A study on english reading strategies employed by second year bridge and road students university of transport and communications

Some studies into this field have been conducted with different types of learners to find out particular strategies employed by effective and ineffective learners such as Huyen Tran’s st

1.1 Rationale

Internationally, teaching English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) has changed tremendously over the last few decades Most significantly, the traditional teacher-centred approach has been replaced with the learner-centred one, which reflects a desire to explore ways of making teaching responsive to learner needs and interests and allowing learners to play a fuller, more active and participatory role in the day-to-day teaching and learning processes Inherent in this approach is a shift in the responsibilities

of both teachers and students in the foreign language classroom No longer does the teacher act as the centre of all instruction, controlling every aspect of the learning process Learners themselves now, more than ever, are sharing the responsibility for successful language acquisition and, in doing so, are becoming less dependent on the language teacher for meeting their own individual language learning needs By giving students more responsibility for their own language development, language programs are inviting learners

to become more autonomous, to diagnose some of their own learning strengths and weaknesses and to self-direct the process of language development

In the field of second language acquisition research, focus has been shifted away from finding perfect teaching methodologies to investigating why some learners are very successful in their language learning while others are not although they have made as much effort learning the language Several studies that have been carried out by Oxford (1990), O’Malley and Chamot (1990) Nunan (1991), Rubin and Thompson (1994) and Cohen (1998) have shown that one of the most important factors that distinguish successful learners from unsuccessful ones is their learning strategies In other words, successful learners do use some effective learning strategies to deal with problems that emerge during their learning process while unsuccessful ones employ inappropriate or ineffective strategies resulting in their failure in their language learning This finding has provoked interests among researchers and teachers in identifying learning strategies employed by good language learners with a view to training bad learners to use such effective learning strategies

In Vietnam, learning strategies have also become a topic of interest in recent years when the concepts of “self-learning” and “life-long learning” have been familiar to the ears

of both Vietnamese teachers and students Some studies into this field have been conducted with different types of learners to find out particular strategies employed by effective and ineffective learners such as Huyen Tran’s study (2004) on vocabulary learning strategies used by students of English at Qui Nhon university or Mai Duong’s (2005) on writing strategies employed by first-year students at Hanoi National University However, studies

as such are still scarce, thus, more research should be done in order to clarify particular strategies used in different settings and by learners of different levels

At the University of Transport and Communications, reading is regarded as the most important skill to the students because these students need to read a lot of English technical books and documents to support their professional studies However, apart from some students who are quite good at English reading, most students find reading difficult They often complain that they have little understanding of the texts they have read and hardly gain any knowledge from their reading Having taught the Bridge and Road Engineering students for several years, I am aware of their problems and very much want

to help them to improve their reading ability Therefore, I intend to examine their reading strategies and find out the differences in the strategies used by students of higher reading abilities and those of lower reading abilities Based on the findings, I am going to make some recommendations to improve the students’ reading proficiency

1.2 Scope, aims and significance of the study

1.2.1 Scope of the study

The study investigates the reading strategies used by effective and ineffective readers among second-year students of English Bridge and Road class (hereafter EBR) at the University of Transport and Communications (hereafter UTC) The study of learning strategies in other English skills would be beyond the scope

1.2.2 Aims of the study

The major purposes of this study are:

(1) to identify the range of reading strategies utilized by the good readers and poor readers among the second-year EBR students at the UTC;

(2) to examine the differences in reading strategy use between these two groups of readers;

(3) to inform teachers so that they can find ways to improve their students’ reading proficiency

In order to achieve the above aims of the study, the following major research questions will be addressed:

- What is the range of reading strategies used by the good and poor readers among the EBR students?

- How do the good readers and poor readers differ in terms of reading strategies employed?

1.2.3 Significance of the study

The study is the first one to be carried out in the field of reading strategy research at the UTC It helps give a detailed description of reading strategies used by the good and poor readers among second-year EBR students at the university More importantly, it works out a classification scheme for these reading strategies It also provides a thorough analysis of the differences in the reading strategies employed by these two groups of readers The findings of their reading strategies can help teachers to understand more about their students and they can serve as the foundation for some recommendations on how to improve the students’ reading proficiency They are also an important basis for reading strategy based instruction to be implemented in the future

1.3 Methods of the study

This study is to be conducted as a descriptive study that utilizes both quantitative and qualitative approaches The quantitative analysis is employed through the process of data collected from a written questionnaire and think-aloud reports to examine the differences between the good and bad readers in their reading strategies In addition, the qualitative approach is used to deal with the data collected from interviews with these two groups of readers The combination of these data collection methods will help the author achieve the aims of the study

1.4 Organization of the thesis

The study consists of five chapters

Chapter 1 is the Introduction, which states the rationale, scope, aims, significance, methods and organization of the study

Chapter 2 reviews the literature relevant to the topic of research and summarizes some selected studies on reading strategies, which serves as a theoretical and methodological foundation of the study

Chapter 3 presents the research methodology of the study It provides information about the participants, the instrumentation, the data collection procedures and data analysis Chapter 4 is the main part of the study that reports and discusses the main findings according to the research questions

Chapter 5 is the Conclusion that summarizes the findings, presents the implications and limitations of the study and finally gives some suggestions for further research

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter reviews theories related to learning strategies in general and reading strategies in particular It also summarizes some studies on reading strategies that have been conducted so far All of these serve as a basis for an investigation into reading strategies which is carried out and presented in the next chapter

2.1 Learning strategies

2.1.1 Definition

Over the last two decades, the study of learning strategies has seen an “explosion of activity” (R Ellis, 1994) with the contributions of such well-known researchers as Tarone (1981), Weinstein and Mayer (1986), Rubin (1987), O’Malley and Chamot (1990), Oxford (1990) and Cohen (1998) These studies have helped figure out a comprehensive overview

of learning strategies

Concerning the definition of learning strategies, there have been some considerable differences in the existing literature Rubin (1987) gave quite a broad definition of learning strategies: “Learning strategies are strategies which contribute to the development of the language system which the learner constructs and affect learning directly” (1987: 23) Tarone (1981) defined learning strategies as attempts to develop linguistic and sociolinguistic competence in the target language These definitions are too general in comparison to the complex nature of learning strategies

