4.3. Findings from the survey questionnaire
4.3.2. About teaching and learning of cohesive devices in English texts
The results obtained from survey questionnaire for the students reveal that most students are not satisfied with the knowledge of cohesive devices. 67 students (55.8%) state they have a little understanding about English cohesive devices, 33.3% of them say that they understand fully the cohesive devices. Especially, 13 students (10.9%) believe that they do not understand anything about cohesive devices. The reasons can be measured by students’ lack of cohesive devices or the materials about cohesion are not available in their college. 77% think the information of cohesive devices in the books is too little, while 23% state that they could not find the information about these devices. Most students agree that the exercises for cohesive devices are limited. Therefore, they mostly get their knowledge of cohesive devices from Grammar, then Reading and Writing.
Translation practice can supply students with more understanding about lexical cohesion.
In the survey about teachers’ and students’ awareness toward the roles of English cohesive devices, the author designs some questions for the students to assess their teachers’ attitudes in teaching some kinds of cohesive devices and some other questions to investigate the students’ understanding of those devices. The results of the survey give the researcher a deeper insight into the teaching and learning of cohesive devices and explain the reasons for making mistakes in terms of translating cohesive devices from English into Vietnamese.
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The survey results reveal that most teachers make a little introduction to cohesive devices, focusing on forms and meanings but paying no attention to the roles of these devices in the text. Up to 71% of the students believe that their teachers do not direct them to translate English reference, conjunction, ellipsis and substitution ties into Vietnamese. In addition, the majority of the students (81%) believe that they clearly understood some kinds of cohesive devices. They say substitution and ellipsis are the most difficult to learn. They pay much attention to lexical cohesive devices through reading and translation skills.
To sum up, the author thinks that high school students are not aware of the importance of cohesive devices in the reading texts. Furthermore, they are not supplied enough information about English cohesive devices. As a result, they are easy to make mistakes in the process of using and translating cohesive devices from English into Vietnamese.
4.3.3. Students’ mistakes in using cohesive devices in reading texts
By using the survey questionnaire in combination with observation in reading and writing periods, the author could see the student’s common mistakes in using and translating cohesive devices in reading texts.
First of all, the students’ understanding of some kinds of cohesive devices is not the same. With the question about the function of demonstrative pronouns, most of the students (87%) state that demonstratives are used to identify someone or something, 47% students refer to demonstratives as one language means to avoid repetition, whereas, a small number of students (about 9%) think that demonstratives function as cohesive means in the text. All the students say that the article “the” is used to identify a particular individual or a noun (noun phrase) mentioned in the earlier text, but there is no one knowing “the” as a cohesive device. Similar to that, 11% of the students consider “one” as a word to point out the quantity with the meaning “một”, and many students (63%) refer to “one” as a pronoun denoting a person in general. Only 26% of the students think that “one”
can be substituted for a noun. With substitute “same”, all the students answer that
“same” is used for the comparison of two similar entities, no one chooses the answer that “same” can substitute for the whole noun phrase. In the survey, “and”
is chosen to represent for conjunction as a cohesive device. Most students do not realize “and” belongs to four types of meaning: additive, contrastive, causal and
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temporal, hence 87% of the students say that “and” is a conjunction word which conveys “additive” meaning only.
The survey results also point out that the students pay very little attention to cohesive devices when they translate the text. 67% of students think that repetitions and synonyms are simple language phenomena, the others (33%) refer to repetition and synonyms as cohesive devices. When they have troubles in translating cohesive devices in the text, they ignore immediately. By personal observation, the author realizes that high school students meet many difficulties in learning and translating cohesive devices. Consequently, they often make mistakes in translating. The findings show that the students’ translation mistakes tend to reside in grammatical cohesive devices rather than in the lexical ones. Here are three common mistakes found in the students’ translation of English scientific texts into Vietnamese:
(i) Mistakes caused by use of unnatural or incorrect Vietnamese equivalents [82] When everyone works together on household chores, it creates a positive atmosphere for the family and sets a good example for the children. This is especially true if mum and dad can find a way to work well together and are not critical of each other.
