Teaching reading to the first year students at the faculty of economics

CERTIFICATE OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: TEACHING READING TO THE FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS AT THE FACULTY OF ECONOMICS in terms of the statements of requirements for the Thesis in Master’s Programs issued by the Higher Degree Committee Ho Chi Minh, December 2005 NGUYEÃN TƯỜNG CHÂU i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Dennis F Berg., who gave me the valuable and dedicate guidance to the research It is his highly informatic instructions that helps me make the thesis to meet the standard My special thanks to MA Lâm Tường Thoại, Vice Principle of Information Management System Department at at the Faculty of Economics, for his generous assistance to present the data collection by SPSS software In particular, I would like to thank Dr Đinh Thị AÙnh Nguyeät, Principle of Foreign Language Department at the Faculty of Economics, who offered me many opportunities to teach reading to the sophomores at FOE Many thanks to Dr Nguyeãn Hoàng Tuấn, Principle of Foreign Language Department at the University of Natural Sciences, for his precious consultance on the research I also wish to thank all my colleagues, the teachers at the Faculty of Economics, for their willing cooperation to carry out the large data collection Last, but not least, I would like to thank my dearest mother and my lovely ant who prospered and encouraged me to the research for a long time ii ABSTRACT The thesis aims to measure the effects of four key including Teachers, Learners, Task, and Evironment on the first-year students’ reading performances This investidation was carried out by: (1) a survey of students’ opinions about the four key factors of teaching-learning process and (2) a collection of students’ reading scores of the mid-term test Then, the mean-comparative stastistics analyses of T-test and One-way ANOVA were run to measure the effect of the four key factors of teaching-learning process on the students’ reading scores The total number of respondents was 505 from 10 classes of five different departments at the Faculty of Ecconomics The results showed that the poor readers have been influenced by many factors of teaching-learning process including: Teachers’ teaching practice (beliefs and methodology); Learners’ English background (subject areas, sub-recruitment, branch, places studied highschool, English learning duration, out-school English learning duration), characteristic (type of analytic learner), cultural differences (Content, Formal and Linguistic schema); Task difficulty of lexical and structural items (Multiple-meaning words, Articles, tenses, voices); and learning Environment (democratic and frinedly class climates) iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Certificate of authorship i Acknowledgement ii Abstract iii Table of contents iv Abbreviations viii List of tables viii List of figures x Chapter – INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background to the study 1.1.1 Teaching background 1.1.2 Theorical background Overview of the thesis Chapter - LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Teachers’ factors 2.1.1 Teachers’ beliefs Teachers’ beliefs about Learners Teachers’ beliefs about Learning Teachers’ beliefs about themselves 2.1.2 Ways of teaching Summary of Teachers 2.2 Learners’ factors 2.2.1 Learners’ characteristics iv Concrete learners Analytical learners Communicative learners 10 Authority-oriented learners 10 2.2.2 Cultural differences 10 Background knowledge 10 Textual knowledge 12 Linguistics knowledge 13 2.2.3 Meaning-making process 14 2.2.4 Learners’ motivation 15 Intrinsic motivation and Extrinsic motivation 15 Learners’ beliefs about themselves 16 2.2.5 Learners’ Goals 17 Summary of Learners 17 2.3 Tasks 18 2.3.1 The universe of content 19 2.3.2 The modality 19 2.3.3 Level of complexity 20 2.3.4 Level of abstraction 20 2.3.5 Literal Reading comprehension 20 Summary of Tasks 21 2.4 Learning environment 21 2.5 The interaction between these factors 22 Summary of the Chapter 23 Chapter - METHODOLOGY 24 3.1 Purposes of the study 24 3.2 Research questions 24 3.3 Research design 25 v 3.3.1 Research subjects 26 3.3.2 Research tools 28 Questionnaire 28 Reading test 31 3.4 Research procedure 32 Summary of Chapter 32 Chapter - RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 33 4.1 Results from the questionnaires and reading tests 33 4.1.1 Results from the questionnaires 33 Respondents’ background 34 Teachers’ factors 40 Learners’ factors 41 Task difficulty 44 Environment factors 45 4.1.2 Results from reading tests 45 4.2 Findings and Discussion 46 4.2.1 The influence of Teachers’ factors 46 4.2.2 The influence of Learners’ factors 50 4.2.3 The influence of Task difficulty 72 4.2.4 The influence of Learning environment 78 4.3 Limitation of the study 81 Summary of the Chapter 81 Chapter - CONCLUSION 82 5.1 Summary of the main findings 82 5.2 Recommendations 85 5.3 Conclusion 93 Summary of Chapter vi BIBLIORGRAPHY 94 APPENDICES 98 APPENDIX A (Questionnaire in Vietnamese) 99 