Options Percent
A. Making sentences with new words 30%
B. Making dialogues with new words 17%
C. Asking and answering questions related to new words 15%
D. Learning new words by heart 75%
E. Playing word games 25%
F. Repeating new words 55%
G. Doing vocabulary exercises. 35%
H. Read new words aloud 27%
I. Write new words and Vietnamese equivalents into a 45%
notebook
J. Other opinions (Please specify) 0%
Table 3: Ways of learning English vocabulary of HRE
Each of the students has their own ways of learning vocabulary of HRE which are taken as their learning habits. Thus, in the questionnaire, Question 5 was set up to investigate students‟ habits of learning vocabulary of HRE.
Generally, students‟ habit of learning vocabulary is problematic. Most of the students learn in a passive way and still keep learning vocabulary in a very traditional way: learning new words by heart, repeating new words, read new words aloud, write new words and Vietnamese equivalents into a notebook. Consequently, they forget them easily and quickly. As seen in the table, the way of learning habit which is most chosen by the students is learning new words by heart that accounts for 75%. Actually, this way only helps students memorize new words temporarily if they do not often use them in speaking and writing. Meanwhile, the data indicates that 55% of the students habitually repeating new words many time to memorize. Furthermore, write new words and Vietnamese equivalents into a notebook also are a popular way of learning vocabulary among participants, which is up to 45%. Besides, 35% of students also are aware of looking for and doing a lot of vocabulary exercises. Sometimes, they also play word games for both entertainment and study, which account for 25%
Another traditional way of learning which 27% of informants also like is read new words aloud. They maybe combine both remember and practice pronouncing them.
This way is quite useful for them to improve their pronunciation and speaking. Only 15% of the students choose it as their vocabulary learning way. Also, making dialogues with new words is a wonderful chance for students to practice speaking their English in general and their vocabulary in particular. However, a moderate number of the informants (17%) always take the chances to use it. Meanwhile, 30% of the students like making sentences with new words separately and individually. This way only helps them memorize new words with hardly improving other skills, especially speaking.
3.2. Discussion of findings
Through the findings from survey questionnaires and interviews, teachers‟ and students‟ challenges in teaching and learning HREE vocabulary have been revealed obviously.
For students, the analysis reveals that students of HRE in general at IUH do not make use of a variety of learning strategies in ESP vocabulary learning. Students prefer to use repetition, and writing words and Vietnamese equivalents. In contrast, making a new sentence, making dialogues with new words, guessing the meaning from the context are the strategies least used by students. The habit of checking new words whenever they come across them in passage kills all interest, motivation and even interferes with comprehension, the students only concentrate on individual words and ignore the context which helps create the meaning of word. Many of them only learn vocabulary by rote learning, and they tend to face great difficulties in associating the meanings of the target words with their form and sound. As a result, they have not achieved satisfactory results in retaining vocabulary yet.
For teachers, ESP is viewed as something hard to teach. In addition, the teachers of HREE share the same difficulties with other ESP teachers. The teachers face challenges in teaching HREE vocabulary because they
- lack HRE vocabulary and terminologies
- lack specialized knowledge or knowledge of concept and knowledge of HRE - lack various teaching techniques
It can be seen that the teachers of ESP in general and teachers of HRE in particular are all teachers of GE who were not trained to teach ESP and they do not have ESP or HRE knowledge either. They have no specialist knowledge on the subject matter; they are unexpectedly required to teach a new and unfamiliar subject, which contains numerous terms, complicated structures and countless expressions.
Regarding the lack of various teaching techniques, many teachers still follow traditional techniques like translation all vocabulary into Vietnamese, ask students to read after them, etc., which is not stimulating but rather boring and depressing. However, it seems that during most of the class time, they rarely use any other technique but “translation” one. Furthermore, it should be better if teachers change their way of teaching. It may be a loss for the students if
their teachers do not apply some teaching techniques in combination, especially the useful ones during the process of teaching.
Through the analyzed challenges above, it is necessary to have solutions to overcome these above challenges.
3.3. Conclusion
From the above findings, the study has discovered a lot of difficulties faced by HREE teachers and students at IUH. Although ESP is quite difficult, especially its terminologies, mainly it is up to teachers and students as well as their learning and teaching methods.
Obviously, from the found results, students have not tried their best to fulfill their ESP study yet. They still are very passive and lazy. They have been not aware of learning English yet, especially ESP. In addition, their traditional ways of learning are not effective, which affects their perception and results. Further, for teachers, among various ways to overcome challenges, the most important one is that the ESP teachers should try to develop their professional competence and be flexible in the new teaching fields.