Oxford (1990) claimed that “Learning strategies are specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self directed, more effective and more transferable to new situations” (1990:5) This definition is judged to be quite comprehensive as it not only covers the cognitive but also the affective aspects of learning strategies (i.e to increase enjoyment in learning) However, Oxford’s definition is not sufficient in the sense that it regards learning strategies as “specific actions”, i.e learning strategies are behavioral, and therefore, they are mostly observable However, a lot of studies in this field have shown that learning strategies are difficult to observe as they are not only behavioral

In an attempt to define learning strategies in a more sensible manner, Weinstein and Mayer (in Ellis, 1994:531) claimed that learning strategies “ are the behaviors and thoughts that a learner engages in during learning that are intended to influence the learner’s encoding process” Thus, these two authors see learning strategies both behavioral and mental Their view has been shared by most researchers in strategy studies

The definition that has been widely accepted to date was proposed by O’Malley and Chamot (1990) According to them, learning strategies are “the special thoughts or behaviors that individuals use to help them comprehend, learn or retain new information” (1990: 1) In spite of being quite short, their definition covers the most important aspects of learning strategies, that is learning strategies are both mental and behavioral (therefore both observable and unobservable), and learning strategies are individually characterized (i.e every learner’s strategies are different) Because of its comprehensive features, the present study utilized this definition as the key direction in its investigation

2.1.2 Classification of learning strategies

Much of the earlier research (Rubin 1975 and 1981; Stern 1975; Naiman et al 1978) focused on compiling inventories of the learning strategies that learners were observed to use or reported to use

Rubin (1981) proposed a classification scheme that subsumes learning strategies under two primary groupings and a number of subgroups Rubin’s first primary category, consisting of strategies that directly affect learning, includes clarification/verification, monitoring, memorization, guessing/inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning and practice The second category, consisting of strategies that contribute indirectly to learning, includes creating practice opportunities and using production tricks such as communication strategies An alternative classification scheme proposed by Naiman et al (1978) contains five broad categories of learning strategies and a number of secondary categories The primary classification includes an active task approach, realization of language as a means

of communication and interaction, management of affective demands and monitoring of second language performance

Subsequent descriptive studies have endeavored to identify broad classes of learning strategies, under which a large number of more specific strategies can be grouped The works of Wenden (1983), Oxford (1990), O’Malley et al (1985a and 1985b),

O’Malley and Chamot 1990) have made an important contribution to our knowledge of learning strategies Wenden’s (1983) research examined the strategies that adult foreign language learners use in order to direct their own learning She identifies three general categories of self-directing strategies: (1) knowing about language (relating to what language and language learning involves, (2) planning (relating to the what and how of language learning) and (3) self-evaluation (relating to progress in learning and the learner’s response to the learning experience) Wenden’s framework was devised as a basis for learner training

R Oxford (1990) built on the earlier classifications with the aim of subsuming within her taxonomy virtually every strategy previously mentioned in the literature Oxford (1990) draws a general distinction between direct and indirect strategies The former consists of memory, cognitive and compensation strategies while the latter includes metacognitive, affective and social strategies However, Oxford’s classification of learning strategies is somewhat complicated and confusing as she treats compensation strategies as

a direct type of learning strategies and memory strategies as separate ones from cognitive strategies

Perhaps, the framework that has been most useful and generally accepted is O’Malley and Chamot (1990)’s In O’Malley and Chamot's framework, three major types

of strategies are distinguished in accordance with the information processing model, on which their research is based Metacognitive strategies are “higher order executive skills that may entail planning for, monitoring or evaluating the success of a learning activity” (O’Malley and Chamot: 44) Cognitive strategies “operate directly on incoming information, manipulating it in ways that enhance learning” (O’Malley and Chamot, 1990: 44) The last type of learning strategies is Social/Affective which “involves either interaction with another person or ideational control over affect” (O’Malley and Chamot, 1990: 45) The subtypes of these strategies presented in Table 2.1 were identified by O’Malley and Chamot on the basis of their several descriptive studies on learning strategies used by second language learners

Table 2.1 Learning strategy definition and classification (O' Maley and Chamot, 1990: 119) Learning strategy Definition

A Metacognitive strategies

Planning

Advance organizers Previewing the main ideas and concepts of the material to be

learned, often by skimming the text for the organizing principle Directed attention Deciding in advance to attend in general to a learning task and to

ignore irrelevant distracters

Functional planning Planning for and rehearsing linguistic components necessary to

carry out an upcoming task

Selective attention Deciding in advance to attend to specific aspects of input, often

by scanning for key words, concepts and/or linguistic markers Self-management Understanding the conditions that help one learn and arranging

for the presence of those conditions

Monitoring

Self-monitoring Checking one’s comprehension during listening or reading or

checking the accuracy and/or appropriateness of one’s oral or written production while it is taking place

Evaluation

Self-evaluation Checking the outcomes of one’s own language against a standard

after it has been completed

Deduction Applying rules to understand or produce the second language or

making up rules based on language analysis

Imagery Using visual images (either mental or actual) to understand or

remember new information

Auditory representation Planning back in one’s mind the sound of a word, phrase or

longer language sequence

Key word method Remembering a new word in the second language by: (1)

identifying a familiar word in the first language that sounds like

or otherwise resembles the new word, and (2) generating easily recalled images of some relationship with the first language homonym and the new word in the second language

Elaboration Relating new information to prior knowledge, relating different

parts of new information to each other, or making meaningful personal associations with the new information

Transfer Using previous linguistic knowledge or prior skills to assist

comprehension or production

Inferencing Using available information to guess meanings of new items,

predict outcomes or fill in missing information

Note taking Writing down key words or concepts in abbreviated verbal,

graphic or numerical form while listening or reading

Summarizing Making a mental, oral or written summary of new information

gained through listening or reading

Recombination Constructing a meaningful sentence or larger language sequence

by combining known elements in a new way

Translation Using the first language as a base for understanding and/or

producing the second language C.Social/Affective

strategies

Question for clarification Eliciting from a teacher or peer additional explanations,

rephrasing, examples or verification

Cooperation Working together with one or more peers to solve a problem, pool

information, check a learning task, model a language activity, or get feedback on oral or written performance

Self-talk Reducing anxiety by using mental techniques that make one feel

competent to do the learning task

This classification of learning strategies is comprehensive and sufficient and it is applicable to learning strategy studies on four English disciplines Therefore, the current study will adopt O’Malley and Chamot's classification of learning strategies as the theoretical framework for investigation

