Using summarizing techniques to integrate writing into reading lessons for students at tan hiep high school

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY _ LÊ THỊ PHÚC HẬU USING SUMMARIZING TECHNIQUES TO INTEGRATE WRITING INTO READING LESSONS FOR EFL HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS AT TAN HIEP HIGH SCHOOL Major: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Code: 60140111 MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION LONG AN 2017 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY _ LÊ THỊ PHÚC HẬU USING SUMMARIZING TECHNIQUES TO INTEGRATE WRITING INTO READING LESSONS FOR EFL HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS AT TAN HIEP HIGH SCHOOL MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION Supervisor: Dr.Nguyễn Thị Kim Anh LONG AN 2017 i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby acknowledge that this study is mine The data and findings discussed in the thesis are true, used with permission from associates and have not been published elsewhere Long An, June 2017 Author Le Thi Phuc Hau ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the encouragement and whole- hearted assistance of many people Firstly, I owe my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Nguyen Thi Kim Anh, whose encouragement, guidance, and support from the initial to the final level has enabled me to overcome many difficulties and develop my research skills It is an honor for me to extend my special thanks to all the staff, especially, the teaching staff at Vinh University Without their help and encouragement, I would not have accomplished my thesis My special thanks would also go to the teachers and students who have participated in this project Without their assistance, I would not have been able to collect valuable data for the project I owe deeply my family, especially my parents, whose continuous encouragement, support and love have helped me pass through insurmountable difficulties during my project Finally, I would like to show my gratitude to all my classmates whose encouragement and support have helped lift up my spirits during the time I conducted this study Long An, June 2017 Author Le Thi Phuc Hau TABLE OF CONTENTS Contents Pages SUBCOVER PAGE STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ABSTRACT CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 The rationale of the study 1.2 Aims of the study .10 1.3 Scope of the study…………………………………………………… …10 1.4 Significance of the study 10 1.5 Methods of the study…………………………………………………… 11 1.6 Organization of the study 11 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 2.1.Writing skill .12 2.1.1 Definition of writing…………………………………………… 12 2.1.2 The teaching of writing……………………………………… 15 2.1.3 The role of teaching writing skills… ………… …………… .18 2.1.4 Different types of writing …………………….……………… .24 2.2 Summarizing techniques 2.2.1 Definition of summary……………………… 26 2.2.2 Types of summarizing………………………………… 27 2.2.3 How to write a summary…………………………………… 27 2.2.4 What is a good summary……………………………… 29 2.2.5 Six essentials for students to write summaries 30 2.2.6 Lesson summarizing techniques………………………………… 31 2.3 Reading and reading activities………………………………….… ……39 2.3.1 Definitions of reading………………………………………… 39 2.3.2 Types of reading models ………………………………………….40 2.4 Characteristics of an effective reader……………………………… 52 2.5 Current research on the effects of using summarizing techniques to integrate reading comprehension and writing………………………… 55 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 3.1 Research subjects 58 3.2 Materials 59 3.3 Procedure .60 3.4 Data collection .61 3.5 Data analysis 61 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 4.1 Findings………………………………………………………… 67 4.1.1 Effectiveness of summarizing techniques on students’ writing and reading skill through the pretest and posttest……………………… 67 4.1.2 Qualitative analysis of the interview data…………………… ….68 4.2 Discussions…………………………………………………………… 69 4.3 Conclusions………………………………………………………… 69 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS 5.1 Conclusions 71 5.2 Recommendations……………………………………… 72 REFERENCES APPENDICES LIST OF TABLES Chart 1: Students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards the importance of reading and writing skill in studying English……………………………… Chart 2: Students’ difficulties in reading and writing……………………… Chart 3: Subjects’ performances on Writing and Reading Comprehension of the two groups in the pre-test Chart 4：Subjects’ performances on Writing and Reading Comprehension of the two groups in the post tests ABSTRACT This study aims to investigate 1) whether summarizing techniques have effects on improving Students’ writing skill , 2) investigate how much the summarizing techniques affect students on their Reading comprehension The subjects in this study were 90 students at Tan Hiep high school.The Independent Group t-test was used for this study Three instruments were used: the pre-test, the post-test and the interview questions.The findings revealed that summarizing techniques have obvious effects to the subjects’ writing skill and their summaries especially in cases of finding the main ideas, using summarizing techniques in reading comprehension develop students’ Reading comprehension Based on the findings, it is recommended that the teachers should use summarizing techniques for teaching students writing subject, which could prove more useful for students in both their writing skill and reading comprehension CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 The rationale of the study English is an international language that allows us to communicate with people from over the world English has been widely used in many areas in life Billions of people speak and write English to at least a basic level It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations Many books, manual, newspaper, letters, emails and information are written in English If we not learn English, we