ABSTRACT This study aimed to find out tenth graders‟ difficulties in making inference in reading and examine tenth graders‟ strategies in doing inferential reading tasks The population o
INTRODUCTION
Rationale
Reading is regarded as a natural action in people's daily lives because they must read a variety of items in order to comprehend what occurs in their environments Reading, on the other hand, according to Nuttal (1982), is a complex activity that entails, on the one hand, identifying and decoding letters and words and, on the other hand, comprehending and grasping the functional meaning of a text For many years, teachers have utilized the reading activity to measure simply literal comprehension rather than teaching skills to help children comprehend what they read beyond decoding words and phrases (Harvey
& Goudvis, 2000) Due to the various reasons, the results obtained from class observations during students' reading activities and other teacher perceptions about their reading comprehension processes confirmed the above, indicating that they had difficulties and poor results when reading texts in English
In reading, the students‟ prior knowledge is really important in supporting the students‟ understanding in reading the text A variety of strategies to interact with the text as well as use their English knowledge are emphasized (Peregoy & Boyle, 2001, cited in Kopitski, 2007) It means the more prior knowledge of the reading content and the language knowledge (such as grammatical structure and vocabulary) the students have, the more they understand the text However, understanding school books is difficult due to the fact that they are usually academic or nonfiction Not only the apparent but also the implicit messages of the text are questioned
Inference making is a fundamental component of being fluent in reading It is one of the components that must be considered in reading, especially when the texts encourage the readers to find out beyond information and when it is supported by text comprehension The greater the students' ability to comprehend the text, the more inferences they can make
As a result, the more fluent they are in reading, the more success they will have with the reading process
Bearing this in mind, I decided to develop this study Through research methods, data collection methods and data analysis, I want to explore the problems that my students, the 10th graders are facing These are students who have just experienced a level-up exams and are also the students who have just entered a new learning environment, so it is essential to find out their problems and come up with useful strategies The findings could be applied to my own teaching practices for better learning outcomes for my students to develop their inferential reading skills
Furthermore, the study aimed to offer suggestions and recommendations for making positive change in teaching at high schools This critical element was expected to help my colleagues in my high schools or teachers from other high schools, where the context is similar to the one described in the present study, to be able to make changes in their teaching practices
Last but not least, this research and the materials enabled me to think of myself as a more active participant in the language learning process, rather than merely a replicant actor This, I believe, was an opportunity for me to reflect on my strengths and limitations, as well as seek ways to enhance my teaching practices in order to encourage students to have a more positive and willing attitude in the language classroom Despite the fact that much research has been done on reading, this study may contribute to the field of reading strategies by emphasizing the importance of developing appropriate materials to provide direct instruction of the strategies in order to help students improve their reading practices in the language classroom.
Aims of the study
The study aims to find out tenth graders‟ problems and strategies in doing inferential reading exercises
The objectives of the study:
- To explore tenth graders‟ problems in doing inferential reading tasks
- To examine tenth graders‟ strategies in doing inferential reading tasks.
Research questions
In order to achieve the above objectives, the following overarching research question have been formulated as follows:
1 What are tenth graders‟ problems in doing inferential reading tasks?
2 What are tenth graders‟ strategies in doing inferential reading tasks?
Scope of the study
This study took place at An Nhon No.3 High School, a public school in Binh Dinh Province The school offers education from tenth grade to twelveth grade Participants are 120 tenth grade students who have just experienced a level- up exam in the morning shift The primary objective of the school is to educate ethical citizens and always put the quality of education as the top goa
The focus of the study lies in finding out tenth graders‟difficulties in doing inferential reading exercises and strategies students use to develop inferential reading skill As students take English at school just three hours per week, there is little time to develop those skills deeply and improve their language learning process The tenthth graders of school become the research sample, because they have just entered the learning environment and it is also the first stage of schooling, so it is necessary to detect difficulties so that teachers can have directions to promptly change teaching methods and develop skills for students improve the quality of learning.