2.2 The theory of reading

Reading plays such a significant part in the success of second language learning and it is essential to understand what reading really is However, the act of reading is not completely understood nor easily described In a general term, reading is defined as “an active, fluent process which involves the reader and the reading material in building meaning” (Anderson,1999: 1) This definition of reading has been generally shared by other researchers

According to Rumelhart (1977), reading involves the reader, the text and the interaction between the reader and text Aebersold and Field (1997: 15) share the same view on reading: “Reading is what happens when people look at a text and assign meaning

to the written symbols in that text The text and the reader are the two physical entities necessary for the reading process to start It is, however, the interaction between the text and the reader that constitutes actual meaning” These interactions, in their opinion, are the interactions between purpose and manner of reading and through reading strategies and schema Purpose determines how people read a text People may read the text to understand it (reading for full comprehension), or simply to get the general idea (skimming), to find the part that contains the information they need (scanning) Readers also use some mental activities that are often referred to as reading strategies to construct meaning from a text In addition, readers base on their previous knowledge that they bring

to the text to assist their reading comprehension This prior knowledge is known as the

schema Research in reading has shown that schema plays an important role in helping the reader to comprehend a text

The above-mentioned views on reading are only general ones In order to understand more about the nature of reading, it is necessary to take a closer look at the actual process that really takes place in the reader’s mind So far, several models have been proposed to describe this process The next section is going to present these models of reading and discuss their strengths and weaknesses

2.2.2 Models of reading process

Up to now, attempts to describe the interaction between reader and text have been numerous and different views of the reading process have been proposed These views are often grouped under three different reading models named the bottom-up, the top-down and the interactive ones

2.2.2.1 Bottom-up model

Early researchers often assumed a passive, bottom up view of second language reading, that is it was viewed as “a decoding process of reconstructing the author’s intended meaning” via recognizing the printed letters and words and building up a meaning for a text from the smallest textual units at the bottom (letters and words) to larger and larger units at the top (phrases, clauses, intersentential linkages) (Rivers 1964, 1968; Plaister 1968; Yorio 1971)

In other words, in the bottom-up reading model, the reader begins with the written text (the bottom) and constructs meaning from the letters, words, phrases and sentences found within and then processes the text in a linear fashion The incoming data from the text must be received before the high level mental stages of understanding transform and recode the data

Gough (1972) who supported this reading model explained the sequence of the reading system from a bottom-up perspective as follows: First, the graphemic information enters through the visual system and is transformed at the first level from a letter character, that is from a graphemic representation to a phonemic representation Second, the phonemic representation is converted, at level two into a word The meaning units or words then pass

on to the third level and meaning is assimilated into the knowledge system

In short, the bottom-up model tends to be linear as they start with the printed stimuli and proceed to higher level stage, one step after another The basis for bottom-up processing is the linguistic knowledge of the reader However, this model reveals several shortcomings in describing the actual reading process

An important drawback of this model, as pointed out by Samuel and Kamil (1988:31), is “the lack of feedback, in that no mechanism is provided to allow for processing stages which occur later in the system to influence processing which occurs earlier in the system Because of the lack of feedback loops in the early bottom-up models,

it was difficult to account for sentence-context effects and the role of prior knowledge of text topic as facilitating variables in word recognition and comprehension.”

Due to this limitation, and together with the advent of Goodman’s top-down view

of reading, the bottom-up view of reading fell into disfavor

2.2.2.2 Top-down model

About over three decades ago, the views on reading changed together with the down model of reading Goodman (1971: 135) described reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game”, in which the “reader reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display” According to this point of view, the reader reconstructs meaning from written language by using the graphonic, syntactic and semantic systems of the language, but he/she merely uses cues from the three levels of language to predict meaning, and most important, confirms those predictions by relating them to his/her past experiences and knowledge of the language

top-Although Goodman did not characterize his theory as a top-down model, several other reading experts (Anderson 1978; Cziko 1978) have considered it as basically a concept-driven top-down pattern in which “higher level processes interact with and direct the flow of information through low level processes” (Stanovich 1980:34) In this top-down approach, the reader begins with a set of hypotheses or predictions about the meaning of text he is about to read and then selectively sample the text to determine whether or not his predictions are correct Reading is a process of reconstructing meaning rather than decoding form, and the reader only resorts to decoding if other means fail This perspective was shared by many other reading specialists such as Carrel (1988), Clarke and Siberstern (1977), Mackey and Mountford (1979) and Widdowson (1978, 1983) as they

viewed reading as “an active process in which the second language reader is an active information processor who predicts while sampling only parts of the actual text” (in Carrel, 1988:3)

Just like bottom-up models, top-down models do have some limitations These models “tend to emphasize such higher-level skills as the prediction of meaning by means

of context clues or certain kinds of background knowledge at the expense of such lower skills as the rapid and accurate identification of lexical and grammatical form That is, in making the perfectly valid point that fluent reading is primarily a cognitive process, they tend to deemphasize the perceptual and decoding dimensions of that process” (Eskey, 1988: 93)

Samuel and Kamil (1988) also share the same view According to them, one of the problems for the top-down model is that for many texts, the reader has little knowledge of the topic and cannot generate predictions A more serious problem is that even if a skilled reader could generate predictions, the amount of time necessary to generate a prediction may

be greater than the amount of time the skilled reader needs simply to recognize the words

Due to the above limitations of both bottom-up and top-down models, a new and more insightful model of reading process has been proposed by Rumelhart (1977, 1980), Sanford and Garrod (1981) and van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) under the name of interactive model 2.2.2.3 Interactive model

The interactive model combines elements of both bottom-up and top-down approaches, assuming that “a pattern is synthesized based on information provided simultaneously from several knowledge sources” (Stanovich, 1980: 35)

Widdownson (1979) has discussed reading as the process of combining textual information with the information a reader brings to a text In this view, the reading process

is not simply a matter of extracting information from the text Rather, it is one in which the reading activates a range of knowledge in the reader’s mind that he or she uses, and that, in turn, may be refined and extended by the new information supplied by the text

Eskey (1988) defined the interactive model as a reading model that “posits a constant interaction between bottom-up and top-down processing in reading, each source

of information contributing to a comprehensive reconstruction of the meaning of the text”