are isolating ourselves away from almost half of the world’s knowledge It is also used in variety of professional fields such as business, information technology, medicine, science, entertainment, aviation, diplomacy and ect Therefore, it is necessary for many Vietnamese to have a good command of English to satisfy the growing needs in a developing country like Viet Nam Four language skills are used to attain the English language proficiency: listening, speaking, reading, and writing Unavoidably, in Vietnam English has been considered important by the government From the point of view of education, it is seen from its position as one of compulsory subjects in high schools, both in junior and senior levels The importance of English in Indonesia is also reflected by the fact that English is one of the compulsory requirements that high schools’ students need to pass to graduate from those levels of education Writing is the fourth of the four language skills.Writing is a form of written communication People who are thousand miles away from us can also be reading the things that we are writing So it is important to write in English as people from thousand miles away might be from a different country understand only the global language which is English Writing English is a task that is often required in school Regardless of the obstructions found by students, writing is a very important competence It is because nowadays people, who take technology as their means of communication, seem to be impossible to be separated from the activity of writing, from the simplest like sending short messages through mobile phones and to the more complex like making business letter via e-mail The importance of writing is also seen from the fact that the skill has become a need for people to compete in the global era Students need to prepare themselves for their future They need to be able to write an application letter when applying a job and many other kinds of written texts when doing their job later In addition, writing is a means of expressing idea or communicating with others, instead of speaking There are situations in which the ability of writing is crucial or written language is a need, as it is said by Nunan (1993) that writing is needed to communicate with others who are removed in time and space, or is used for those occasions on which a permanent or semi-permanent record is required Such situations can be easily found in the real life every day, for instance, when someone was visiting a friend but he could not meet and he left a note However, the writing skill difficulties are one of the most significant problems that affect not only native English speakers, but also hundreds of students that are learning English as a second or foreign language around the world Many students have learned in high school to camouflage their lack of reading and writing skills, so it is often difficult for teachers to identify their weaknesses until students hand in papers or take exams Then writing deficiencies are obvious Besides, not only self-strategies influence students’ performance, but also the effectiveness of teaching techniques that teachers apply in their English lesson plans Each method is useful with some students but fails with others, so writing needs to persist and teachers must take into account suitable strategies if they want their students to develop effective writing skills awareness of their writing, provided opportunities to approach their friends’ different perspectives about their papers, and gave them more chances to write By using qualitative analysis of the interview data, the participants described their in-depth evaluation towards the most effective activity or the least effective one Consequently, ‘Finding the topic sentence and making an outline’ was assessed as the most effective activity and the opposite one was ‘Written / Journal Summary.’ The first reason for the most effective techniques was that the learners have become more aware of the subject to be discussed and how the paragraph will discuss it Readers generally look to the first few sentences in a paragraph to determine the subject and perspective of the paragraph That’s why it’s often best to put the topic sentence at the very beginning of the paragraph 4.2.Discussions This research studied effectiveness of summarizing techniques on reading comprehension as evaluated from their summaries of 90 students at Tan Hiep high school in one semester The data analysis of this research is focused on these main issues: Finding the topic sentence; Paraphrase, Oral-summary, Written / Journal Summary; About/ point The results show that the scores of comprehension and writing found in the post-test of the experimental group are significantly higher than those of the controlled group To sum up, the summarizing techniques have obvious effects to reading comprehension and student’s summary 4.3.Conclusions The results of the study showed that training the students with the using of summarizing techniques to high school students had positive effects – this made students have awareness of using summarizing to improve reading skill Most students were able to find the main ideas, and they tried to paraphrase sentences from the original texts The subjects in experimental group used much less 69 plagiarism in their summaries This confirmed that summarizing techniques are beneficial In regard to writing, it seems that students were highly occupied with using their own words They sometimes used inappropriate words to substitute the original words in their post-test This means they misunderstood some contents of the original texts However, they had a greater struggle to change the original sentences Based on the finding of this study, the researcher found that they had problems on grammar and writing Sometimes, although they understood what the texts said about, they did not know how to write, so grammar knowledge is also important in summarizing This agrees with Kirkland