Significance
The research serves as a reference source for teachers, students, and others who are interested in this topic once it is completed It is also anticipated to make recommendations for further research
This research is expected to give beneficial contribution to teaching and learning English, not only for English teachers, but also for students, and other researchers For English teachers, hopefully, by knowing the students‟ problems it can give important information to improve their skill in teaching reading Furthermore, it is expected that they can develop any teaching methods which are very beneficial to assist students‟ comprehension in reading the text
Teachers and students, in particular, would be aware of their current status in terms of teaching and developing inferential reading abilities in order to make appropriate adjustments The research is expected to improve students' attitudes toward inferential reading and drive them to read inferentially as a result of the critical comments, as well as teachers' teaching strategies for inferential reading.
Organization of the thesis
This paper has five main chapters The first chapter is the introduction, where the rationale, objectives, the significance as well as the scope of the study are raised The second one is Literature Review, in which key theoretical basis, some common challengies of students in doing inferential reading tasks and previous findings concerning strategies, and inferential reading skills are discussed The next chapter is Methodology which is believed to be an important one It describes the methods used to collect data, including research instruments (questionnaire and interview with students ) It also provides the data analysis methods, the steps that I took in analyzing the collected data
The fourth chapter in this part (i.e results and discussion) presents the results and discussion of the findings The final part is the conclusion In this part, the summary of this study, limitations and recommendations for further studies are presented.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Inferential reading
To high school learners, simple comprehension of a text is not enough
To be high-level readers, students need to be able to infer meaning that goes beyond what the text explicitly tells them Inferences are the conclusions that are drawn based on what one already knows and judgments readers make based on given information This skill helps students make connections between their personal experiences and their comprehension of a text Rather than stopping students during the reading process to comment on specific points, inference focuses on their thinking and how new information reshapes their prior knowledge, which consists of 4 types “syntactical” knowledge,
“semantic” knowledge, “orthographic” knowledge and “lexical” knowledge (Rumelhart, 2004)
2.1.1 Reading skills and inferential reading as a reading skill
Reading comprehension is a complex skill since it needs readers (students) to combine many reading strategies to understand the text All readers need to relate their English language knowledge, world of knowledge and understanding of print to understand text (Peregoy & Boyle, 2001) in Kopitski, 2007 It is the ability to draw meaning from the text It is more complex than the word reading as it involves a broader range of cognitive processes and thus it is viewed as the “essence of reading” (Durkin, 1993, cited in Li, 2012:1)
In comprehending a reading text, readers should consider literal comprehensionand inferential comprehension Both of them are very important for them to make them easier to understand the text In literal comprehension (e.g., textbase), readers only need a relatively shallow understanding of what the text states While in inferential comprehension, (e.g., situation model) readers need a deep understanding of what the text states (Li, 2012: 5-6)
In other words, it is obvious that reading comprehension is the activity of understanding texts not only shallowly but also deeply Activities of understanding reading texts need thinking process
Reading, according to the literacy definition, plays an essential role in people's lives, and Smith (1971: 35) claims that "reading is the most natural activity in the universe." This indicates that even if people never read written material such as books or newspapers, they must read a lot in order to understand what is going on around them on a daily basis People are more likely to read printed things such as adverts, drug labels, traffic signs, and anything else that provides them with information As a result, reading must be seen as a crucial component of people's daily lives because it enables them to acquire and interpret knowledge and information required to comprehend their surroundings
Reading must be viewed as a dynamic and participatory process in which people employ their language and cognitive knowledge to make sense of a written passage, according to the above In this regard, Goodman (1996) asserts that reading is an active activity in which the reader establishes a relationship with the text based on his or her own understandings and experiences in order to make sense of the information offered Readers are able to make meaning of the print because of these interactions between new and old information