(1988: 94) According to this view, good readers are regarded as “both good decoders and good interpreters of texts, their decoding skills becoming more automatic but no less important as their reading skill develops” (1988: 94) Eskey also believed that to achieve both fluency and accuracy in reading, developing readers must work at perfecting both their bottom-up recognition skills and their top-down interpretation strategies In other word, good reading - that is, fluent and accurate reading- can result only from a constant interaction between these two processes

The following comment by Stanovich (1980) can summarize all the strengths of the interactive model over the other two models:

“Interactive models of reading appear to provide a more accurate conceptualization

of reading performance than strictly top-down or bottom-up models When combined with

an assumption of compensatory processing (that a deficit in any particular process will result in a greater reliance on their knowledge sources, regardless of their level in the processing hierarchy), interactive models provide a better account of the existing data on the use of orthographic structure and sentence context by good and poor readers” (1980: 32)

Therefore, it is generally agreed that the interactive model is the best one that can truly reflect the reading process that takes place in the reader’s mind In this process, the reader constantly shuttles between bottom-up and top-down processes and he can not be successful in reading comprehension without either of these two processes As this study focuses on reading strategies, the next part is going to summarize some outstanding studies

on reading strategies that have been carried out

2.2.3 Reading strategies

2.2.3.1 Definition

Much attention has been paid to the study of reading in general and reading strategies in particular Reading strategies are of interest for what they reveal about the way the readers manage their interaction with written text and how these strategies are related to text comprehension

As mentioned earlier, research in second language learning suggests that learners use a variety of strategies to assist them with the acquisition, storage and retrieval of information C Brantmeier (2002) defined reading strategies as “the comprehension

processes that readers use in order to make sense of what they read” (2002:1) This process may involve skimming, scanning, guessing, recognizing cognates and word families, reading for meaning, predicting, activating general knowledge, making inferences, following references and separating main ideas from supporting ones (Barnet, 1988) Obviously, some strategies may be more useful than others with different types of reading texts and tasks

Based on O’Maley and Chamot’s (1990), reading strategies can be understood as the special thoughts or behaviours that individuals use to help them to comprehend, learn and retain new information from the reading text These strategies are both observable and unobservable and individually different According to O’Malley and Chamot (1990), reading strategies can be classified into three main types including the metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies A categorization scheme of these strategies have been provided in section 2.1.2

2.2.3.2 Review of reading strategy research

A considerable number of studies examine the comprehension strategies that second language readers utilize to process a text In these studies, the participants are quite diverse, some from elementary, secondary and university levels, some from remedial reading classes and others enrolled in courses taught at non-university language centres Obviously, the participants are of many different ages and backgrounds Furthermore, the investigators use a variety of research methods and tasks to examine strategy type and frequency of strategy use including think-aloud reports, interviews, questionnaires, observations and written recalls (Bernhardt, 1991) Table 2.2 provides a brief summary of the selected studies

Table 2.2 Foreign Language Reading Strategy Research

Hosenfield

(1977)

Ninth grade students

learning French; 20

successful readers and 20

poor readers; think-aloud

reports for each sentence

they read

Two different codes:

Main - meaning line and word solving strategies

(1) Successful readers kept meaning of passage in mind while assigning meaning to sentence etc; whereas poor readers focused on solving unknown words or phrases

Block

(1986)

9 university level ESL and

native English students in

a remedial reading course;

think-aloud reports for

each sentence they read

Two different codes:

General strategies and local strategies

(1) More successful readers: (a) used their general knowledge (b) focused on the overall meaning of text (c) integrated new information with old (d) differentiated main ideas from supporting points (2) The poor readers rarely did any of the above

Sarig

(1987)

Ten female native Hebrew

readers studying English

as a foreign language;

Think-aloud reports while

reading native language

texts and foreign language

texts

Four different codes (1) technical aids, such as skimming, scanning, using glossary (2) clarification and simplification such

as decoding meanings of

(1) Subjects transferred strategies from L1 to L2 reading

(2) Global strategies led to both successful and unsuccessful reading comprehension (3) Classification and simplication strategies

words, paraphrasing, syntactic simplification (3) coherence detection such as identification of text type and use

of prior content schemata (4) monitoring moves such as mistake correction, slowing down and identification of misunderstanding

contributed to unsuccessful reading comprehension in L1 and L2

Carrell

(1989)

75 native English speakers

learning Spanish in first,

second and third-year

courses; 45 native

speakers of Spanish in

intermediate ESL courses;

written strategy use

Local or bottom-up strategies

(1) Spanish as a foreign language group at lower proficiency levels used more bottom-up processing strategies, (2) ESL group at advanced levels used top-down strategies

(1) Students who used more strategies comprehended better

(2) No significant

Language Skills reading

Comprehension Test) with

multiple choice questions;

TPR (Textbooks Reading

Profile) with think-aloud

reports)

(3) drawing inferences Coding Scheme for TRP

(1) supervising (2) supporting (3) paraphrasing (4) establishing coherence (5) test taking

relationship between the amount of unique strategies and comprehension

Block

(1992)

16 proficient readers of

English, 9 non-proficient

readers of English;

think-aloud reports at sentence

level

Two different codes:

Meaning based (global) and word level (local)

(1) Less proficient readers used local strategies (2) More proficient readers relied on global strategies One of the earliest pieces of research on individual learners’ reading strategies was conducted by Hosenfeld (1977) She examined successful readers and unsuccessful readers

to find out what types of cognitive operations they used to process written texts Participants were ninth grade students who were learning French Before conducting her study, she classified readers based on a test of L2 reading Then, in an oral interview, participants were asked to read a text and do think-aloud reports (that is, she directed them

to say in their first language whatever came to their mind while processing each sentence

in the text) Hosenfeld found out that the successful readers used the following kinds of strategies (1977: 233- 4):

o keep the meaning of the passage in mind

o read in broad phrases

o skip inessential words

o guess from context the meaning of unknown words

o have a good self-concept as a reader

o identify the grammatical category of words

o demonstrate sensitivity to a different word order

o examine illustrations

o read the title and make inferences from it

o use orthographic information (e.g capitalization)

o refer to the side glossary

o use the glossary as a last resort

o look up words correctly

o continue if unsuccessful at decoding a word or phrase

o recognize cognates

o use their knowledge of the world,

o follow through with a proposed solution to a problem

o evaluate their guesses

Poor readers, on the other hand, translated sentences and lost the general meaning

of the passage, rarely skipped words or looked up unknown words in a glossary and had a poor concept as a reader While these results clearly described the strategies students used

to process the text, they did not link the strategy use to comprehension of specific paragraphs or to the text as whole The data only focused on sentence level comprehension

so the results of the study did not reveal overall comprehension of the entire text

