skkn cấp tỉnh instruct students to improve reading comprehension skill through reading fill and comprehension exercises in ba thuoc high school

1.INTRODUCTION1.1 Reasons for choosing the topic.

Nowaday, English plays an important role in schools, improving thequality of teaching and learning is a top important and necessary issue Howstudents can fully grasp the knowledge and use it competently is a matter ofconcern to our teachers We all know that learning English is simply learning alanguage To use that language fluently, learners must practice four basic skills:- Listening, -Speaking, -Reading, -Writing In which, reading skills play adecisive role in determining whether learners understand the content of thearticle or not Reading comprehension becomes a proactive skill in whichlearners play an active part of the participant in the information being read,processed, understood and decoded in the information to eventually respond toit It's exactly like a process of four operations: feeling - understanding -evaluating - responding In Vietnam, as in many Asian countries, English isnow taught as a compulsory school subject from an early age (it is officiallytaught from grade 3 onwards) (Ministry of Education and Training (MOET),2008), and many changes have been initiated in the teaching of the subject in thelast few years Implement multiple-choice test for English subjects becomespopular and compulsory in high school graduation exams, university exams, andcolleges of the Ministry of Education and Training Practicing test-taking skillsis considered as a basic goal in the teaching process to meet nationalexaminations Reading comprehension is considered as a basic element of theexam preparation process Only when readers can respond will the readingprocess be completed and will the communication process achieve the desiredresults Ba Thuoc high school has many ethnic minorities students so theirlanguage knowledge is lower Poor reading skills cannot gain high scores ingeneral exams and national examinations in the reading test part Therefore,Students who want to improve their grade in English exams have no other waybut to improve their reading comprehension skills, and also do better in Englishtests

Based on the results of the tests, lesson plans, assessments on thereceptive ability of Ba Thuoc School students and observation of the students’activities in choosing the best answer in each test of grade 12 students, theconductor can recognize the difficulties of students in the process of solvingdifferences in each reading fill exercise Therefore, I decided to choose the

topic: “Instruct students to improve reading comprehension skill throughreading fill and comprehension exercises in Ba Thuoc high school”

+ Practical reasons:

Following the direction of the Ministry of Education on innovating theteaching method of English subject under the 2020 project, listening, speaking,reading and writing skills are four skills that need to be invested and focused todevelop professional skills and communication skills for students The aims ofthis research are to investigate how English reading skills are taught in here and

to apply some new techniques and adjustment to help the students in Ba Thuochigh school tackle the challenges on the learning reading skills more effectively

+ Reasons for urgency:

According to the Department of Education's guidelines for the school-yearassessment innovation, reading skills account for 40% of the 45-minute tests andsemester exams of grades as well as tests national graduate Therefore, it is veryimportant to focus on improving the effectiveness of reading classes.

+ Reasons for the condition and capacity of the instructor:

Based on the results of the tests, lesson plans, assessments on thereceptive ability of Ba Thuoc School students from teachers in solving readingcomprehension exercises of grade 12 students, can recognize the followingdifficulties in the process of teaching and learning reading skills, especiallythrough two types of exercises: reading fill and reading questions to answer forhigh school students

1.2 Aims of the study

The aims of this research are to investigate how English reading skills aretaught in here and to apply some new techniques and adjustment to help thestudents tackle the challenges on the learning reading skills and focusing onsolving two basic types of exercises: Cloze text / Reading comprehension(Entering words and answering questions) more effectively

1.3 Methods of the study

- Observe reading classes

- Draw from experience of my teaching.

- Consult many documents , especially methods of study.- Study colleagues’ experience

1.4 Scope of the study

+ Subjects of study:

Grade 12 students The research has been carried out in 2 classes of grade:12A3, A7 in 2022- 2023 school year 12A1 (in the controlling group) and 12A2(in the experimental group)

+ On the learner's side:

Ba Thuoc High School is in high mountainous area which has manyethnic minority students Their initial point is low and a significant impact onthe learning of most students They don’t focus on studying seriously because oftheir living standard It is the thinking of earning money early and easily thatmakes them neglect study They spend the less time doing homework and

preparing lessons before class Another drawback in this context is the badlearning habits that many beginning learners have

Another drawback in this context is the bad learning habits that manybeginning learners have The habit of translating into Vietnamese to understandeach word, the desire to read and understand 100% of information also makesmany students unable to know what is the core content to capture and whatinformation to skip during reading Misunderstanding of the requirements ofdifferent types of exercises makes the learner tired and tends to becomeconfused during reading lessons in class.