APPENDIX B (Questionnaire in English translation) 101 APPENDIX C (the reading test) 103 vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS FOE = VNU-HCMC = The Faculty of Economics Viet Nam National University – Ho Chi Minh City LISTS OF TABLES Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a viii Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a Table 4.1.1 a ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure x agree 6.79 disagree 6.42 strongly disagree 6.51 Total 6.70 Table 4.2.4.h Frequency of pairs or groups work and Scores Mean of score 7.8 7.6 7.4 7.2 6.8 6.6 6.4 strongly agree agree disagree strongly disagree Frequency of pairs or groups work Figure 4.2.4.h Frequency of pairs or groups work and Scores Which group was less satisfied with the class climates? The result of descriptive statistic analysis showed that the students who belong to Branch B were less satisfied with the class climates Report Mean Branch Branch A Frequency of raising questions to the teacher Frequency of pairs or groups work 2.94 2.80 Branch B 2.54 2.41 Total 2.82 2.69 Table 4.2.4.i Class climates and Scores xciv Branches and Class climates 4.00 3.00 Branch A 2.00 Branch B 1.00 0.00 Figure 4.2.4.i Class climates and Scores 4.2 Limitation of the study: Although the data collection was designed and carried out in a very careful way, there were still a few casual responses It is very difficult to deal with a large number of 505 respondents at the same time In addition, the first-year English program is not an ESP program, so was not divided into four separate skills to teach The effect of four key factors of teaching-learning process was not only on the reading scores, but also towards the whole midterm test scores This study has narrowed down the effects of these factors only on the sophomore’s readability However, the study is a serious work that draws a complete picture of the first-year weak readers at the FOE, VNU-HCM This is useful for the teacher and the students as well as the Board Management at the FOE 4.2 Summary of the Chapter: xcv This chapter presented the results from the questionnaires and reading tests in the forms of descriptive statistics with the frequency (N), the central tendency (Mean), and the variability (S.D.) In addition, the useful findings have been worked out by the analyses of T-test and One-way ANOVA mean-comparative tools of SPSS sastistic software that revealed the significant relations between four-key factors of the teaching-learning process and students’ reading scores xcvi Chapter CONCLUSION This final Chapter presents a summary of the main findings of the study The summary of the findings is followed by a set of recommendations aimed at helping to resolve some of the problems that were identified with the teaching of ESP 5.1 Summary of the main findings: Background knowledge Students characteristics, learning motivation, learning goals and cultural background On the whole, there are many factors that affect the reading process of students First, is their background knowledge of English A full one third of the students studied high school in rural areas and lacked ideal conditions for the studying of English; e.g no reference books, poor teaching–learning facilities and equipment Even, some of them have not studied English before or for a short time of years In addition, most of students have entered this university based on their scores in Math, Physics, and Chemistry (Branch A), so they are not so concerned with English Furthermore, only one fourth of the students took extra-English lessons outside the class; this xcvii implies that they did not pay much attention or concern to improving their knowledge of the English language Besides, among the students having reading scores lower than five, there is also a difference in scores between the group of students who studied in high school in rural areas and in urban areas The students in remote are were the poorest readers, next to those raised in the mountainous areas, followed by those raised in the countryside, and finally by those raised in the town and city The longer they have learned English the higher scores they had These difference in the background knowledge of English contribute to effect of the cultural differences including content schema (knowledge of the real world), formal schema (knowledge of vocabulary and structures), and linguistics schema (reading strategies and skills) The formal schema has a stronger influence than the content schema And linguistics schema especially contributes to a students’ performance in reading The second factor having an influence on reading scores is students’ personal characteristics The type of analytic learners who like finding grammatical errors and solving problems by themselves are thought to be good at reading comprehension From the study, the students of Branch A are more analytic than those of Branch B As the results of the study indicate, the two factors of learning motivation and learning goals not seem to have an affected on the students’ reading scores Teacher factors: xcviii Teacher s beliefs and methodology