Furthermore, Aebersold and Field (1997: 50) stated that "reading is what happens when people look at a text and give meaning to the written symbols in a general sense” As a result, reading cannot be reduced to a basic process of decoding letters and words Reading, on the other hand, is a meaning- making process in which the reader interacts with the text This interaction occurs when a reader connects information from the text with prior knowledge; it is a dialogue between language and cognition that allows the reader to develop a personal understanding of the text
To summarize, when reading a text, readers' language knowledge helps them to recognize printed words and sentences, while their world knowledge allows them to comprehend these words and phrases (Goodman, 1996) As a result, reading is an active process in which readers relate information from the text to what they already know, rather than a passive skill Readers who are proficient make sense of the print and hunt for meaning; they do not decode each letter or word; instead, they take the text and apply it to what they already know The process of reading, then, is a constructive and interactive one in which readers learn to recognize, understand, and comprehend the message of a written text
Inferential reading as a reading skill
As students develop inferential reading skills, they learn to understand the intonation of characters' words and relationships to one another, provide explanations for ideas that are presented in the text, recognize the author's view of the world including the author's biases and offer conclusions from facts presented in the text In teaching reading comprehension in a reader‟s workshop Keene and Zimmerman (1997) state that differently proficient readers who infer are able to draw conclusions from text, make reasonable predictions while and after reading, use the combination of background knowledge and explicitly stated information from the text to answer questions they have as they read It is clear that proficient readers easily create new background knowledge for themselves, discriminate and critically analyze text and authors, and engage in conversation and/or other analytical responses to what they read while struggling readers have difficulty with some or all of these comprehension skills Chikalanga (1993) shows the performance on different types of interference questions of two groups of Zambian secondary school at grade 8 and grade 10; that is, grade 10 students performed significantly better than grade 8 students
Inference is increasingly recognized as an essential component of the process of reading comprehension According to the psycholinguistic models of reading comprehension (i.e., schema-theoretic view of reading), inferences are important in integrating the text with the knowledge base (Spiro, 1980; Sanford et al.,1981)
In addition, Chikalanga (1993) shows that inference is defined as the cognitive or mental process of reader goes through to obtain the implicit meaning of a written text on the basis of two sources of information, the propositional content of the text (i.e., information explicitly stated) and prior knowledge of the reader as cued by test items Some previous work has revealed (Paris and Lindauer, 1976; Paris and Upton, 1976; Omanson et al.,
1978) the ability to infer improves with age
An inference is an event or conclusion reached based on information contained in a text or story, but not stated explicitly (Trabasso & Magliano,
1996) Making inferences is as central to story comprehension as understanding causal relationships and recognizing importance of story events (van den Broek, et al., 2005; van den Broek, 1989; van Kleeck, 2008)
Generally, inference is a cognitive process used to construct meaning Inference in reading comprehension is a constructive thinking process because the reader expands knowledge by proposing and evaluating competing hypotheses about the meaning of the text in an attempt to progressively refine understanding The importance of inference in understanding even the simplest text has been pointed out by Thorndike
(1917) Inference makes it possible for a reader to comprehend the information that the author presents (Goetz, 1977) and is an integral part of the comprehension of and memory for text (Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Bransford & McCarrell, 1974; Harris & Monaco, 1978; Kintsch, 1988)
Inference making, which is one of the aspects that have to be considered in reading, especially when the texts ask the readers to find out the beyond information, and when it is supported by the text comprehension, is a key component to be fluent in reading (Davoudi, 2005) The more the students are able to comprehend the text, the more they can make inference Thus, the more fluent they are in reading and the more success the reading process will be obtained
When students are able to make inference, reading is felt to be easier, no matter how long the text is In making inference, the students have to read between the lines (Preszler, 2006: 4) They have to understand the text implicitly – finding out themeaning beyond the text