and Suanders (1991) that the students need to have vocabulary, reading and writing skills That is the important skills in summarizing are to have adequate reading and writing skills If the practice of summarizing is prolonged, certainly, the students will gradually improve their reading and writing skills 70 CHAPTER CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS 5.1 Conclusions The teaching and learning of reading comprehension and writing skill have become more and more important in high schools Teachers of English are, therefore, trying best to find more useful techniques to help the students develop their reading and writing skill This study is conducted to find effective techniques to teach the 10th form students at Tan Hiep high school The thesis has presented some useful techniques accompanied by a number of activities to develop certain reading skill and writing skill for students All these techniques and activities are suggested basing on the theory of reading and writing It is also based on the present situation of teaching and learning reading in the high school at Tan Hiep high school The actual teaching and learning status was clarified through the two survey questionnaires and some class observations at Tan Hiep high school The statistics indicate that both students and teachers have positive attitudes toward teaching and learning reading and writing, There are actually a lot of techniques in teaching and learning but teachers must be flexible in using them They should depend on the reading texts, their students’ level or the learning condition to provide their students with suitable and useful activities to exploit the text efficiently and develop their effective reading skills The results from the writing pre-test and posttest confirmed a significant improvement in the quality of participants’ writing and reading comprehension in the experimental group while those in the control condition were not significantly changed after the study It is indicated that the summarizing techniques, which were used in the appropriate stages of learning to write, improved the learners’ writing performance and reading comprehension These 71 summarizing techniques attempted to help the learners write better Each technique focused on improving the learners’ writing ability and comprehension at different stages of the writing process The participants showed to write better when these activities partly resolved the learners’ problems The summarizing techniques were believed to strengthen the learners’ writing ability and reading comprehension The participants’ positive evaluation to the use of these writing activities and reading comprehension could be the high achievement of their writing ability The learners reported that they have learned and practiced their writing skills and reading skill when they knew to pay more attention to their learning and writing abilities In conclusion, from what have been presented, the thesis is hoped to be useful and referred to by high school teachers in their reading and writing lessons 5.2 Recommendations From the findings of this research, the summarizing techniques are obviously useful for the students, especially in terms of writing skill and their reading comprehension If learners have opportunity to practice more about summarizing, they will better improve their reading comprehension and summary writing ability, so teachers should include the use of summarizing techniques or summary writing in curriculums to benefit the students The results indicated that the participants in the experimental condition significantly gained in their writing performance and Reading comprehension In comparison to that of the experimental condition, the learners’ writing performance and reading comprehension in the control group stayed the same while the positive impact of the use of using summarizing techniques improved the quality of writing performance and Reading comprehension in the experimental group To improve the learners’ writing ability, the teachers of English in the research context may consider applying the suggested techniques in their classes With the regards to the roles of teachers as a facilitator and the learners as the center of the 72 writing and reading activities, if the teachers positively facilitate the learning to write techniques by using these techniques, the learners’ writing performance and reading comprehension could be improved That could obviously show that the outcomes of this study could be adaptable to Tan Hiep high school classrooms as the similar issues, goals for writing and reading classes and focuses were stated in the previous studies and issues possibly exist In addition, the teachers should provide the students should be the center of the learning process Teachers should involve them as much as possible in most of the writing and reading activities When the students the activities, these activities help them practice and experience writing and reading In addition, teachers should also motivate the learners’ writing ability and reading comprehension by providing them with confidence to write Moreover, with the opportunities to have teacher consultation The teacher consultation could be very effective when teachers use the questioning strategies to help learners realize their strengths and weaknesses by themselves When the learners understand what they should to improve their writing and reading comprehension and teachers facilitate their learning process, the learners’ writing ability and reading comprehension would be changed very fast REFERENCES Anderson, N.J (1999) Exploring Second Language Reading: Issues and Strategies.Toronto: Heinle & Heinle Publisher Barnett, M 1988 Teaching reading in a foreign language ERIC, ED 305829 Budi, A S (2009) Using summarizing technique to improve the reading comprehension of the students of the English study program of state Polytechnics of Jember Unpublished master’s thesis, Program