Although, the first-year reading English program at FOE was designed to teach all skills equally, the results show that reading was the least concerned about skill in English classes This is a warning signal that suggests the need to plan to improve the readability of the sophomores in the next terms In addition to the lack of concern for reading on the part of the teacher, the students are affected by the teacher’ way of teaching more than his/her knowledge Tasks Lexical terms and grammatical terms Basing on the learning goals of the reading program at the basic level, reading tasks focus on lexical and grammatical acquisition As a result, among the six factors causing task difficulty that were mentioned, there were four factors that appeared to have a strong influence on students’ reading scores including multiple-meaning words, articles, tenses, and voices in which multiple-meaning words were assessed to be the most difficult factor The two other factors of technical terms and prepositions did not have significant relations to student’s scores In addition, the students who have learned English for a long time took more advantage to confront with task difficulty Learning environment xcix Democratic and friendly class climates From the study, it is clear that the learning environment also contributed to a students’ positive performances It is necessary to create a democratic and friendly learning environment under the form of pairs or group work in order to create many opportunities to exchange between one another in the class 5.2 Recommendations: For Learners The shortage of background knowledge of English such as the knowledge of the real world, lexical and grammatical items that can be improve by reading day by day To quickly reduce the distance of English competence between the students who lived in urban areas and those in rural areas, it is really necessary for the students to join in supporting English classes in order to review the basic knowledge of general English and consolidate the current knowledge of business English However, the self-study skill take the decisive role to promote the success of overcoming current problems This skill is usually not a high concern when studying English in high school For Teachers In addition, the linguistics knowledge of reading strategies and skills are also very important to deal with task difficulty quickly and effectively From my teaching experience, it is very useful to employ some useful IELTS reading c strategies and skills to deal with Business texts which are also based on authentic sources These can be summarized as following: First of all, a background of the context must be built to help the students get the general meaning of the text The students should be directed to first identify the subject and the topic of the text as well as the topic sentence of each paragraph, and then use their own knowledge to anticipate the information in the text as much as possible The more information they can predict, the shorter time they take for answers It is also suggested to skim and scan the passages to identify the topic and main ideas As usual, the topic sentence and the controlling ideas are locked in the first or the second or the final sentence of a passage, the thesis and the controlling ideas of whole the text are located at the introduction or the conclusion paragraph (Beatrice S Mikulecky, Linda Jeffries 86:1-2, Garry Adams & Terry Peck 96:30, 32) On the other hand, an overview of the format is also helpful to get a general meaning of the text, including the title, headings, sub-headings, pictures, diagrams, illustrations, instructions, kinds of questions and answers, examples We should pay attention to bold printed words as well as capital letters which are said to give a hint at something different from the rest in the text (Garry Adams & Terry Peck 96:30-31, Greg Deakin 96:7) In addition, read carefully the instructions and rectify what type of question and what the form of the answer should be, e.g a question requires the answer of numerical information, not dates or the statements of reason, so just pay attention to the numbers in the text And try to understand exactly ci the instructions and remember the questions as reading will be helpful to produce correctly and quickly the answers It is also said that your brain only retains the information you have been read in a few seconds, thus the slower you read the less comprehensive you get about the meaning of the text Keep in mind the instructions/questions are a good way to economize the testing time (Beatrice S Mikulecky, Linda Jeffries 86:1-2, Eric Van Bemmel & Janina Tucker 96:17) To complete the reading session in the test on time, it is estimated that one minute for per question is reasonable The skilled readers take the easiest questions at first and leave the difficult ones until later, but not leave any spaces in the answer sheet at the end of test, if not, 50% of chances to get a right answer must be lost (Greg Deakin 96:7, Garry Adams & Terry Peck 96:31) In fact, my students often did not finish the reading questions in time although