To what extent does extensive reading affect the l2 proficiency of students at lower intermediate level of english in vinh phuc high school for the gifted

SỞ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TỈNH VĨNH PHÚC TRƯỜNG TRUNG HỌC PHỔ THÔNG CHUYÊN VĨNH PHÚC BÁO CÁO CHUYÊN ĐỀ Examining the impacts of Extensive Reading on the English language proficiency of grade 11 students in Vinh Phuc high school for the gifted: A pilot study Giáo viên: Trần Thị Thùy Môn : Tiếng Anh Tổ môn : Ngoại Ngữ Vĩnh Phúc, năm 2015 Contents Reasons for choosing the study Various attempts at different levels have been made to improve the quality of teaching and learning English at school In fact, the Ministry of Education and Training has recently suggested that by the year 2020, at least half of the young should be able to use English fluently, and this is a goal for teachers of English and education authorities to work towards The main challenges lay, however, in the lack of human resources to cater for such need and the lack of motivation to learn English from the students In a workshop in 2011, the writer was exposed to Extensive Reading, an “aid to language learning” which has been reported to work in many an Asian countries By doing a great amount of reading under the language teacher’s instruction and facilitation, students are claimed to make steady progress in all language components and language skills It is therefore believed that extensive reading can be the key to language improvement which may be appropriate in our educational setting, since it provides an alternative to the more common teachercentred mode in Vietnam and can hence deal with the two aforementioned issues effectively Implementing a programme of extensive reading in a particular school, however, needs elaborate preponderance This study is therefore to serve as the first cycle of an action research pilot study-the basis for the official formation of an 2 extensive reading club within a senior secondary school for the gifted in Vinh Phuc Research question To what extent does extensive reading affect the L2 proficiency of students at lower intermediate level of English in Vinh Phuc high school for the gifted? Subjects of the study The primary subject of the study is the vast amount of literature on extensive reading Besides, there are eight students acting as the control group and another eight participating in the first cycle of the extensive reading club Aims and significance of the study The study aims to explore the possible impacts of Extensive Reading on learners’ L2 proficiency and examine the relevance of this approach in a special senior secondary school for the gifted in Vinh Phuc This action research may subsequently encourage similar schools in the area to consider including extensive reading into their teaching/learning, either as part of a required curriculum or as an extra-curricular programme Limits of the study 3 Should there be more participants and a lengthier period of programme implementation, this study could be considerably improved Methodology The study involves reviewing and summarising the literature on extensive reading This is followed by observation of and informal conversations with 16 students in both the control and experimental group Finally, formal assessment of learners’ language proficiency in the forms of tests ( pre-tests, progress tests, post-tests) and journal entries written by students during the implementation of the programme are also analysed and compared Research time March 2014 – January 2015 4 Part Theoretical background Extensive reading: A definition Extensive reading is understood as an approach to language learning/teaching which is “generally associated with reading large amounts with the aim of getting an overall understanding of the material Readers are more concerned with the meaning of the text than the meaning of individual words or sentences.” (Day &Bramford, 2002) The benefits of extensive reading Bell (1998) summarised a number of advantages of extensive reading, from positive psychological aspects to real language enhancement, of which the most important are listed below: a The provision of authentic, 'comprehensible input' It has always been proposed that that extensive reading will lead to language acquisition, provided that certain preconditions are met, including adequate exposure to the language, interesting material, and a learner-friendly environment b The enhancement of learners' general language competence Extensive reading increases the opportunity for the learner-reader to practise his automaticity of word recognition and decoding the symbols on the printed page (often called bottom-up processing) In a study on an extensive reading project with school children by Elley & Manghubai (1983), 5 significant post treatment gains in word recognition and reading comprehension was reported to be gained after the first year, and wider gains in oral and written skills after two years c The increase of the