It comes as no surprise that readers' background knowledge has also been shown to be an integral factor in the comprehension of text through inference Pearson, Hansen, and Gordon (1979) find that background knowledge has a facilitating effect on inferential comprehension
The comprehension process
Reading comprehension is a psychological process which occurs in the mind The mental process is invisible This invisibility makes it difficult for the researcher to provide a concrete and clear definition Kintsch (1998) describes comprehension as occurring "when and if the elements that enter into the process achieve a stable state in which the majority of elements are meaningfully related to one another and other elements that do not fit the pattern of the majority are suppressed" (p 4) In common sense terms, the mental elements can be readers' prior knowledge, concepts, images or emotions With the schematic processing perspective held by Johnston
(1983), reading comprehension can be defined as follows:
Reading comprehension is considered to be a complex behavior which involves conscious and unconscious use of various strategies, including problem-solving strategies, to build a model of the meaning which the writer is assumed to have intended The model is constructed using schematic knowledge structures and the various cue systems which the writer has given (e.g., words, syntax macrostructures, social information) to generate hypotheses which are tested using various logical and pragmatic strategies Most of this model must be inferred, since text can never be fully explicit and, in general, very little of it is explicit because even the appropriate intentional and extensional meanings of words must be inferred from their context (p 17)
For Johnston (1983), reading comprehension can mean the reader's comprehension of the text results from using different strategies consciously and unconsciously and is evoked by various knowledge sources Johnston
(1983) discusses using strategies to comprehend the text and he emphasizes examining the process of comprehension Another view of reading comprehension focusing on the result rather than the process can also be added for this current study The result of reading comprehension may show what the reader understands from a text, what he/she fails to understand from a text, and how he/she transacts with the text
Gunderson (1995) differentiates three levels of comprehension including "literal or detail, inferential, and critical and evaluative, sometimes called applicative" (p 27) Gunderson (1995) provides explanations for the three levels of comprehension: literal-level comprehension requires little more than memory work and the remembering of details from the text; inferential- level comprehension involves "readers in thinking about what they've read and coming to conclusions that go beyond the information given in the text" (p 31); at critical and evaluative level comprehension, readers are able to
"evaluate whether a text is valid and expresses opinion rather than fact, as well as apply the knowledge gained from the text in other situations" (p 28) This study, following Gunderson's (1995) suggestion, avoids focusing on literal-level comprehension as the end goal of the study but rather intends to set up an EFL reading program which may "excite students and nurture their ability to use language in creative and meaningful ways" (Gunderson, 1995: 43).
Strategies to enhance reading comprehension
According to Lerner (2006) the National Reading Panel of 2000 recognize several strategies that had a solid scientific basis of instruction for improving reading comprehension including: Comprehension monitoring: Students learn how to be aware of their understanding of the material
Cooperative thinking: Students learn reading strategies together
Use of graphic and semantic organizers, including story maps: Students make graphic representations of the materials to assist their comprehension
Question answering: Students answer questions posed by the teacher and receive immediate feedback
Question generation: Students ask themselves questions about various aspects of the story
Story structure: Students are taught how to use the structure of the story as a means of helping them recall story content in order to answer questions about what they have read
Summarization: Students are taught to integrate ideas and to generate ideas and to generalize from the text information
Williams (1998) emphasizes a “Themes Instruction Program”, which consists of a series of twelve 40 minutes lessons and each lesson is organized around a single story and is composed of five parts namely: pre-reading discussion on the purpose of the lesson and the topic of the story that will be read, reading the story, discussion of important story information using organized (schema) questions as a guide, identification of a theme for the story, stating it in general terms so that it is relevant to a variety of stories and situations and finally practice in applying the generalized theme to real-life experiences.