Admittedly the fact that for most students, reading is the most difficultskill Meanwhile, the amount of time spent learning to read in class is too little.Less self-study time This partly explains the fact that some students are lazy toread before going to class, just see the answers, bad habits make the readingprocess meaningless and waste of time.

The passive learning attitude during reading lessons in some classes thatteachers have had the opportunity to attend also shows that learners do not seemto pay adequate attention to self-improvement in the learning process.

Psychological issues are also another difficulty for learners in receivingand responding to information When confronted with comprehension texts ofover 300 words or unfamiliar reading topics or new words, students are oftendepressed and distracted.

+ On the teacher's side:

The application of translation methods in language teaching includingreading comprehension in some teachers makes the skill training ineffective.

It is still a notion that reading is practicing receptive skill Learners areasked to receive information without any prior hints about the situation they areabout to read, or they are not allowed to request feedback after reading clearly.

Guide students in the traditional way by listing all the new words thatappear in the text.

Some teachers are also aware of the need to change teaching methods butdue to the limited time in class, they cannot apply many effective measures tochange the situation.

2.2 Limitations in the process of teaching and learning reading skills.

+ Subjective limitations:

One of the main obstacles that prevents students from doing well theform of filling in is the lack of language knowledge Limited vocabulary is thebiggest obstruction to the reading comprehension process of learners Thisrestriction interferes with learners’ reading process when seeing to many newwords, which has affected the speed and time of reading.

+ Objective limitations:+ For teachers:

Due to the limited time of 45 minute with so many tasks to carry out in a

class, there is not enough time to carefully guide students on tips to readeffectively On the other hand, over 20 years learning process at Ba Thuoc highschool, skill training requires time, perseverance, and repetition of therequirements of the lesson waste a lot of times, teachers do not havedetailed instructions to clearly orient students about the topic of the reading orthe steps to follow to solve the given reading exercises Especially, teacher’sattention cannot be paid equally to all the student groups in a big size class(40- 50 students).

+ For students

Students have complained that reading comprehension skill throughreading fill exercises is extremely difficult because his skill not only requiresstudents to understand the content of the reading passage, but also master therelevant grammar knowledge I have found that when doing this kind of tasks,I found that the majority of the students choose the answer indiscriminately.As the result, they usually get bad marks At the beginning of the first semester- school year 2022 - 2023, I conducted a small survey with 88 students in 2classes – 12A3 and 12A7 - to find out the difficulties when they did the testand why a lot of them got bad result, and I got the result:

1 There are too many new words in the passage 60%2 I spend time reading and translating the passage

into Vietnamese.

50%3 I don’t remember the grammatical knowledge 70%4 I don’t know how to do this type of exercise 70%

In the process of teaching students to do reading comprehension testsand fill in correct answers, I noticed that most of the students do not grasprelevant grammatical knowledge such as word forms, conjunctions, quantitywords

By analyzing subjective and objective difficulties in the process ofteaching and learning reading, focusing on the type of exercise: filling inwords the researcher recognizes that most students are confused, encountermany mistakes when doing homework, or do not even be able to do this typeof exercise at the average level The aim of the research is to suggest somesolutions to improve the situation, to help students do the readingcomprehension tasks more effectively and eventually improve their results andgrades in exams.

2.3 More specifically, to solve two basic types of exercises effectively:fill in words and reading comprehensions.

+ Specific steps in teaching.

If the words you need are filled with unfamiliar vocabulary, studentsrarely read it, the teacher should add that vocabulary to the new words, butstudents do not have to translate the whole paragraph, only read and understandthe sentence containing the word to fill or the sentence before and after theblank.