they were instructed carefully about the general meaning of the text The main reason is they spent too much time on understanding clearly and exactly all the words in the passages It must waste time to seek the meaning of every word instead of guessing its meaning from the context If the students stop to check the new words in the dictionary, they will lose their memory of information read and their interest in reading Guessing the meaning of new words without the dictionary, a skillful techniques of mature readers, which is one of the most difficult skills necessary to reading test (Beatrice S Mikulecky, Linda Jeffries 86:1-2, Garry Adams & Terry Peck 96:39) The meaning of one difficult word can be derived from such related lexical words as synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, metonymy, as well as structural clues such as definitions, alternatives, explanation or restatement, cii example or illustration, and kinds of grammatical expressions as cause and effect, comparison and contrast, description of characteristic or quality of a person or a thing Some typical examples of guessing the meaning of unknown words can be seen in the article on Helping Adult Chinese EFL Learners Acquire Vocabulary Via a Context-based Approach by Yu Shu Ying in the Guidelines, volume 21, number 2, 1999 For example, as for the case of guessing the meaning of a new word through its Synonym: “The old woman had a strange habit to keep over 100 cats in her house Her neighbors all called her an eccentric lady.” (From Han, He and Liu, 1988:120) The unknown word eccentric has a synonym for strange Apart from that, from Eric Van Bemmel & Janina Tucker (1996:19) and Yu Shu Ying (1996-119), morphological information like prefixes and suffixes contribute a vital part to refer to the meaning of difficult words through their bases or added elements, e.g the meaning of unhappy, teacher, disagree, examination can be understood by adding the meaning of added elements un, er, dis, ation into the bases happy, teach, agree, exam Particularly, knowing the organization of the ideas the students will be easier to guess the meaning of specific words in the text There are four principal types of organizing ideas: listing, chronological order, cause-effect and comparison, and two styles of writings- descriptive or argumentative and both It is also advised that the students should be told about what the writer is defining, labeling, and classifying things or process in a descriptive writing to infer the new information In other words, the writers’ attitudes are ciii presented in argumentative writings like supporting, objection, assertion, or neutral, giving a hint at classifying findings and conclusions, general ideas and specific individual words (Beatrice S Mikulecky, Linda Jeffries 86:102, Garry Adams & Terry Peck 96:37, Kerry O’Sullivan & Jeremy Lindeck 2002:16-31) Signal words like connectives are also very useful to follow the changes in grammatical structural patterns, discovering the flow of ideas which can not locate at any specific words Typical connective words for listing pattern includes first, second, another, even, several, etc., time order: first, next, soon, after, before, times, etc., and cause and effect: because of, results in, had an effect on, is the reason for, lead to, due to, etc (Beatrice S Mikulecky, Linda Jeffries 86:103-121, Eric Van Bemmel & Janina Tucker 96:31) Besides, the use of reference words, typically pronouns instead of nouns, are often used to link all the ideas of the text logically and smoothly Look at this example: “Most young people in Poland enjoy similar forms of entertainment as their peers in English-speaking countries These include popular music concerts, disco, movies, and sporting events – soccer being by far the most popular sport in Poland – and attractions available in the city or local centre People with children, as elsewhere, tend to go out less, especially if they not have parents or in-laws to look after the children They tend to go for walks in local parks or visit other people with children.” (From Kerry O’Sullivan & Jeremy Lindeck 2000:36) From these reference words their, these, they, the students are easier to control the flow of ideas in the passage civ However, the students usually not as well as they should on the test due to the shortage of time Therefore, the specific strategies and skills are very necessary for them to deal well all the questions in time Generally, for all types of questions, it is suggested that the teacher should guide the students to follow these steps: skim the passage to get a general understanding of the main points in the passage, read carefully the instructions to rectify what type of question to choose what form of answer, scan the passage to locate the specific information needed to answer a question, and read intensively the text to decide on the answers Besides, it had better to guess the content of the text before reading (Kerry O’Sullivan & Jeremy Lindeck 2000:5 and Eric Van Bemmel & Janina Tucker 96:16-17) It is also advised to take gap fill summary tasks firstly, or summarizing