Factors affecting reading comprehension
A study by Palincsar and Brown (1984) show that "reading comprehension is the product of three main factors" (p 118) The three factors include first, reader-friendly or reader considerate texts; second, the interaction of the reader's prior knowledge and text content; and third, reading strategies which reveal the way readers manage their interaction with written texts and how these strategies are related to text comprehension (Palincsar & Brown, 1984)
Comprehension can be enhanced to the extent that the texts are well written, that is, they follow a structure which is familiar to the reader and their syntax, style, clarity of presentation, and coherence reach an acceptable level in terms of the reader's mother language Such texts have been called reader- friendly or readerconsiderate (Anderson & Armbruster, 1984) Comprehension can also be influenced by the extent of overlap between the reader's prior knowledge and the content of the text Research demonstrates the impact of schematic constructive processes on text comprehension A number of studies suggest that text comprehension is dependent upon prior knowledge (Anderson & Pitchert, 1978; Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert, & Goetz, 1977; Bransford & Johnson, 1973; Dooling & Lacharnn, 1971; Fass & Schumacher, 1981) Voss and his colleges (Chiesi, Spilich, & Voss, 1979) provide a clear example of this in their research that describes how previously acquired knowledge influences college students' acquisition of new domain- related information In their research, the performance of individuals with high baseball (HK) or low baseball (LK) knowledge is compared Chiesi, Spilich and Voss (1979) indicate HK recognition performance is superior to
LK, and that HK individuals need less information to make recognition judgments than LK individuals Moreover, to enhance comprehension and overcome comprehension failures, some reading researchers focus on reading strategies In Casanave's (1988) study of comprehension monitoring strategies, Cananave describes how successful readers employ effective strategies while reading; they usually propose a question, and elaborate their own knowledge and the content of the text Casanave (1988) also makes a distinction between routine and repair (non- routine) monitoring strategies- the task of routine monitoring strategies may include "predicting, checking understanding for consistency, and checking for overall understanding" (p
290) whereas repair (non-routine) strategies may include "evaluating what the problem is, deciding how to resolve it, implementing the strategy as a result of the decision made, and checking the results" (p 290) Other recognize strategies may include these identified in Zvetina's study (1987) for building and activating appropriate background knowledge, and those described by
Block (1986) for recognizing text structure The well-practiced decoding and comprehension skills of expert readers permit those readers to proceed relatively automatically, until a triggering event alerts them to a comprehension failure but when a comprehension failure is detected, readers must slow down and allot extra processing to the problem area (Spilich,Vesonder, Chiesi, & Voss, 1979) To fully understand how a student learns from texts, the reading instructor cannot ignore any of these three main factors which Palincsar and Brown (1984) propose However, in this paper, the researcher has chosen to concentrate most extensively on how the reader's prior knowledge may influence EFL students' reading comprehension.
Previous relevant studies
The first is the study conducted by Cain, et al (2001) In this study they investigate the relation between young children‟s comprehension skill and inference making ability by using a procedure that controlls individual differences in general knowledge (Barnes & Dennis, 1998; Barnes, Dennis, & HaefeleKalvaitis, 1996) A multi episode story is read to the children and their ability to make two types of inference is assessed: coherence inferences, which are essential for adequate comprehension of the text, and elaborative inferences, which enhance the text representation but which are not crucial to understanding There is a strong relation between comprehension skill and inference-making ability even when knowledge is equally available to all participants Subsidiary analyses of the source of inference failures reveal different underlying sources of difficulty for good and poor comprehenders
The second study s carried out by Attaprechakul (2013) The goal of this study is to look into the inference processes that are required to read journal papers successfully Eighty-eight graduate students participate in this study, reading a set of materials on education and economic growth and answering comprehension questions Twenty-four of the participants additionally agree to participate in a more in-depth interview The kids are found to rely on bottom- up processing the majority of the time They skimmed over some of the more challenging sections, such as technical information and graphic illustrations To improve their comprehension, they sought assistance from pals They are effective in comprehending the thesis statement, the substance of the section, and the meanings of the tested terms and clauses in general However, they are less able to infer the underlying argument, the tone of the article, and the attitudes of others toward the research findings A substantial number of students also fail to utilize information from section headings and the organization of research articles to guide their reading tasks
The third study is conducted by Arianti (2013) This study looks into the importance and effectiveness of employing the DRTA technique to teach narrative text inference It is a one-group pre-test post-test design with a pre- experimental design The class is Grade XI IPA 1, with a total of thirty-four students The data is acquired by providing each of the 34 students 30 multiple choice items, which are then analyzed using the t-test and effect size calculation The findings show that teaching utilizing the DRTA technique greatly improves students' capacity to make narrative text-based inferences It has a high level of efficacy