In example [82] most of the students translate “it” into “nó” and “this” into
“điều này/cái này”. “It” and “this” are mostly thought to be a single pronoun and a demonstrative one, whereas they can mostly be translated respectively as “điều này”. “it” refers to “When everyone works together on household chores” while
“this” replaces the whole preceding sentence. “It” and “this” are considered as unnatural use of Vietnamese equivalents.
(ii) Mistakes caused by identifying the presupposed items wrongly
[83] However, she and other female firefighters became the targets of laughter and anger from the co-workers and local people. They were unwelcomed at meals, faced loneliness and even violence.
“They” in this example refers to “she and other female firefighters”, but quite a few students wrongly believe that “they” refers to “the co-workers” or
“local people”. Therefore, students translate that “họ”, while it should be: “những nữ lính cứu hỏa này”
(iii) Mistakes caused by wrongly identifying the function or the kind of relation performed by the cohesive device in the text.
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According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), the conjunct “and” is divided into four types of relation: adversative, additive, causative and temporal. Through the students’ translation versions, we realize that nearly 90% of the students consider
“and” as a word with additive function under the Vietnamese equivalent “và/ còn”.
Not many students know that “and” can be translated into Vietnamese as “nhưng/
còn” (adversative), “do vậy/ nên/ thì” (causative), “(và) rồi” (temporal) as in the following examples [84], [85], [86].
[84] Children who share the housework with their mums and dads do better at school, become more sociable, and have better relationships with their teachers and friends. (Temporal)
[85] Women whose husbands do not contribute to the household chores are more vulnerable to illness and tend to think more about divorce. (Causative)
[86] In most cases, volunteers also become more concerned and aware of the problems facing the world and many feel that they were ignorant or narrow-minded before. (adversative)
In summary, the data and example analysis of the study has displayed common mistakes committed by high school students when they translate cohesive devices in reading texts. The study results also point out that the large number of students’ mistakes are on grammatical cohesive devices. This fact is due to some factors such as the language skills under the study, the context of the study and the students’ language knowledge. In addition, understanding of the students’ common mistakes in using and translating cohesive devices in English reading texts serves as background knowledge which helps teachers to build sufficient error correction techniques, the focus of teaching as well as teaching strategies to prevent and eliminate these mistakes.
4.4 Implications of the thesis
4.4.1. Implications for the teaching and learning of cohesive devices in English texts in general and reading texts in particular.
This study is very much hoped to be useful to teachers and students in their use of cohesive devices to get better achievement in teaching and learning English.
Firstly, the types of problems stated above, especially the overuse of certain types of cohesive devices, namely repetition and reference, while ignoring or misusing the others may result in a number of bad consequences in students’
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production and processing of the language. In production, they may create a stretch of language which may comprise correct sentences in isolation but is not coherent at all due to poor use of cohesion. In processing, they may find it hard to recognize in what ways sentences are related to each other or in what patterns they are formed.
In this sense, students may well understand sentences individually but still fail to understand the whole discourse. This may be either because they are so involved in decoding individual sentences and lose signs of cohesive device items or because they are not well equipped with the knowledge of cohesion. For those reasons, a full attention to cohesion is required in English teaching and learning activities.
Secondly, cohesive devices are really an important part in the teaching of analysing discourse or texts as well as translating texts. The knowledge of coherence and cohesion is also of great importance in discourse construction, so the teacher should provide the students with the textual cohesive devices that are considered the effective means in the creation of a cohesive and coherent reading text. In other words, the teacher should raise the students’ awareness of the importance of cohesive devices in reading texts. He/she should also introduce to the students some of the commonly-used cohesive devices in reading texts and a number of synonyms and antonyms to enrich the students’ vocabulary and help them to avoid boredom or tiredness when too much repetition or reference is used.
However, owing to the fact that the knowledge of cohesive devices is so vast and detailed that it is hard to give the best way to teach. Teachers, therefore, need to make sure that the knowledge of cohesive devices which students are exposed to is of the most benefit to them. When presenting words or sentences in the text, teachers should include the information and the forms of cohesive devices.