students' exposure to the language It is a fact that the quality of exposure to language that learners receive is of great importance to their ability to acquire knowledge, whether in terms of grammar or lexico, from the input Elley’s (1991:404) researched subjects in an extensive reading programme showed rapid growth in language development compared with learners in regular language programs He claimed to have seen a "spread of effect from reading competence to other language skills - writing, speaking and control over syntax," d Increased knowledge of vocabulary It is suggested that only a small percentage of vocabulary learning is due to direct vocabulary instruction, the remainder is acquisition of words from reading Traditional approaches to the teaching of vocabulary, in which the number of new words taught in each class was carefully controlled (words often being presented in related sets), is therefore not sufficient in promoting vocabulary growth Exposing leaners to reading text can fill in the gap e Improvement in writing With such regular peruse of “comprehensible input”, there have been reported significant improvements in subjects' written work Extensive reading is accordingly an effective means of fostering improvements in students writing f Increased motivation for learners to read As Bell (1998) put it “reading material selected for extensive reading programs should address students' needs, tastes and interests, so as to 6 energize and motivate them to read the books” With some need analysis in advance, the organiser/teacher can easily identify the appropriate genre(s) for their students to read, for example by means of informal discussion or the delivery of a need analysis questionnaire In many cases, familiar material and popular titles reflecting the local culture, or, paradoxically, stories of faraway land and strange customs and practices could be the most popular among school children and even teenagers g Consolidation of previously learned language The authentic, or near-authentic choice of books to read also mean that by reading students can experience what is termed the “recycling” of language This is by itself a form of reinforcement which helps to ensure that new input is “retained and made available for spoken and written production” (Bell, 1998) h Confidence with extended texts It is the case that all classroom reading work in our course books are traditionally focused on the exploitation of shorts texts Gradually the average student could be accustomed to reading those “simple-looking” texts that he/she would back up when asked to read longer, more complex ones for academic purposes Extensive reading can therefore provide a “fun”, stressfree approach to the acclimatisation of students with these longer texts Principles of an extensive reading programme Drawing on their experience with different extensive reading programmes, researchers (Day, 2002; Bramford, 1998; Maley, 2008) have proposed a number of criteria on which to develop a standard programme which could 7 be useful for future reference Some of the most widely known and well supported ones are as follows: a Maximize Learner Involvement This is meant to reduce the feeling of obligation which may impede students’ automaticity both during the whole programme and during their individual act of reading Particularly, students should be encouraged discuss with the teacher to identify their own interest in reading, for instance, whether it is books about the environment/space or fiction books For students in Vinh Phuc senior secondary school for the gifted, this involvement is highly desirable From a psychological point of view, most of the students here, being teenagers, have very strong face-saving needs and the teacher’s failure to give them a sense of “ownership” of their reading project may cause feelings of compulsion and later dissatisfaction b Provide a wide range of texts It is strongly believed that some variety in terms of genre and length of texts can minimize the student’s chance of feeling bored For the success of any lengthy project, there should be abundant reading materials available in a range of genre and length The teacher should note, however, that whatever type of material, the language presented must be within the language competence of the reader-student c Avoid the use of tests As testing in our context is often associated with rote learning, memorization and lack of freedom, extensive reading done at home or during an agreed period of time assigned should be totally detached from testing d Discourage the over-use of dictionaries 8 Dictionary use may harm the flow of the reader if she/he concentrates too much on looking up the meaning of every single new word Pickard (1996:155) comments that, for the extensive reader-learner "Use of the dictionary was sparing, with the main focus on meaning" Similarly, Day (2002) suggests no dictionary use during reading as most of the chosen material should be “comprehensible input” e The