Challenges faced by information technology students in reading english for computer science

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY ĐẶNG THỊ HẢI LÝ CHALLENGES FACED BY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY STUDENTS IN READING ENGLISH FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE (NHỮNG THÁCH THỨC SINH VIÊN CÔNG NGHỆ THÔNG TIN GẶP PHẢI TRONG KỸ NĂNG ĐỌC MÔN TIẾNG ANH CHUYÊN NGÀNH KHOA HỌC MÁY TÍNH) Master Thesis in Education Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching Code: 60.14.10 Vinh, 2011 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS I.1. Rationale 4 I.2. Aims and objectives: 5 I.3. Method of the study 5 I.4. Scope of the study: .6 It is too broad to deal with reading challenges of all types. Therefore, the focus of this study is to investigate some problems in linguistics and reading skills which are faced by second-year students of IT at Nghe An JTTC. Then, the researcher will recommend some techniques to overcome reading challenges. 6 I.5. Significance of the study .6 I.6. Organization of the study: 7 1.7. Summary 7 CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW 8 II.1. The nature of reading .8 II.2. Reading in General English (GE) and in ESP .21 II.3. Summary .35 CHAPTER III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .35 This chapter deals with the research methodology that has been employed for the achievement of the aims and objectives of the study. Data was obtained by means of a survey questionnaire. Besides the survey data, additional data was gathered by other instruments such as discussion with teachers and students to provide more in-depth information 35 III.1. The setting of the study 35 III.2. The participants .40 III.3. Research method .40 III.3.2. Data collection instruments 40 To obtain adequate data for the study, the main instrument was employed and described as followed: .40 Questionnaires for students: .40 Questionnaires were chosen here because it is relatively popular means of collecting data (Nunan,1992). Moreover, questionnaires are considered an effective way of collecting data quickly in term of affective dimension of teaching and learning as beliefs, attitudes, motivation and preferences (Richard and Lockhart, 1994). The advantages of the questionnaire are that it saves time and it can be used with the large number of subjects. Besides, it encourages people to answer the questions straightforwardly and genuinely. Moreover, the information collected is not difficult to tabulate and to analyze. 40 For all of the above reasons, the author decided to use questionnaires for the research. The ideas for these questionnaires were based on the literature, the challenges in reading English for Computer Science and the author’s observation of the students during some years of teaching at Nghe An JTTC 41 Survey questionnaires designed for students consist of 11 questions and were written in Vietnamese to make sure that all the subjects understand the questions properly. All of them are multiple choice questions. Investigating students’ opinions on reading lessons, materials, their challenges in reading English for computer science and their expectations of the teachers’ methodology and materials is the main aim of the survey .41 III.4. Summary 41 CHAPTER IV.: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .43 IV.2. Discussion 63 2 CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION .65 V.1. Summary of the main findings .65 V.2. Conclusions .66 The study focuses on answering the two research questions raised from the actual context of learning reading English for Computer Science at Nghe An JTTC .66 V.3. Implications for the study 67 V.4. Limitations and Suggestions for further study .77 REFERENCES 79 3 CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION I.1. Rationale I have been teaching at Nghe An Junior Teacher Training College (JTTC) for ten years. English is taught with the purpose that the students will use it effectively to fulfill their daily work in the future, so it receives great deal of concern from both teachers and students here. Enormous attempts have been made to provide the students with general English as well as English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Now I find out that reading comprehension plays a very important role in learning English as a foreign language, especially English for computer science in Vietnam. The main goal of ESP course, especially English for Computer Science is aimed at providing the students with linguistic knowledge relevant to their field and skills up to their expectation of their future employment. However, students learning ESP in Vietnam rarely have opportunities to use English in communication outside the classroom. They mainly have access to popular documents written in English through reading. Hence, skills in reading English texts are naturally of special importance in teaching and learning ESP, which is not an exception for the ESP teaching at Nghe An JTTC. Nghe An JTTC is one of those where ESP involves within an English teaching situation in response to the demand for specific language skills for the specialists – the graduated doctors. Therefore, improving students’ reading skills is recognized as a principal objective of ESP course provided by teachers of English at Nghe An JTTC. Of the four skills, reading comprehension has always received a great deal of attention. It is completely right because English is taught and learnt in other countries, not the native countries. So reading comprehension is not only the importance to get a new language but also for further study. “ For many students, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in a second language, particularly in English as a second or foreign language” (Carrel, 1981:1). As we know, if students read well, they are able to handle subjects 4 related written materials in English and to work with modern technological equipment. In fact, many researchers find out that teachers are disappointed with students’ reading comprehension. There are many challenges that we have to pay attention to: Teaching methods, classroom techniques, unsuitable materials, teachers and students’ attitude about the subjects. For all these reasons, it is necessary to discover the areas of students’ reading challenges at Nghe An JTTC and the causes of their unsuccessful reading comprehension. Problems have been found out. The researcher should do something as suggestions to improve the learning for students about reading comprehension of English for Computer Science at Nghe An JTTC. I.2. Aims and objectives: This study aims to examine the areas of challenges in reading comprehension of English for Computer Science for second-year students in the department of information technology at Nghe An JTTC. To be more specific, the objectives of this study are: - To investigate the situation of teaching and learning English for Computer Science in order to find out the students’ challenges in reading the materials and causes of them. - To suggest the ways to overcome the challenges and help students to improve their reading comprehension. - It is hoped that the findings from this study will be of some benefits to the second- year students of information technology (IT) at Nghe An JTTC. I.3. Method of the study In order to achieve the aims mentioned above, the methodologies adopted for this study are a survey questionnaire with 65 students which is used as the main method to collect the needed data from the learners . 5 When carrying out this thesis, the author prepares a questionnaire to investigate the second-year IT students’ challenges in learning reading English for Computer Science and find out some possible causes of these challenges. The questionnaire consists of 11 questions, based on the information in the literature review part and the aims of the study. This questionnaire is prepared in Vietnamese for the learners to read, think and answer suitably and adequately. After that it is delivered to second-year IT students, and the answers are collected and analyzed. The real challenges in learning reading English for Computer Science and some possible causes to these difficulties will be found out. I.4. Scope of the study: It is too broad to deal with reading challenges of all types. Therefore, the focus of this study is to investigate some problems in linguistics and reading skills which are faced by second-year students of IT at Nghe An JTTC. Then, the researcher will recommend some techniques to overcome reading challenges. I.5. Significance of the study. Reading is one of the four language skills which is very important in learning a foreign language. Reading will help students get adequate knowledge of vocabularies, structures or ideas to speak and to write. Teaching the language itself is the most typical use of reading in a foreign language class. Despite the awareness of the importance of reading in ESP learning, some students had a negative attitude towards ESP reading, which made their reading more difficult. What is more, when poor reading results are reported, one tends to blame the students for having poor ability or for making insufficient effort. Nevertheless, the students are not always at fault. There are other important factors in the process of teaching and learning reading such as unsuitable teaching materials, teachers’ inappropriate teaching methods and classroom techniques. How to help them reach the goal of reading comprehension is a great challenge. Hopefully, this study will 6 much help teachers of English at my college to better their teaching, motivate my IT students to better their learning especially to improve their reading comprehension. I.6. Organization of the study: This major thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 concludes the rationale for the study, the aims, the methods, and the scope of the study as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter 2 deals with the literature review. It discusses the theoretical background to the nature of reading and reading comprehension and reading in ESP teaching and learning. Chapter 3, the methodology chapter, will make it clear how the present study was implemented, including information about context, participants , and procedures, instrumentation and data collection. Methods of analysis will be addressed in Chapter 4. It investigates the current situation of teaching and learning English for Computer Science at Nghe An JTTC. Analysis of a range of data collected from various sources for the study will be clarified in this chapter. It includes some discussion of findings and recommendations. Chapter 5 - Conclusion - summarizes the main findings of the study, points out the limitations and makes some suggestions for further research. 1.7. Summary This chapter introduces the study. This introduction includes the rationale, research methods, and the scope of of the study. Next chapter reviews the literature for the study. 