A decade later, Block’s (1986) study compared the reading comprehension strategies used by native English speakers and ESL students who were enrolled in a remedial reading course at the university level and she connected these behaviors to comprehension The participants were identified as non-proficient readers because they failed a college reading proficiency test before the study Subjects read two exploratory passages selected from an introductory psychology textbook, and were asked to think aloud while reading (they reported after each sentence) After reading and retelling each passage, the participants answered twenty multiple choice comprehension questions Block developed a scheme to classify strategies that consisted of two types: general strategies and

local strategies General strategies included the following behaviors: anticipate content, recognize text structure, integrate information, question information, distinguish main ideas, interpret the text, use general knowledge and associations to background, comment

on behavior or process, monitor comprehension, correct behavior, focused on textual meaning as a whole, and react to the text Local strategies were: paraphrase, reread, question meaning of a clause or a sentence, question meaning of a word and solve a vocabulary problem Of the 9 ESL students in the study, the readers with higher comprehension scores on the retelling and the multiple choice questions integrated new information in the text with old information, distinguished main ideas from details, referred

to their background and focus on the textual meaning as a whole This means they all eomployed “general strategies” On the other hand, readers with low comprehension scores rarely distinguished main ideas from details, rarely referred to their background, infrequently focused on textual meaning and seldom integrated information

Sarig (1987) investigated the contribution of L1 reading strategies and L2 language proficiency to L2 reading, as well as the relationship between L1 and L2 reading strategies Sarig’s subjects were 10 female native Hebrew readers who were studying English as a foreign language Sarig classified the data from think-aloud reports into four general types

of behaviors or responses: (1) technical aids, (2) clarification and simplification, (3) coherence detection and (4) monitoring moves Sarig’s results revealed that subjects transferred strategies from L1 reading to L2 reading and that the same reading strategy types “accounted for success and failure in both languages to almost the same extent” (Sarig, 1987: 118) Top-down, global strategies led to both successful and unsuccessful reading comprehension The two language dependent strategies, the clarification and simplification strategies contributed to unsuccessful reading comprehension in both L1 and L2 Results also indicated that most of the strategies used during the reading comprehension process were particular to each reader or that each individual reads differently and used a different combination of strategies These results do not duplicate Block’s (1986) where global strategies led to successful (not unsuccessful) reading comprehension

Some studies have shown that better readers are also better strategy users Carrel (1989) for example, conducted a study to investigate the metacognitive awareness of second language reader strategies in both their first and second language and the

relationship between this awareness and their comprehension Her first group of subjects was native Spanish speakers of intermediate and high-intermediate levels studying English

as a second language at a university level institute Her second group consisted of native English speakers learning Spanish as a foreign language in first, second and third-year courses Carrel first asked subjects to read two texts, one in L1 and one in L2 She controlled for content schemata as both texts were on a general topic of language The subjects then answered multiple-choice comprehension questions about the text followed

by a strategy use questionnaire Carrel correlated strategy use with comprehension and concluded that the ESL readers of more advanced proficiency level perceived “global” or top-down strategies as more effective With the Spanish as a L2 group, she found that at the lower proficiency levels, subjects used more bottom-up or “local” strategies

Anderson (1991) examined individual differences in strategy use on two types of reading tasks: standardized reading comprehension tests and academic texts The subjects were 28 Spanish-speaking adult students (18 females and 10 males) enrolled in university level English as a second language courses On the first day of the study, Anderson assessed participants’ reading comprehension skills with a typical standardized test On a different day, participants read two passages from the Textbook Reading Profile, which consisted of academic reading passages taken from fresh-men level texts The subjects verbalized reading strategies used for both forms of reading comprehension The results of Anderson’s qualitative and quantitative inquiries demonstrated that for both the standardized reading comprehension test and the textbook reading, participants who used more strategies tended to comprehend better Of relevance is that results also indicated that there is not a statistically significant relationship between the number of particular strategies reported and overall comprehension scores on the reading tasks

The last study mentioned here was conducted by Block (1992) He investigated the comprehension monitoring process used by first and second language readers of English The subjects were 25 college freshmen and consisted of proficient and non-proficient readers of English While reading an expository text, the participants were asked to think aloud or more specifically, to “say everything they understood and everything they were thinking as they read each sentence” (Block, 1992: 323) The results indicated that when facing a vocabulary problem, proficient ESL readers used background knowledge, decided

on whether the word contributed to the overall meaning of the passage, reread the sentence

and used syntactic clues These meaning -based strategies are classified as global behaviors On the other hand, non-proficient ESL readers focused on identifying lexical problems and did little to figure out the meaning of words

From the above findings of research in reading strategies, it becomes clear that there are indeed differences between successful or good readers and less successful or poor readers in terms of strategy use Overall, more proficient readers combine both top-down and bottom-up strategies in reading but tend to use more top-down strategies than bottom-

up ones Specifically, they exhibit the following types of reading behavior:

• overview text before reading

• employ context clues such as titles, subheadings and diagrams

• look for important information while reading and pay greater attention to it than other information

• attempt to relate important points in text to one another in order to understand the text as a whole

• activate and use prior knowledge to interpret text

• reconsider and revise hypothesis about the meaning of text based on text content

• attempt to infer information from the text

• attempt to identify or infer the meaning of words not understood or recognized

• monitor text comprehension

• use strategies to remember text (paraphrasing, repetition, making notes, summarizing, self-questioning etc)

• understand relationships between parts of text and recognize text structure

• change reading strategies when comprehension is perceived not be proceeding smoothly

• evaluate the qualities of text

• reflect on and process additionally after a part has been read and anticipate

or plan for the use of knowledge gained from the reading

(Hosenfield 1977; Block 1986; Carrel 1986) While this list is not priotized or complete, it helps provide a description of the characteristics of successful readers and serves as an important foundation for more research into reading