Note that students have meaningful and valuable information on theexercises just to guide the answers or information to be filled, because mostexercises are linked and related to each other.

The teacher asks students to read the paragraph, then determines the typeof words to fill (nouns, adjectives, verbs, phrasal verbs, prepositions, etc.) andpredicts the meaning of the word or phrase to be filled out, because it helpsreaders refine and choose the closest information Students need to note thewords or phrases before and after the blank as they may be related to the word tobe filled Ask students to identify language knowledge related to the spaces to befilled (tenses, relative pronouns, conjunctions , comparisons, phrasal verbs…………)

Answer questionsNumber Recognize Understanding Comprehension applicationAdvanced

-

Relative pronoun

+ The structure of the comprehension skill through reading fill exercises

+ Checking the word formation

Students must first understand the functional position of adjectives, nouns, verbs and adverbs Only then can you choose the correct answer.

+ Nouns.

After adj

After the articles

After possesive

and indicative

After words

of quantity

“ment – ness – or – ty – ance – tion –

ee– cy – dom- hood - sion

Before or after

Before adj

At the beginning of

the sentence

Between aux and participle

Adj + ly = adv

Before noun

After “ to be” or linking verb

Used in the structures: so…that/ such….that/ too…or

the comparisions

Adj usually ends by: “- ful, - able, - ic, - less, - ous, - al, - ing/ed, - y, - ive, -ish, - ible, -ent, -ant,

+ Checking the meaning of the word

For this type of exercise, students often encounter conjunctions and quantity words

Therefore,

consequently, as result, thus

Although, eventhough, though,even if

Despite, in spite of, regardless of

Nevertheless, howeverAdditional

In addition to, apart from, except for

Also, furthermore,moreover, in addition, besides,

- if it is a clause, subordinators are used

- if it is phrasal noun or Ving, prepositions are used- if it is a sentences, conjunction adverbs are used

+ The quantities

When the answer is a word indicating quantity, it is necessary to determine what kind of noun after the vacancy is, countable or

uncountable, plural or singular

- MANY = a large number of/a great

many/ a majority of/ a wide varietyof/ a wide range of

- Used with countable nouns.

MUCH = a great deal of/a large

amount of

- Used with uncountable nouns.

- Used with countable nouns - Used with uncountable nouns.

- Most + N

MOSTLY (mostly): used as an adverbALMOST (almost): used as an adverbto complement verbs, adjectives, and nouns.

- The others: the remaining or

remaining people in a group of many things or people.

+ Relative pronouns and adverbs.

When the answer is the relative pronoun, adverbs students must understand the use and place of each type of relative pronouns and adverd

Table 1: The use of relative adverbs

place

Table 2: Functions of relative pronouns

3 PROCEDURE3.1 Arrange the experimental groups.

There are two groups in these experiments The first groupconsists of 42 students, class 12A3 For this group, the

in/at/on + which= when/whereIndicate time

for which= whyWHY

RELATIVE CLAUSE

Replace for things

WHICHUsed both as asubject and an

(làm chủ ngữ hoặctân ngữ cho động từ

đứng sau nó)

Replace for possessiveof adjectivesReplace for man

Usually use withnoun

WHOMUsed as an

researcher still uses the traditional methods while teaching, focusing on translating the text into Vietnamese After that students will be given the answers.

The second group with 42 students, class 12A7 is taught by the new techniquesfor processing a reading text with tables and new methods Students are askedto follow every step when they do reading fill exercises when they do this typeof exercise both in class and at home.

3.2: Experimental time:

5 months (the first semester of school year 2022 - 2023) The firsttest is taken at the beginning of the experiment in September 2022 andthe other is implemented in January 2023 The achievement in theexperiment is divided into 4 levels: very weak mark is from 1,0 to 3,0points; weak mark is from 2 to 4 points; average mark is from 5 to 6points; good mark is from 7 to 8 points.

Table Result of tests after 5 months of the first groups.

Point 79hs

September2022