly better than the experimental group

Once again, to find out if there is any difference of students’ competence in two groups before the researcher applies the treatment to experimental group, the scores are analyzed by Descriptive Statistics and presented in the table below

Deviatio n Pretest control group 30 3.0 8.0 5.550 5.250 1.3793 Pretest experimental group 30 3.0 8.0 5.567 5.500

Table 1: Description of Pretest Results

The descriptive statistics table shows some values of the pretest result including minimum; maximum, mean, median and standard deviation It can be seen that both pre-tests have the same minimum and maximum marks

Besides, the mean value of two groups is around 5.5 Whereas 5.550 is the mean of control group, this figure of experimental group is 5.567 The difference of median values shown in the table is also rather small, just about 0.250 Standard deviation of control group pretest is 1.3793 and this figure of experimental group is 1.2981 Although these deviation values are not similar, they are acceptable because both groups have the same number of students; this violation has little effect on students’ results

In a nutshell, with the data presented in the bar chart and the table, it can be concluded that the performances of the two groups in the pretest are quite similar In other words, the difference in their performance is not considerable

As mentioned above, the post-test score is the output result It is used to prove the effect of using authentic materials in teaching reading skill to students After applying this type of materials to teach students in experimental group in 8 weeks, the teacher asks two groups to take part in the same post-test The post-test results are presented in the following bar chart

It is easy to realize that there is reversal in the output result of both groups In the former chart, the experimental group had a little worse result in pretest than the control group In the current chart, obviously the students in the group receiving treatment created breakthrough in their post-test result The number of students in experimental who got good marks (20%) is double of that in the control group (10%) The rate of fair mark is not stable

From the same percentage of fair mark of two groups in the later chart, this figure increases 10% in experimental group’s result, whereas the increase in fair mark of control group’s result is only about 3% On the contrary to the rate of good and fair mark of control group, the percentages of average and bad marks of this group takes a higher position in comparison with the percentage of experimental group Significantly, the proportion of bad mark of the treated group decreases from 23.3% to 6.7% This proportion is only about one third as much as the bad mark rate of control group This is a persuasive proof about students’ reading comprehension progress after they are taught with authentic materials

The Descriptive Statistics is also conducted to analyze the post-test results

Deviation Posttest control 30 4.0 8.0 5.850 6.000 1.2045 Posttest experimental 30 4.0 9.0 6.600 6.500

Table 2: Description of post-test result

In this table the indices such as minimum, maximum, mean, median and standard deviation also bring useful meanings for the researcher to analyze

Two groups have the same minimum mark (4points) and this figure is higher 1point than in the minimum mark in pretest The maximum mark of control group’s post-test is 8 points whereas it is 9 points in experimental group mark The difference of mean value and median value between two groups’ results is 0.8 points and 0.5 points in turn and experimental group still gains the higher position

Consequently, the post-test results analyzed in both the chart and the statistics tables obviously express the change of studying result of two groups of students after the investigation time

In addition, Independent sample T-test was used to find out the difference between two mean scores was statistically significant

Levene's Test for Equality of Variance s t-test for Equality of Means

Table 3: Independent Sample T-test for Post-test result

The table shows that Sig value in Levene’s Test (0.706 > 0.05) indicates that variances of two groups are equal Thus, the sig value in Equal Variances assumed must be used to assess the difference between two mean scores Sig value in T-test is 0.023 which is smaller than 0.05 And it can be concluded that two mean scores of two groups is remarkably different As a result, the null hypothesis “There is no significant effect of using authentic materials on students’ reading comprehension achievement” must be rejected and the alternative hypothesis is that “There is significant effect of using authentic materials on students’ reading comprehension.”