However, a gap that can be found in these studies on reading strategies is that few researchers who have attempted to classify reading strategies into a more comprehensive scheme except for top-down and bottom-up strategies (or global or local strategies) This is the gap that the current thesis study tries to bridge by using O’Malley and Chamot’s scheme to classify the reading strategies used by the good readers and bad readers among the EBR students As mentioned earlier, this scheme was developed by O’Malley and Chamot (1990) based on their several descriptive studies on learning strategies in four English skills It can reflect the actual reading process as it contains both top-down and bottom-up strategies within its categories The top-down strategies included in this scheme are elaboration (relating prior knowledge to new information), transfer (using previous linguistic knowledge or prior skills to assist comprehension), inferencing (using the available information to guess meaning of new items and predict outcomes) and summarizing (making mental or oral summary of new information gained through reading) The bottom-up strategies are grouping (classifying words, terminology or concepts according to their attributes or meanings), deduction (applying rules to understand the second language), recombination (constructing a meaningful sentence or larger language sequence by combining known elements in a new way), key word methods (remember a new word in the second language) and translation (using the first language as

a base for understanding the second language) In addition, there are metacognitive strategies that involve executive processes in planning for reading, monitoring comprehension and evaluating how well one has achieved a reading activity Therefore, this classification framework is quite comprehensive and applicable to examining reading strategies In this study, the EBR subjects’ reading strategies are classified according to these categories of this scheme and differences in their strategies are identified

The classification of learning strategies is also a complex work done by a considerable number of researchers Based on descriptive studies on learning strategies of ESL and EFL learners, Rubin (1975), Naiman et al (1978), Wenden (1983), Oxford (1990),O’Malley et al (1985a and 1985b) and O’Malley and Chamot (1990) have proposed useful schemes for classification of learning strategies Of these schemes, O’Malley and Chamot's has been most useful and generally accepted to date In O’Malley and Chamot's framework, three major types including metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies are distinguished in accordance with the information processing model, on which their research is based Such a detailed and sufficient classification of learning strategies is presented in table 2.1 and is going to be adopted for the investigation

of reading strategies for this study

The second part of this chapter covers the important theories related to reading and

an overview of studies on reading strategies of successful and unsuccessful learners Different definitions of reading are provided by different researchers These authors view reading based on three reading models namely the bottom-up, top-down and interactive ones Bottom-up theorists argues that the reader constructs the text from the smallest units (letters to words to phrases to sentences, etc) and decoding is an earlier term for this process Top-down reading authors insist that readers bring a great deal of knowledge, expectations, assumptions and questions to the text and, given a basic understanding of the vocabulary, they continue to read as long as the text confirms their expectations (Goodman 1967) The interactive model, which most researchers currently endorse, argues that both top-down and bottom-up processes occur in reading, either alternatively or at the same

time These theorists describe a process that moves both bottom-up and top-down, depending on the type of text as well as on the reader’s background knowledge, language proficiency level, motivation, strategy use and culturally shaped beliefs about reading In comparison to the bottom-up and top-down models, interactive models of reading provide

a more accurate conceptualization of reading performance and describe exactly what really happens during the reader’s reading process According to this interactive model, good reading can result only from a constant interaction between the bottom-up and top-down processes In other words, good readers are those who can “efficiently integrate” both of these processes This view is now shared by a majority of researchers in a numerous number of studies on reading

The last part of the chapter discusses reading strategies, the focus of the thesis, in details After giving definitions of reading strategies, it reviews some prominent studies on reading strategies employed by ESL/EFL readers that have been conducted so far With the use of a variety of research methods including think-aloud verbal reports, interviews, questionnaires, observations and written recalls, the investigators tried to examine strategy type and frequency of strategy use by readers of different proficiency levels Most of the researchers have concluded that there are indeed differences between effective and ineffective readers in terms of strategies used The more proficient readers often employed both top-down and bottom-up strategies but appear to use more top-down ones A detailed description of reading strategies employed by effective readers is provided so as to serve as the basis for any research into reading strategies

The next chapter is the study on reading strategies used by the EBR students, which has been conducted in the light of the theories discussed above

The previous chapter has presented a literature review on learning strategies, theory

of reading and reading strategies and provided a necessary theoretical background for the present study This chapter presents the methodology used for the data collection and analysis in the study It starts with a description of the participants and the setting of the study It then describes data collection instruments and analysis procedures of the study It also presents the advantages and disadvantages of each data collection instrument

3.1 Participants and settings of the study

3.1.1 Participants:

The participants in this study were 22 second-year non-English majors specializing

in Bridge and Road Engineering at the University of Transport and Communication Of them, there were three girls and nineteen boys, who mostly came from the countryside Only three students were twenty-one years old and the other nineteen students were twenty-years old All of them spent between 4-13 years learning English (two students learned English for 13 years; fourteen students for 8 years; six students for 4 years) Their English proficiency levels were generally reported to be at pre-intermediate Table 3.1 summarizes the background information about the participants such as the genders, ages, number of years learning English and their self-assessed English proficiency

Table 3.1 Background information about the participants

(years)

Number of years learning English

English proficiency Total number

of participants

Male Female 20 21 4 years 8 years 13 years Pre-intermediate

These students belong to a special system at the university which is named

“English Bridge and Road System” This EBR system has been established since 1998 and aimed to train gifted students majoring in Bridge and Road Engineering with high proficiency in English The classes of this system only admit students with very high

scores in the entrance exam to university, which means these students are excellent in Maths, Physics and Chemistry The English course, which is specifically designed for these students, lasts from the first year to the fifth year of training at the university This course is divided into two periods: The GE (General English) course delivered in the first and second year and the ESP course (English for Civil Engineering) delivered in the third, fourth and fifth year In addition, they have to learn some professional subjects in English

in the fourth and fifth year Therefore, for these students, English is not a minor subject but plays a very important role in their study at the university

There are some reasons for choosing the second-year EBR students as the participants of this study Firstly, the training quality of these gifted students is always of great concern to both the university authority and teachers at the UTC The findings of this study would provide essential information for teachers to improve the EBR students’ reading proficiency and hence contribute to enhancing the overall training quality of these students Secondly, the second - year EBR students are suitable participants for the study because they have had already some proficiency in English reading after nearly two years learning English at the UTC It is feasible for me to conduct the study on reading strategies with such students of quite good reading abilities In addition, as these students are the ones who I have been directly teaching, I will have favourable conditions to carry out all the steps of the research process