teacher’s role There is a shift in the roles that the teacher plays in an extensive reading programme with those she/he does in a normal classroom setting He/she no longer directs the students’ learning Rather, she/he facilitates it Besides, Bramford (1998) points out that in order to administer the resources efficiently, and to trace students' developing reading habits and interests, effective monitoring from the teacher is fundamental f Maintain the entertainment factor This is in fact the key to any extensive reading programme Only when students are delighted with what they are doing can they continue with their work Once the fun is kept, automaticity and self-adjustment along the way can be more feasible Entertainment can be achieved by different ways yet the vast amount of responsibility is on the teacher as a facilitator Her/his creativity, suitable follow-up activities, good management skills may help 9 Part The study 3.1 Participants The participants in this study were 16 students from an Englishmajored class in Vinh Phuc high school for the gifted Being from the same class, they have the same amount of exposure to English, which is five periods a week (three hour and a half) in the morning The participants were selected on the basis that their language proficiency were roughly the same, i.e intermediate level The students were at grade 11 and studied English with the same teacher in their (compulsory) morning classes None among them went to an extra English course of any kind or had any exposure to English during the time of the study The researcher decided to introduce Extensive Reading in the form of a reading club with a membership of nine (one teacher/researcher functioning as a participant and eight students) The club met once every four weeks Participation is voluntary and full consent was granted from their parents 3.2 Materials 3.2.1 Reading materials 10 10 An important principle of ER is that the input should not be imposed upon the readers, but rather be chosen by the readers based on their personal preferences and interests For the project to work, the teacher had to make sure that the “comprehensible input” students get exposed to is abundant and validated In total, there were 50 stories, 15 poems and 20 non-fiction books of various levels (2-5) being used throughout the project (See Appendix for a sample of the material) Prior to project implementation, the participants were consulted regarding the genres of the books to be purchased, which explains how fiction seemed to predominate 3.2.2 Tests These included a pre-project test (hereby pre-test) and a post-project test (hereby post-test) selected from the abundance available online for classifying students into suitable reading levels (graded readers, level 1-6) It should be noted that the two tests were designed in such a way that they were considered of the same difficulty level, which the participating students were unaware of The tests comprised of two sections: writing, which occupied two third of the total score, and reading, which made up for the remaining one third 3.3 Procedures Pre-tests were administered at the beginning of the programme, which helped in determining the level(s) of the students and choosing the most suitable candidates from the volunteers The 16 chosen participants were then divided into two groups of equal membership The control group did not join the extensive reading club and functioned as the reference point from which to assess the assumed 11 11 progress of the experimental group The latter’s members underwent a process of needs analysis in the form of informal conversations in order that the appropriate reading materials could be acquired according to their wishes Subsequently, they formed pairs and started selecting what to read from the newly acquired resources (graded reader series of Oxford, Pearson, and Penguin) The experimental group, being relatively small in size, met once every four weeks to reflect on their own progress and carry out a number of follow-up activities with the researcher/mentor’s presence as a participant (as opposed to a teacher/mentor/researcher) Those are crucial in monitoring the students’ performance and progress and maintain a sense of continuity among the subjects studied Below are some activities recommended by Bramford (1998) and Day (2002), and which were employed in the project • The Reader Interview Regular conferencing among students on what they had read and on their opinion on the book • Read Aloud to the Class A student read some favourite extracts outloud to the class and then share his/her thinking on the parts This act provided a model of how to correctly pronounce a word and how to read with emotion Students then followed • Student Presentations Students were encouraged to make short presentations on books of their choices 12 12 • Follow-up written reports/ blurbs/ reviews Contests were organised in which students chose to write a report on a book they had read or an alternative