1.3 Analysis pre-test and post-test results within each group

In order to check if there is improvement of students in each group, the researcher makes an analysis about pre-test and post-test results of each group by using Paired Sample T-test This comparison is made to make sure that after 8 weeks the students in both groups create significant difference in their studying results

Confidence Interval of the Difference Lower Upper Pre-Posttest control -.3000 5186 0947 -.4937 -.1063 -3.168 29 004

Table 4: Paired Sample T-test for pre-test and post-test

According to data analyzed in the table, both sig values of two groups (0.004 and 0.000) are lower than 0.05 This means that post-test results of two groups are higher than pre-test results Moreover this difference is presented in Interval of the Difference because there is no zero value in this section In a word, the difference of two mean scores shown in the table is the evidence of students’ improvement in their reading skill

To demonstrate this difference more specifically, the below charts will be employed to describe the results recorded

Discussion

The results gained from pre-tests and post-test are the strong evidence to reject the hypothesis “authentic materials do not have any effect on students’ reading comprehension achievement” As data analyzed and proved above, there is no doubt about the effectiveness of authentic materials to the experimental group which receive authentic reading materials as a special treatment in comparison with the control group Involved in the research within the same period of research time but getting different kind of materials, the students in two groups make different output although their pre-test results are not very different Eventually, at the beginning the control group is a little bit prominent than the experimental group However at the later test, the experimental group has a better performance than the control group

The change in students’ reading comprehension achievement can be summarized as following:

Both control and experimental groups have improvement in their reading skill, which is shown in the increase of good and fair marks and the decrease of average and bad marks Notwithstanding, this change is not the same with two groups The rate of good and fair marks of experimental group’s post- test is higher than this rate of control group while there is reverse of the rate of bad and average marks between two groups More importantly, the differences which are analyzed in Independent and Paired Sample T-test are meaningful

In a nut shell, with that results and analysis a conclusion can be drawn that authentic materials created effectiveness on students’ reading comprehension achievement at Le Hoan High School

In the previous part of the study, data were analyzed in order to find out the answer to the research question and come up to the conclusion of the effects of authentic materials over non-authentic materials in foreign language acquisition In this part, the summary of the research findings, implication and suggestions for further study will be presented.

Conclusion

With a lot of research which has been investigated up to now, they are really valuable groundwork to conduct further investigation related to the issue Specially, the previous findings could be confirmed on the other subjects to make them more persuasive and universal Although there have been debates about the advantages and disadvantages of authentic materials in teaching and learning foreign language, most of the scholars share their point of view that the participants can gain certain improvement in their studying results in most aspects of language acquisition This idea has received the strong agreement to high-level learners such as students in gifted school or college students However it has not clearly proved with the lower-level students Therefore, the current analysis was made on the lower- level students to examine whether the previous findings are still remained or not

This quasi-experimental research was conducted as an evidence to negate the non-hypothesis that authentic materials do not have greater influence on the improvement of students’ reading comprehension than non- authentic materials And authentic reading material is the special treatment applied to the experimental group in 8 weeks, which plays an important role as the independent variable of the study; whereas the improvement of students in reading skill is the dependent variable Regarding the findings of the research, the performance of the experimental group’s students in post- test was not only better than that in their pretest but also than that of the control group’s students

According to the research results, it cannot be deniable that authentic materials not only have great influence on the reading progress of high-level students but also on the reading improvement of low-level students Besides, it also suggests a new teaching technique to English teachers when they would like to help their students to master reading skill better In addition, the authentic text is considered as a source of background information providing students with much knowledge around the world in comparison with the course book

Never before have the students at Le Hoan High School been given such types of reading materials thus that was the first time they recognized the relationship between foreign language they learnt at school and foreign language used in real life.

Implications

After realizing that authentic materials are useful source for the teacher to take into consideration and use to teach reading skill to their students, the researcher also understands some important pedagogical implications:

Firstly, as mentioned above there are several types of authentic materials and they are always available on Internet, in newspaper, on TV, etc…Therefore, it is not difficult for the teacher to find authentic texts to use in language classes Nevertheless to achieve the objectives of the lesson the teacher should pay attention to students’ level In fact, this type of reading text often contains a lot of complex words and structures If the students cannot read and understand the text after reading it, they will feel tired and do not want to work with it Only when the teacher selects and designs the reading text carefully, could it bring about advantages Otherwise is would cause the unexpected consequences

Secondly, during the research procedure the students revealed their interest in the different topics of the given readings texts though these topics are not related to the topics they learnt in the course book This suggested that the teacher can choose the topics of the teaching materials based on the students’ interest instead of following the topics suggested in the course book.

Pretest scores