7 CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter aims at providing a theoretical background to the study. The review of the issues most relevant to be the focus of the study will be included: definition of reading and reading comprehension, classification of reading according to the purposes of reading; reading in ESP teaching and learning such as definitions such as definition of ESP, types of ESP and challenges in teaching and learning English for Computer Science; finally the typical features of IT texts will also be discussed. II.1. The nature of reading II.1.1. Reading Up to now, there are so many definitions of reading by perspectives-linguists, psychologists, educators and second language researchers. When reading, we understand the texts. We analyze and find its meaning give out meaningful conclusion. But no one can define exactly what reading is. The question “What is reading?” attracts much attention and reasearchers have defined reading in various ideas. Each author has each different way to define. Goodman(1971; 135) considers reading as “ a psycholinguistic process by which the reader, a language user, reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display”. William (1984) had the same view on reading, especially on the act of reconstructions as Goodman. He argues that “ written texts, then often contain more than we need to understand them. The efficient reader makes use of this to take what he needs, and no more to obtain meaning” (p.3). His opinion is shared by Nuttall and Grellet. However, Hafner and July (1982:4) did not think that understanding is known what the writer implied although they also mentioned the understanding between the author and the readers. According to their opinion, “ reading involves the identification and recognition of printed and written symbols which serve as stimuli 8 for the recall of meanings built up through past experiences and further construction of new meanings through the readers’ manipulation of relevant concepts already in his possession.” Frank Smith (1985; 102) defined “ reading is understanding the author’s thought”. It means that the readers “ read the author’s mind not the author’s words”. He also added “ understanding print or even receiving communication can hardly be said to explain reading ”. We know that the nature of reading is the interaction between readers and the authors. Harmer (1989: 153) considers reading as a mechanical process that “eyes receive the message and the brain then has to work out the significance of the message.” Harmer points out a view that reading activity consists of two actions dominated by the eyes and the brain. Rumelhart (1977) writes “ reading involves the reader, the text, and the interaction between the reader and the text”. He emphasizes the important role of both readers and reading texts. According to Carell Devine and Eskey (1988:13) “ reading is a process in that it starts with linguistic surface representation encoded by a writer and ends with meaning, which reader constructs. There is, thus, an essential interaction between language and thought in reading. The writer encodes thought in language and the reader decodes language to thought ”. They mean that we can see clearly the interrelationship between the writer, the reader and the text. One more definition of reading is offered by Allen and Vallete (1977). They thought that “ reading is developmental process” (p.249). We learn reading not only to know how to read, to master the symbols, the language, the grammar, etc…used in the text but also to understand the ideas, the information expressed in that text or to develop the ability reconstructing its contents in our own words. From all the opinions above, it is clear that no definition can possibly capture all the ideas and features of what reading is. Each scholar’s definition reflects what reading means as seen from his own point of view. However, they all try to find out 9 the nature of reading, that is “ understanding ” in which they emphasize on reading process, reading message and readers. Nowadays, with the explosion of information, reading has become more important. II.1.2. Reading comprehension In teaching and learning reading, reading comprehension plays a very important role. Reading comprehension can be understood as the ability to attract the required information from the text as efficiently as possible. There are three elements involving in the reading process: the text being read, the background knowledge of the reader, and the contextual aspects relevant for interpreting the text. Abbott (1981:82) gives out a research on the nature of reading comprehension. According to him “ there are two broad aspects or levels. Firstly, there is basically visual task that of deciphering the marks on the page, the brain receiving signals from the eyes. Secondly, there is cognitive task that of interpreting the visual information, so one is not simply barking at point.” According to Swan ( 1975: 1 ) “ a student is good at comprehension ” if “ he can read accurately and efficiently, so as to get the maximum information of a text with the minimum understanding”. , This means that the student can show his understanding by re-expressing the content of the text in many ways such as summarizing the text answering questions etc. Grellet (1981:3) considered “ reading comprehension or understand a written text means extracting the required information from it as effectively as possible”. Richard and Thomas (1987:9) describe reading comprehension as “an understanding between the author and the reader.” The nature of reading comprehension has been emphasized by these authors. It means that the readers look at the printed words and try to understand the implied meanings of the author basing on their background knowledge. This is a process whereby the printed words inspire the ideas, experiences that are relevant to each individual. 10