blurb to the one used by the publisher • Project journal A journal was kept which recorded the experimental group’s feelings and their “new” discoveries/ reflection as the reading programme progressed At the end of the project, a post-test of the same difficulty level as the pre-test were given to both groups Results were collected, analysed and compared to identify the difference between the two groups’ performance and decide if any real progress had been made among members of the experimental group as opposed to those from the control group In addition, throughout the project, the participants had kept a project journal, which later contributed to the researcher’s understanding of the subjects’ opinion of their own progress 3.4 Results 3.4.1 Test results Table and compare how members of the two groups scored in different sessions of the pre-test - i.e the one before the implementation fo the reading project The maximum score for the test is 30 As the students researched were selected according to their English proficiency, which was low intermediate level, their performance in the pre-test reflected exactly this The minimum score for the experimental 13 13 group was 14 out of 30 and the maximum score was 17 For the control group, the corresponding figures were 15 and 18 It is clear that before the project, the discrepancy among the 16 subjects’ command of English, though existed, was inconsiderable as the scores from 14 to 18 fall into the same category of intermediate level Bearing this small gap in mind, however, the researcher made sure that those from the experimental group had slightly lower average score than those from the control group (15.75 compared to 16.125) Name Section Section Total score Student 10/20 4/10 14/30 Student 12/20 6/10 18/30 Student 11/20 5/10 16/30 Student /20 5/10 14/30 Student 10/20 7/10 17/30 Student 7/20 7/10 14/30 Stuent 10/20 6/10 16/30 Student 12/20 5/10 17/30 Table 1: Experimental group’s pre-test scores 14 Name Section Section Total score Student 9/20 6/10 15/30 Student 11/20 6/10 17/30 Student 11/20 5/10 16/30 14 Student /20 7/10 16/30 Student 12/20 6/10 18/30 Student 8/20 7/10 15/30 Stuent 12/20 4/10 16/30 Student 10/20 6/10 16/30 Table 2: Control group’s pre-test scores Table and illustrate the performance of the same groups’ members in the post-test, which is of identical format and had the same level of difficulty For both groups, improvement in performance can be noticed, with the average score for the experimental group and control group being 22.75 and 18.5 Name Section Section Total score Student 15/20 6/10 21/30 Student 19/20 9/10 28/30 Student 15/20 7/10 22/30 Student 12 /20 6/10 18/30 Student 16/20 10/10 26/30 Student 15/20 7/10 22/30 Stuent 16/20 9/10 25/30 Student 15/20 7/10 22/30 Table 3: Experimental group’s post-test scores 15 15 Name Section Section Total score Student 10/20 6/10 16/30 Student 12/20 6/10 19/30 Student 14/20 5/10 19/30 Student 13/20 6/10 18/30 Student 12/20 5/10 17/30 Student 9/20 7/10 16/30 Stuent 14/20 7/10 21/30 Student 14/20 8/10 22/30 Table 4: Control group’s post-test scores 3.4.2 Journal entries The reading club members were advised to keep their own shared “club diaries” in Vietnamese which reflected their insights into and feelings about the programme To avoid repetition and help keeping a certain degree of anonymity, when a student found a journal entry with which she/he concurred or resonated, she/he was invited to simply put a tick next to the one By the end of the project, with consent from the students, the researcher read the diary thoroughly and identified the most salient features regarding the participants’ perspectives on their “learning from reading” experience Overall, the most common features were listed below Opinion/ Feelings Transcript Excitement “A perfect husband” was interesting… H told me her book is 16 16 sooo frightening I’m not keen on ghost stories, but maybe I’ll give it a try…” “At first I was cool, but as all the others are reading book after book, I have to rush too, and you know what? It’s totally worth it ’ “I like it because we’re studying about the author in our Literature Class in the morning, and when the teacher asks me, I know everything… Raised awareness different shades meaning of words of “So today I’ve come to realise a normal word can have so of amny interesting meaning, even words like DO… “I know what flabbergasted is And I also know a number of other long words…I just don’t need a dictionary for that I learn it by reading “Sometimes I have a vague feeling that somehow by reading a lot, I’ve learnt to use words more flexibly Today in the morning class I used the word “withering” and “faucet” Well, the teacher liked it She even asked me “where you get that from?” Confidence with longer “So, I’m not afraid of those reading passage anymore But, text having said that, the passages in the textbook are so different from our reading club books, right ” “I’ve finished a looong story And I don’t feel tired Anything