3.1.1.1 Selection of good and bad readers

In order to select the good and bad readers among the EBR students, I had required the students to do three reading tests The first reading test was taken from Longman Preparation Series for the TOEIC Test by Lin Loughgheed This test included two reading passages with 8 comprehension questions The second reading comprehension test was taken from Thoughts and Notion by Linda Lee and Barbara Bushly This reading test contained two parts with 10 reading comprehension questions The third reading test was drawn from Cambridge First Certificate Examination Practice 1 published by University of Cambridge All of these reading tests are included in Appendix 1 When deciding the tests for my students, I took into consideration their reading abilities At the time of data collection, their English proficiency was at the pre-intermediate level The reading comprehension tests chosen for them should be suitable for this proficiency level As

TOEIC and Cambridge First Certificate books were generally quite difficult, I only chose short and quite simple reading tasks which were more appropriate for my students

The three different reading tests were given to 22 EBR second-year students one after another during three weeks The test papers were then marked and scores were collected Table 3.2 shows the central tendency and the dispersion of the scores obtained

in three reading tests

Table 3.2 Central tendencies and dispersions of three test scores

Table 3.3 shows each student's test score, mean and standard deviation The students were ranked in this table according to their mean scores obtained in these tests Table 3.3 Students’ scores, means and standard deviations obtained in three tests Students

The present study was conducted from early March to mid June 2006 when the students were in the second semester of the second year Up to the time of the study, they had been studying English at the university for more than one and a half year with 450

periods (8 periods per week) They had finished learning a series of Lifeline books including Lifelines Elementary, Lifelines Pre-intermediate by Tom Hutchinson and some other materials adapted to suit their proficiency levels such as Listen for it and Academic Writing At the time of the study, they were learning Lifelines - Intermediate by Tom Hutchinson All of these textbooks and materials aim to provide these students with basic knowledge of English and help them to be skillful in speaking, listening, reading and writing They also serve as a preparation course for the ESP course to be delivered in the third year As mentioned earlier, this English program, which consists of two courses namely GE and ESP and lasts for five years, is completely different from the course of other normal classes at the UTC

During this time, I was the only teacher who directly taught the learner-participants and therefore, quite understands their strengths and weaknesses in English This is a great advantage for me to conduct the study

3.2 Instruments of data collection

The present study utitilized both quantitative and qualitative methods including tests, questionnaires, interviews and think-aloud reports to collect data on the reading strategies employed by the second-year EBR subjects

he questionnaires were administered to the identified good and bad readers to find out their reading strategies The interviews followed by think-loud reports were individually conducted to determine the particular reading strategies that learners used to do a reading comprehension task

The reason why I used multiple approaches to data collection is that different types

of data collection procedures may lead to different conclusions about the characters and uses of reading strategies This combination of data collection instruments would provide a comprehensive overview of reading strategies used by my students This is also the approach that was successfully employed by in other learning strategy studies such as O’Maley and Chamot (1990), Oxford (1990) and Naiman et al (1978) The following part discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each data collection instrument employed in this study

3.2.2 Questionnaires

Questionnaires are printed forms for data collection, which include questions or statements to which the subject is expected to respond, often anonymously Questions can range form those that ask for yes-no responses or indication of frequency (e.g ‘never’,

‘seldom’, ‘sometimes’, ‘often’ and ‘always’) to less structured questions asking respondents to describe or discuss language learning behavior in detail The questionnaire used in this study consisted of two main parts The first part required subjects to give information about their names, ages, genders, the number of years learning English, their English certificates (if available) and their English proficiency levels (self-evaluated) The second part contained 17 questions mainly about the subjects’ reading strategies and some questions about their views on reading comprehension

As mentioned in the previous chapter, survey questionnaires are a common tool for several authors (Oxford: 1990, O’ Maley and Chamot: 1990, Naiman et all: 1989) to collect data on learning strategies in general and reading strategies in particular As Selinger and Shohany (1989) pointed out, questionnaires have the following advantages Firstly, they do not take so much time to administer as other procedures Secondly, since the same questionnaire is given to all subjects at the same time, the data are more uniform, standard and accurate Lastly, questionnaires can be easily quantified because multiple choice questions are used Because of these advantages, I have used questionnaires as a main data collection method in my study

However, one of the biggest problems with questionnaires is that constructing a reliable one is extremely time consuming The researcher must be very careful when designing questions as the ambiguity in the question may lead to irrelevant answers Furthermore, responses may not always be true as students may over-estimate or under-estimate the frequency of use of certain strategies They may also be unaware if they use a given strategy and even more importantly, how they are using it

To deal with these problems, I had spent a lot of time designing the questionnaire This questionnaire was developed based on O’Malley and Chamot’s learning strategy

classification and literature on reading strategies (sections 2.1.2 and 2.2.3) After the questionnaire design was completed, I tried it out with some students to examine whether it helped to elicit the kind of data I intended to gather Based on the feedbacks from these students, I had revised some questions that were inappropriate or ambiguous to the students and therefore improved the quality of the data obtained In addition, before delivering the questionnaires to the EBR students, I told them that my study would only be valuable if they gave true answers to the questions in the questionnaires I realized that the students were aware of my notice and they answered the questionnaires in a very strict manner 3.2.3 Interviews

Besides questionnaires, interviews are regarded as a useful tool for collecting data

in second language acquisition research This study used the structured interviews because they were suitable for the purpose of the study These interviews consisted of specific and defined questions determined beforehand about the reading habits of good readers and bad readers among the EBR students

In this study, individual structured interviews were used to supplement the data collected from survey questionnaires Interviews were conducted in Vietnamese with two different groups of good readers and bad readers in order to identify their reading habits and check if there were any differences among them These interviews have truly provided

a lot of valuable information about the reading habits of the subjects

Interviews are proved to be a very effective instrument for data collection in strategy studies O’Maley and Chamot (1990) affirmed that “the primary advantage with interview data collection is the richness of the description obtained of the respondent’s use

of learning strategies The researcher obtains in-depth information about the use of strategies with individual tasks that would be difficult to obtain using other techniques” (1990: 94) In addition, it is also found that students would feel free and motivated to talk about the learning strategies they use if a relaxed atmosphere is created in the interview