Pascasarjana Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia Cobine, Gary R 1995 Writing as a response to reading ERIC, ED 386734 73 Carson, J and Leki, I., eds 1993 Reading in the composition classroom: Second language perspectives Boston: Heinle and Heinle Corbeil, G (2000) Exploring the effects of first-and second-language proficiency 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a Remaining at home b c working outside home c Inheriting property d d receiving education B Writing Write a summary about the passage Passage People commit crimes for various reasons For example, many persons steal things they could not obtain otherwise Others, such as drug addicts, steal to get money to by narcotics or other things they need Some shoplifters steal for excitement, but others so to stretch the family budget Many automobile thieves take cars for joy-riding, but others strip down the stolen autos and sell them Many embezzlers take money from their employers to meet a personal emergency, intending to return the money The motives also vary in crimes of violence A robber may kill his victim to avoid detection Some gangsters torture people to obtain money A man may beat his wife in a fit of a rage during a quarrel A Reading comprehension According to the passage, some people who steal money… a Don’t need it b Are shoplifters c Are criminals d love money We understand from the passage that… 78 a Drug addicts are the most dangerous criminals b Detectors may kill robbers c There are many criminals in the world d There are many reasons why a person commits a crime Which of the following has not been mentioned as a crime? a Beating wives b Making money c Killing victims d Stealing cars According to the passage which of the following is a crime? a Returning money b Stretching the family budget c Stealing things d Joy-riding The main idea of this passage is related to … a Stealing things b Torturing people c Causes of crime d Buying narcotics B WRITING Write a summay about the passage Passage The earliest recorded evidence of religious activity dates from only about 60,000 BC However, anthropologists and historians of religion believe that some form of religion has been practiced since people first appeared on the earth about two and a half million years ago Experts think prehistoric religion arose out of fear and wonder about natural events, such as the occurrence of storms and earthquakes and the birth of 79 babies and animals To explain why someone died, people credited supernatural powers greater than themselves or greater than the world around them A Reading comprehension The passage is mainly about… a Anthropology and religion b The origin of religion c Religious people and places d Different kinds of religion We understand from the passage that religion a Is not a recent phenomenon b Has been practiced since 60,000 BC c Was practiced even before man appeared on earth d Has been mentioned in history According to the passage, prehistoric people… a Believed in fear and wonder b Believed in supernatural powers c Could control storms and earthquakes d Could explain why someone died Which of the following has been suggested as the basis for prehistoric religions? a Evidence for historians b Fear about natural events c Love for children d Care for animals According to the passage, religion beliefs relate to… a Powers greater than we can imagine b Natural powers used for social purposes 80 c Supernatural powers mentioned in history d Powerful people in the history of mankind B Writing Write a summay about the passage Passage Student Volunteers Needed! On Saturday, December 12th, from 10 A.M until P.M., Carverton Middle School will be holding a music festival in the school gymnasium The special event will feature a variety of professional musicians and singers Task Time Date Make posters P.M.–4 P.M December 5th Set up gym 11 A.M.–4 P.M December 11th Help performers A.M.–4 P.M December 12th Welcome guests 10 A.M.–2 P.M December 12th Clean up gym P.M.–7 P.M December 12th Interested students should speak with Ms Braxton, the music teacher Students who would like to help at the festival must have written permission from a parent or guardian A.Reading comprehension: What time will the festival begin? A 10 A.M B 11 A.M C P.M D P.M In line 2, the word feature is closest in meaning to _ A look B keep 81 C include D entertain Who will be included in the festival ? A teachers B dancers C musicians and singers D magicians What job will be done the day before the festival begins? A Making posters B Setting up the gym C Cleaning up the gym D Helping the performers Who is told to talk to Ms Braxton? A Parents B Students C Teachers D Performers B.Writing Write a summary about the passage Correlational research is often conducted as exploratory or beginning research Once variables have been identified and defined, experiments are conductable APPENDIX II Interview questions Please evaluate the effectiveness of the following summarizing techniques: Put a check ( ) on the chosen column No Names of summarizing techniques Effective 82 Neutral Ineffective Finding the topic sentence and making an outline Paraphrasing Oral summary Written-journal summary About/Point Why you evaluate one techniques as effective or ineffective? (Select the techniques with ineffective choice and the effective one when most participants chose) _ _ _ _ _ 83 ... EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY _ LÊ THỊ PHÚC HẬU USING SUMMARIZING TECHNIQUES TO INTEGRATE WRITING INTO READING LESSONS FOR EFL HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS AT TAN HIEP HIGH SCHOOL. .. of using summarizing techniques to integrate writing into reading lessons and summarizes some studies on effects of using summarizing techniques in integrating writing into reading lessons that... comprehension? What recommendations are given for applying summarizing techniques to both develop students? ?? writing skill and students? ?? reading comprehension at Tan Hiep high school? 1.3 Scope of the