but tired” “Long, but it’s worth it I was exhausted, but happy!” Less dependence dictionary on “so different from the texts in the coursebooks I don’t like texts there, I always feel the need to have a dictionary, but reading like this, I feel like I can work out the meaning in 17 17 most cases…anyway, there seem to be fewer new words Not exactly like that, but I can understand the text better without a dictionary Maybe because I enjoy the story…?” “I thin they write the book to help us learn without a dictionary in many cases I just understand…Anyway, the teacher advised us against dictionary use, and I thought “I won’t work that way” But it did, somehow Discussion of the results and implications It is unsurprising, perhaps, that improvements can be observed in all students from the two groups involved considering the fact that during the course of the reading programme both were having their morning English classes as scheduled What is striking here, nevertheless, was the considerable gap in the post-test between the experimental and the control group While an average student in the reading club scored 22.75 out of 30 points, his counterpart in the control group did remarkably lower, gaining a mere 18.55 points Compared to the starting point at which the former performed slightly worse than the latter (15.75 as opposed to 18.125), it can be safely concluded that the experimental group’s member did make significant progress than those who were not involved in the extensive reading project Among the three skills tested (Listening, Reading and Writing), those in the experimental group tended to make the greatest progress in Writing Reading, surprisingly, came only second, and the positive changes in Listening, albeit remarkable in two cases (Student and 6), 18 18 were not the norm for the rest But for the short time available and the limited number of subjects studied, it would be interesting to pinpoint exactly the language component and skill benefiting the most from Extensive Reading For the control group, best scored area of the exam was also the Writing session, which was, however, on average points lower in comparison with the experimental group The above mentioned results may present a case for the introduction of Extensive Reading into the current teaching contest in Vinh Phuc high school for the gifted This is further backed up by the close examination of the journal entries, where, albeit several instances of feeling of frustration and nerves, the majority of responses and comments were highly positive and denoted a resolution to persevere with this supposedly long-term project Improved language competence aside, there are probably many equally beneficial aspects of such a practice as Extensive Reading, which again should be taken into consideration New areas worth researching emerge, for instance, how student intrinsic motivation may change as a result of their participation in an Extensive Reading project, or how the practice of reading in English may influence their reading in their mother tongue 19 19 Part Conclusion The study seeks to gain insights into the influences of extensive reading on the L2 competence of eight students at lower intermediate level of English The results did highlight the possible benefits and relevance of extensive reading in our educational setting This ahs made a strong case for a greater scale implementation of a similar reading project before any official administrative decision to include this into the teaching curriculum can be sought after Due to the limited experience in this field from the writer, and the limited time possible for the research, problems and oversights are unavoidable I therefore would be grateful to any comments and criticism from the readers for the betterment of this study 20 20 REFERENCES Bell, T, (1998) Extensive Reading: Why? and How? The IESL Journal, 12 (4) Day, Richard, R (2002) ‘Top Ten Principles for teaching extensive reading.’ Reading in a Foreign Language 14(2) Day, Richard, R and Bamford, Julian.(1998) Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Elley, W B., & Manghubai, F (1983) 'The effect of reading on second language learning.' Reading Research Quarterly, 19/1, (pp 53-67) Maley, Alan (2008) ‘Extensive Reading: Maid in Waiting’ in B Tomlinson (ed) English Language Learning Materials: a critical review London/New York: Continuum pp133156 21 21 Appendix 1: Sample of a reading text Genre: Literature Grade The Devoted Widow A widow weeping on her husband's grave was approached by an Engaging Gentleman who, in a respectful manner, assured her that he had long entertained for her the most tender feelings "Wretch!" cried the Widow "Leave me this instant! Is this a time to talk to me of love?" "I assure you, madam, that I had not intended to disclose my affection," the Engaging Gentleman humbly explained, "but the power of your beauty has overcome my discretion." "You should see me when I have not been crying," said the Widow (Ambrose Bierce) 22 22