Thirdly, teacher should teach students to raise awareness of grammatical cohesive devices used in reading texts. In addition, teachers need to be ready to teach collocations which are a source of mother tongue interference, especially the noun-collocations which are used most frequently among various sorts of collocations. Teachers should also be aware and make their students aware of the differences in English and Vietnamese collocations and some cross-cultural factors that cause these differences.
The study also appeals for adequate concerns on the side of academic writing.
It has been shown by teachers of writing and discourse that teaching the various types of cohesive devices in isolation does not help the learners to use them
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appropriately in their writing. Therefore, there is a need for teachers to focus on the way cohesive devices are used in texts written by native speakers of English where a demonstration of all those devices is made manifest in writing. A teacher should also point out the semantic consequences of particular patterns of language use to help their students become fully aware of the organization of relevant meanings in relation to each another in a text. In this case, the students will become familiar with the crucial role cohesive devices can play in the logical development of the topic.
This is supposed by Heller (1995) and Hirvela (2004), who stated that to enhance students’ awareness of cohesion; it is essential to incorporated reading activities into writing classes. This enhances the students’ awareness of the characteristics of good writing, including cohesion.
Probably, the major question of teaching cohesive devices in English reading texts is how we should teach them. When teachers introduce a new form of cohesive devices in a certain text, they should give some other examples on it. Moreover, cohesive devices need to be taught in combination with teaching language skills such as reading, writing. The teachers should also help their students realize the importance of cohesive devices in English discourse in general and in reading texts in particular.
Moreover, during reading comprehension task students should be aware of lexical cohesive devices and collocations in particular. The meaning of a collocation should be taken into account instead of the dictionary meaning of the individual words. This therefore dissuades them from word-by-word translating or mistranslating.
For learners, collocation also helps them greatly in learning vocabulary.
Particularly, new vocabulary can be more easily remembered when it is learned in its context, i.e. in collocation relations. As a result, new vocabulary can be recalled at any time and retained in learners for a long time. In addition, learners should be encouraged to use dictionary of collocation especially when they do writing and translating tasks. Hence, collocation helps enlarge the students’ vocabulary.
In exploiting repetition device, teachers may ask students to elicit the most repeated items in the whole text to guess the topic of it. This helps students greatly in reading comprehension.
4.4.2. Some suggested solutions to improve high school students’ capabilities in using cohesive devices in reading comprehension.
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Basing on the results of survey questionnaire in chapter 4, the author realizes that high school students are facing many difficulties in learning English as well as in reading comprehension. There are some limitations in teaching methods and students’ capabilities. In order to help students learn English more effectively, the author suggests some solutions to improve students’ capabilities in reading English texts for comprehension.
Firstly, the reading texts are sometimes not attractive to the learners as they are suitable to the topics of the lessons only. On the other hands, the teachers do not spend enough time carefully studying and analyzing the texts, hence the English cohesive devices are not focused on properly. Next time, teachers can combine teaching theory of cohesion devices with teaching reading comprehension.
Secondly, in order to understand English texts thoroughly, teachers should analyze the source text carefully. This process will help students understand deeply the text and explore cohesive devices used in the text. Furthermore, it makes the reading text more attractive to the students. Based on that, the students can easily make sense of the text and use cohesive devices with full understanding. And in the time distribution for reading periods, the lecturers should spend more time teaching theory of text analysis.
Thirdly, it is necessary to have separated lessons on cohesion, which help the students understand cohesive devices, their use and their meanings thoroughly. It is advisable to teach English cohesive devices through teaching other skills such as reading and writing due to the fact that there is a little time for teaching English cohesive devices. In details, teaching grammatical cohesion through reading and writing is very important as the data collected indicated that using grammatical cohesive devices is more difficult for the students to use than lexical cohesive devices. In teaching conjunctions, the students should be provided with conjunctive knowledge, especially four types of conjunctions with typical words. They should be aware of how to use and translate the conjunctive words in the specific context.
Only by doing exercises can the students make acquaintance with these types of conjunctions. In teaching reference, the teachers can point out to the students that the chaining of reference and referents contributes greatly to the cohesion of the text. Teaching ellipsis and substitution through reading and writing can be done by exercises for practice. Moreover, teaching lexical cohesion through those skills also