questions, because getting broad information is quicker than specific details, e.g to choose a suitable word from a given list of words or phrases to fill in the gaps in the reading passage; first, the students should skim or scan the gap filling text for general understanding, then definite the words before and after the gap in the parts of speech, singular or plural forms, positive or negative meanings in order to change the form of the word given adapting to the gap filling text (Garry Adams & Terry Peck 96:40-42) For the multiple-choice questions, it is suggested to skim for the general ideas, scan the context to find evidences for answering, and especially highlight to locate the answers in the passages to check later More importantly, pay much attention on what type of text to find the purpose of the writers as well as the organization of the text, specifying in different cv kinds of words and phrases, e.g poems require a lot of connotative words (Penny Cameron 2000: 60-61) Different from the multiple choice questions, short-answer and completing sentences focus on specific words or phrases, so preview quickly the questions and then read intensively the passages for detailed information (Geg Deakin 96:7, Penny Cameron 2000:62-64) Next, matching tasks seems easier than the former types because they not need to look for the right words or arrange them in correct order This task invites to match two the lists of things together In details, it is better to read the text as quickly as possible and base on the topic sentences to fit the given headings well Read the text from top to bottom in consideration of the list of matching items given, probably, guess the answers and mark them in the text (Garry Adams & Terry Peck 96:34-35, Penny Cameron 2000:74) Following, the classifying items – “True/False/Does Not Say” or “Yes/No/Not Given” - require a understanding of the writer’s views or claims, thus watch out the synonyms to avoid misunderstanding It is suggested to paraphrase the questions, then look for the answer as reading (Penny Cameron 2000:71) Particularly, the very important skill is to deal with nonverbal signs such as charts, tables, diagrams, and illustrations which are also used a lot in business English texts In this task, these items take the same techniques as with the text Typically for the chart, preview quickly its title, headings, figures, then scan for the specific information of the questions on the X axis cvi of the chart, and finally carefully seek for the detailed information on the Y axis to answer (Kerry O’Sullivan & Jeremy Lindeck 2000:32-34) In addition, answer keys and detailed explanations should be given for all the wrong answers at the end of the tasks It must be useful to brainstorm what information they have received from the instructors and draw out the experienced lessons for another tests Finally, but not least, choose texts useful to practice reading as: textbooks used in high school or university talking about history, geography, accounting or social science, textbooks teaching English at pre-intermediate level, English language newspapers, articles on whether sports, politics, current events or comic strips, popular magazines that help you more familiar with authentic materials’ topics (Kerry O’Sullivan & Jeremy Lindeck 2000:45) These texts will be helpful to expand knowledge of English vocabulary, grammatical structures and written expressions in order to improve reading comprehensive ability However, the students will be eager to read and read faster the information which they are really interested in In short, I am hopeful that these effective and efficient strategies will be useful for helping the students deal well all reading tests at FOE as well as adapt to official international tests such as IELTS, TOEFL, SAT, GRE, etc in the future In the role of the teacher, it is necessary to pay more attention to the factors having influences on students’ performance as well as classify the group of poor readers in order to help them study better as soon as possible The reading should not be the least concerted skill because this is the “major input” to study other skills In addition, that asking students to cvii find grammatical errors and solve the problems by themselves will train them an analytic ability to reading texts Furthermore, the variety of suitable teaching materials also makes the lesson more interesting that received a lot of expectations from the students 5.3 Conclusion: Teaching ESP to the first-year students is absolutely not a new topic Teaching reading skill is very old in TESOL subjects However, the help to the poor readers is not abundant at all The most important help from the teacher is the deep concern about his/her students to help them overcome unexpected problems Although the role of a teacher is very small in the growing process of students compared to the effects of family and society, it is the gathering of many solid bricks building up a firm house This study hopefully will call more attention to the number of weak readers who lack the proper studying conditions in high school cviii