Copy of LUẬN VĂN.Nguyen thi my trang-K19A2

HANOI UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES NGUYEN THI MY TRANG THE EFFECTS OF CONCEPT MAPPING STRATEGY ON NON-ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS’ ESP READING COMPREHENSION AT UNIVERSITY OF TRANSPORT TECHNOLOGY Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements Of the degree of master in tesol SUPERVISOR: HOANG VAN HOAT, M.A Hanoi, 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest thanks and most sincere appreciation to my supervisor, Mr Hoang Van Hoat, M.A for his patient guidance, orientations in helping me choose the topic for the thesis as well as his encouragement, critical comments, and constant support during my doing this M.A thesis with all his heart Secondly, I would acknowledge my great gratitude to Ms Nguyen Thai Ha, M.A., the lecturer of Research Methods for her willing support, guidance, and invaluable knowledge for research theoretically With her wholehearted assistance, I can now not only know how to search for and read needed materials, journals effectively, but can also take the basic steps in doing research Thirdly, I am very thankful to all other lecturers and organizers at Department of Postgraduate Studies – Hanoi University for their providing me with useful knowledge during the Master course My special thanks also go to the students of class 62CCKT05 and 62CCKT07 of the Department of Economics at University of Transport Technology (UTT) for their willingness to take part in the study Without their help, this research could not have been so successful I am additionally in deeply indebted to my friends, my classmates, and my colleagues as well for their useful help, comments, and criticism Last but not least, I would like to send my heart-felt gratitude to my family who have constantly inspired and encouraged me throughout the study 3 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CM : Concept mapping CMs : Concept maps E1 : The first English subject at UTT E2 : The second English subject at UTT E3 : The third English subject at UTT E4 : The fourth English subject at UTT EFL : English as a foreign language ESL : English as a second language ESP : English for Special Purpose GE : General English L1 : First Language L2 : Second Language M : Mean p : probability value SD : Standard Deviation SLA : Second Language Acquisition SPSS : Statistical Package for Social Sciences UTT : University of Transport Technology 4 LIST OF TABLES 5 LIST OF FIGURES 6 ABSTRACT In an attempt to improve non-English major students’ ESP reading comprehension skills at the University of Transport Technology (UTT), the research aims at investigating the effects of concept mapping (CM) strategy on non-English major students’ ESP reading comprehension as well as the students’ attitudes towards the CM To find the answers to these questions, an experimental design was chosen to carry out the study The subjects of the study were 81 students, including 62 females and 19 males They were all the second year non-English major students, specializing in Accounting and their level of English proficiency was high elementary To ensure that differences in the results of the study were due to the difference in the treatment, the researcher chose two intact classes as participants of the study due to the results of the last GE achievement exam (E3 achievement exam) in January, 2013 on schedule and the researcher’s knowledge about these two classes while teaching them E3 in the first semester of the second year The experimental group was taught using CM strategy in reading comprehension lessons while the control group was taught by “the traditional way” The data of the study were collected by means of an ESP reading comprehension test and an attitude questionnaire The data collected from the ESP reading comprehension test results were computed and analyzed by means of t-tests, using paired-samples t-tests with SPSS version 16.0 to measure the students’ ESP reading comprehension proficiency before and after the experiment The data collected from the questionnaire were converted into percentage to investigate students’ attitudes towards CM strategy The results of the study revealed that students’ ESP reading comprehension proficiency increased significantly when CM strategy was applied Moreover, the findings of the research showed that students had positive attitudes towards the use of CM strategy in ESP lessons Therefore, the study concludes that CM strategy may contribute to the students’ ESP reading comprehension ability and recommends that CM strategy should be applied in teaching reading ESP 7 8 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The current study is intended to investigate the effects of CM strategy on ESP reading comprehension of non-English major students at UTT It begins with this introductory chapter, which describes the background to the study and indicates the aims and research questions It also discusses the scope, the significance of the study and provides the organization of the thesis 1.1 Background to the study As studies indicate that the ability to read and to comprehend is considered one of the most important and basic skills for a person to learn and educate Research findings in applied linguistics and reading research consistently show a strong correlation between reading proficiency and academic success at all ages (Pretorius, 2000) Thus, it can be said that without reading comprehension skills, readers cannot gather any information and use it to efficiently function and enjoy the richness of life At UTT, after finishing 180 periods (each lasts 45 minutes) of GE program, of which 120 periods are spent on the course-book “New English File” - Elementary (Oxenden, LathamKoenig, & Seligson, 2004) and divided equally into two subjects named E1 and E2 in the first and second semester of the first academic year, and the rest 60 periods is for another subject called E3 covering the first five units in “New English File”– Pre-intermediate in the first semester of the second year, students have to take an ESP course (called E4) in the second semester of the second year In the ESP courses, English learning focuses mainly on reading, so does English for Economics English for Economics compiled by teachers of English from the English Division – UTT includes 10 units which are taught in 60 periods with an aim to provide students vocabulary, terms related to economics, reading skills as well as some basic grammatical structures so that after the course, students will be able to comprehend and utilize a certain number of economic terms, comprehend, analyze, and translate English materials, books, and magazines in Economic field (Curriculum specifications: English for Economics, 2009, UTT) Finishing this course, students are assessed through a written exam with a focus on examining ESP reading comprehension performance, specialty words, terms, including specialty knowledge of students in English Therefore, reading, especially reading comprehension obviously plays an important role for students at Economics Department in particular and for all students in ESP classes at UTT in general However, there is a fact that after finishing 180 periods of GE program at UTT, the students still possess inadequate reading comprehension skills, which is a big constraint for them to follow ESP courses Due to this problem, many of them lose their interest in reading ESP texts (To Van Hoa, 2008) and this could lead to the students’ failure in previous ESP courses As observed and discussed, the researcher knows that there are two main causes to this problem: uninteresting, inappropriate current teaching method and the difference between GE and ESP In fact, although UTT teachers of English still follow three stages: Pre-, While-, and Post-reading in ESP reading lessons, it seems to be ineffective and challenging for students to get the requirements of a reading text Specifically, in Pre-reading stage, teachers usually try to elicit students’ prior knowledge related to the topic by asking them some questions However, it is obvious that students have difficulty in answering or expressing what they want to say in English although they have learned the subject knowledge in Vietnamese As a result, they always answer the teacher’s questions in Vietnamese which is meaningless in ESP reading lessons In While- reading stage, teachers usually ask students to read the text individually in silence or aloud before doing the follow-up reading comprehension exercises The lessons are often ended by a summary of the text and then a translation of the passage into Vietnamese but once again the students have difficulty in summarizing the text because they cannot organize and connect the ideas in such a long text as ESP texts The pedagogical results of this approach are that the lessons become boring; students not have effective reading strategies In fact, when being asked about what reading strategies they usually use, most of them express that they try to read and comprehend the reading texts word by word; some say that they usually translate the texts into Vietnamese while reading, others pay too much attention to vocabulary, few get the gist of the passage by skimming and no one scans to get the needed information or finds the key words As a result, they read slowly, read without understanding accordingly as their memory is taxed by the inability to retain information in ... useful knowledge during the Master course My special thanks also go to the students of class 62CCKT05 and 62CCKT07 of the Department of Economics at University of Transport Technology (UTT) for their... definition of reading, ESP reading, reading strategies, principles of effective reading instruction and stages of a reading lesson; (2) reading comprehension comprised of definition of reading... research, the CM techniques used in this study and the reasons for this choice The last part of this section presents some related previous studies 2.3.1 Definition of concept maps and concept mapping