The fourth study is conducted by Azizmohammadi (2013) Two rather homogeneous groups of EFL learners (NF) in Arak University are chosen for this study They are learning English as a second language After taking a reading comprehension test to ensure that their differences in reading comprehension were not significant, they are randomly assigned to two sections of a short-story course, one serving as the experimental group and the other as the control group, both studying the same short stories and both being taught by the researcher as their course instructor The researchers discover that in a memory test two weeks later, learners who can draw inferences considerably outperformed the other learners in a reading comprehension exam using T-test and ANOVA
The fifth study is conducted by Cain (2015) It looked into the inference procedures that are required to read journal articles successfully Eighty-eight graduate students participate in this study, reading a set of materials on education and economic growth and answering comprehension questions This is a two-part research involving 4- to 6-year-olds The first goal is to see how early higher-level comprehension skills are supported by lower-level comprehension skills (receptive vocabulary and grammar) and verbal memory (inference and literal story comprehension) The second goal is to see if these abilities may predict eventual reading comprehension Eighty-two children complete assessments of nonverbal ability, receptive vocabulary and grammar, verbal short-term memory, and inferential and literal comprehension of a picture book narrative Vocabulary is a unique predictor of concurrent narrative comprehension Longitudinally, inference skills, literal comprehension and grammar made independent contributions to reading comprehension one year later The influence of vocabulary on reading comprehension is mediated through both inference and literal comprehension The results show that inference skills are critical to the construction of text representations in the earliest stages of reading comprehension development.
Summary
In summary, inferential reading strategies and factors affect reading comprehension are two main items discussed in literature review According Johnston (1983), reading comprehension mean the reader's comprehension of the text results from using different strategies consciously and unconsciously and is evoked by various knowledge sources So the result of reading comprehension may show what the reader understands from a text, what he/she fails to understand from a text, and how he/she transacts with the text Besides, Difficulties in doing the exercises are inevitable, so it is necessary to consider the factors affecting on the results of students‟ performance.
METHODOLOGY
Participants
For this study, students of grade 10 were selected Those students were chosen from An Nhon No.3 High School a public school in Binh Dinh Province Participants were 120 tenth grade students who had just experienced graduation examination in which English was one of the compulsory subject
Clustering sampling was used to choose the students Three classes of pupils were chosen at random from a total of 11 classes This strategy was chosen because it was easy to use and fair It was also supposed to aid in improving the validity and dependability of data from a sampling standpoint
In addition, as the researcher conducting the study, I gained permission to do the survey in the school
During the survey, these students were asked to fill a questionnaire to get the information about individual characteristics and strategies students applied in their inferential reading identify, which types of references students thinks difficult, and six of them were invited to answer a semi – structured interview to get more information to make all the things in the questionnaire to be clearer After 8-week treatment, six students were chosen randomly by drawing lots from the questionnaire they had done.
Data collection instruments
To meet the objectives of the study, both qualitative and quantitative approaches were exploited Student survey questionnaire was the main research tools semi-structured interviews with the participants
After considering the benefits and drawbacks of several instruments used in language learning strategy research, I opted to use a questionnaire to gather data for this study Questionnaire has some strong points, notably its
“efficiency in terms of researcher time, researcher efforts and financial resources” (Hoang & Nguyen, 2006, p10) The questionnaire given to students was written in two languages (i.e., two versions): one in English and the other in Vietnamese, so that students could comprehend it better
There are two questionnaires in this study:
- The first one was designed to identify which types of references students think difficult
- The second questionnaire was designed to includes statements related to strategies used in inferiential reading tasks The aim is to identify which strategies students use in doing inferential reading tasks and which is effective
For each questionnaire statement, 5-alternative choices adapted from Vagias & Wade (2006) were provided Participants were asked to select one from among the options
Interviews were individually conducted with 10 students I decided to conduct these interviews because they were expected to help establish and maintain a close relationship with the participants and to help clarify more about the information the participants provide through their answers in the questionnaire Particularly, interviews helped to gain data to answer the questions “What problems do students face while doing inferential English reading tasks?” and “ What strategies students apply while doing inferentiral reading English tasks?”