Despite some above mentioned advantages, interviews have several disadvantages The biggest disadvantage is that interviews are very time consuming For this study,13 interviews were conducted with 6 good readers and 7 bad readers Each individual interview lasted for about half an hour, which added up to 7 hours for 13 interviews altogether All the interviews were tape-recorded and then transcribed This process also

took me a lot of time and effort to complete Another disadvantage of interviews is that they may introduce elements of subjectivity and personal bias, and rapport may cause the interviewee to respond in a certain way to please the interviewer To avoid these problems,

I had to assure my students that their answers did not affect the way I judged them so they should answer honestly I also told them that only true answers contributed to the success

of my study

3.2.4 Think-aloud reports

Think-aloud reports refer to a set of data collection procedures in which research subjects report orally to the researcher on the processes they are engaged in while performing a cognitive or linguistic task (Cohen and Hosenfeld 1981, Mann 1983)

In reading strategy studies, think-aloud reports are a very effective data collection method used by several reading researchers (Hosenfeld, 1977; Sarig, 1987; Anderson, 1991; Block, 1992) Cohen (1998) stated that think-aloud reports “are, in fact, valuable and thoroughly reliable sources of information about cognitive processes” (1998:38) Selinger (1989) also confirmed that the think-aloud procedure “is believed to yield rich data since it elicits information which is kept in short-term memory and is thereby directly accessible for further processing and verbalization The other methods cannot always be relied on to produce data stemming directly from subject's actual experience or thought processes" (1989:170)

In this study, think-aloud reports were used in combination with interviews to obtain more information about the reading strategies employed by EBR students Six good readers and seven bad readers were given a reading comprehension task to do without time limit This reading task (titled “The English Language) that was adapted from Concepts and Comments by Patricia Ackert included 10 reading comprehension questions A dictionary was also provided for them in case they needed to look up any word they did not know This dictionary was also an instrument used to see whether these students employed some certain reading strategies The participants were asked to say aloud everything they thought and everything that occurred to them while doing this task

It is important for a researcher to be aware of some of the problems associated with this think-aloud method The first problem of this data collection procedure is that the subjects (EBR students) are not accustomed to carrying out ‘think-aloud’ tasks and find it

difficult to perform two tasks simultaneously and thus fail to verbalize important information Another problem is that in an effort to please the researcher (their teacher), the subjects may over-compensate and provide information that they feel the researcher is hoping to obtain but does not really reflect their true mental stages The researcher’s hope

of obtaining certain data may also indirectly bias the subjects’ behaviour There are doubts, therefore, about the reliability and validity of the data obtained from think-aloud reporting procedures

In order to counteract these problems, I carried out the following steps:

- Firstly, I talked to the participants to prepare them for the think-aloud procedures, to explain the purpose of the study and to illustrate the task they were about to engage in then I asked them to do some practice This aimed to help students to know how to do think-aloud tasks

- Secondly, the participants went through the task and were asked to verbalize their thoughts while reading They were encouraged to point out any difficulties they encountered in comprehending the text or questions and to express verbally any confusion or uncertainty they experience when reading Participants were not given a time limit in which to complete the task and there was as little intervention on the part

of the researcher as possible When a long pause in verbalization occurred, I probed to elicit information with a question such as “What are you thinking about now?” This aimed to help the participants provide true information about their reading strategies and avoid the researcher’s bias

- Finally, the tapes were transcribed and analyzed using protocol analysis procedure 3.3 Data collection procedures

The data collection procedures commenced in early March and ended in mid June

2006 All of the procedures involved the following steps

Step 1: In March, EBR students were given a reading comprehension test once a week This work was done in three weeks to get the test scores from three different reading comprehension tests These test scores were collected and then analyzed to identify students with high mean scores and students with low mean scores Based on these results, effective readers and ineffective readers were classified

Step 2: Also in March, a questionnaire that included 20 questions was developed and given

to a group of 10 students for trial purposes (these students were not EBR students but from another class) Some ambiguous questions were identified and adjusted to improve the questionnaire Then the questionnaires were administered to the EBR subjects to find out about their reading strategies in general All of this work was completed in April

Step 3: Individual interviews followed by think-aloud reports were conducted with six effective and seven ineffective readers in early May Each subject was required to stay after class to do the interview and each interview combined with a think-aloud report often lasted for about an hour During the interviews, the students were asked about their motivation for reading and their reading habits Then they were explained about how to do think-aloud reports Illustrations were made by the researcher to make this process clear Then the learners were given a reading comprehension task and were required to verbalize their thoughts in Vietnamese while reading In this reading task, EBR readers were required

to answer 10 reading comprehension questions All of the interviews and think-aloud reports were tape-recorded and then transcribed All of this work was finished in mid June

3.4 Data analysis

Three sets of data were obtained from the data collection The first data set comprised 13 questionnaires answered by 6 good readers and 7 bad readers who were identified based on the test scores The second data set consisted of interview data on these

13 subjects’ reading habits The third data set comprised data from 13 think-aloud reports made by 6 effective and 7 ineffective readers The following section reports the transcription, coding and analysis of the data set

3.4.1 Transcription of data from interviews and think-aloud reports

All the interviews and think-aloud reports were broadly transcribed to serve the purpose of the study There were about 13 hours recording of the interviews and think-aloud reports

3.4.2 Coding of data

3.4.2.1 Coding of questionnaire data

The questionnaire included 20 questions, in which 17 items were reserved for asking about the subjects’ reading strategies These reading strategies were coded into

three main types of strategies including metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies Following is the reading strategy coding table used for the questionnaire

Table 3.4 Questionnaires: Reading strategy coding categories adapted from O'Malley and Chamot (1990: 119)

Item 4 I preview the headings and illustrations to get the main idea of the text before reading

Item 8 I skim through the text to understand main ideas of the texts before focusing on details

Directed

attention

Deciding in advance to attend in general to

a learning task and to ignore irrelevant distracters

Item 5: Before reading, I read the comprehension questions to decide important information that should be noted

Item 13: I skip the words that are not essential for comprehending the texts while reading

Selective

attention

Deciding in advance to attend to specific aspects of input, often by scanning for key words, concepts and/or linguistic markers

Item 10: I scan for key words or concepts that are closely related to the questions in order to answer them Item 6: I choose reading strategies according to my reading purposes