However, unlike the questionnaires, only open-ended questions were included and all interviews are semi-constructed, since it was believed that semi- constructed interviews provide the interviewer with a great deal of flexibility while offering the interviewees adequate power and control over the course of the interview
Most importantly, those interviews also helped to collect further information compare to the answers the students had answered in the questionnaires The students had a chance to express their attitudes towards inferential reading, talking about the way they did their inferential reading exercises, the problems they face when doing those exercises.
Data collection procedure
The data gathering procedure for this study was divided into six phases:
Phase 1: I hold conversations with the participants about the prior teaching and learning methods in reading skills in general and inferential reading in particular In English lessons, they discussed in groups or pairs the strategies and how they understood them
Phase 2: The participants were asked to complete the questionnaire I explained to them the purpose of the study, and made sure that they could understand that all information they provide would be used for research purposes only The main aim of using the challenge questionnaire was to explore the problems of students in doing inferential reading exercises The participants then were given guidelines and instructions for completing the questionnaire They were encouraged to ask me about anything they did not understand or were not clear while completing the questionnaire They then filled in the questionnaire, which took about fifteen minutes
Phase 3: In this phase, everything that had been planned was conducted and during 8- week training session with 3 hours per week I noted all the things that were related to the application of reading strategies happened in class as soon as possible
During this time, there were a lot of activities in class
First, I explained the definition of inference, different sorts of inferential reading tasks, the distinction between using "strategies" and "skills," and provided clear examples for them to grasp
Second, I gave pupils a brief bit of text to read inferentially
Third, I introduced to participants 11 strategies in inferential tasks by proving various topics for them to read
To keep this practice going, I raised the amount of questions about inferential until participants could understand and apply them successfully
Finally, I asked my participants to read a longer passage and developed a set of questions related to inference
In fact, during the 8- week treatment, students had a chance to practice 15 inferential reading texts related types of inference: Referential, Filling in deleted information, Inferring meanings of words, Inferring connotations of words or sentences, Relating text to prior knowledge, Inferences about the author, Characters or state of world as depicted in text, Confirming or disconfirming previous inferences, Drawing conclusion These reading texts ranged from the easy to difficult ones
Phase 4: The questionnaire was filled out by the participants I made sure they understood the study's objectives and that all of the information they provided would be utilized solely for research The primary goal of using the strategy questionnaire was to investigate the methods that students employ when completing activities involving inferential reading The guidelines and directions for filling out the questionnaire were then delivered to the participants They then took roughly fifteen minutes to complete the questionnaire
Phase 5: In this phase, 10 students took part in an interview, individually They provided more information about what they had done in their questionnaire, their feelings after being trained towards inferential reading, the strategies they used, and how they applied these strategies Taking the suggestions by Patton on conducting effective interviews (1990, cited in Hoang & Nguyen, 2006: 47 – 50) into consideration, I began with a brief explanation of the format, the length of the interview and asked them for any questions before actually conducting the interviews During each interview, questions were asked one at a time and responses were encouraged and extra questions were added frequently to exploit in-depth information from the interviewees On the other hand, reorientation for interviewees was made carefully to avoid off-track conversations while jottings were taken carefully during the interview for better data collation later on.
Data analysis
The Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) version 20 was used to analyze the data from questionnaires The types and frequency of strategies used were counted and analyzed basing on theory strategies and average by adding up individual scores from each participant to obtain a total score for each strategy employed in the questionnaire The higher the averages, the more frequently the participants used the strategy concerned And similarly, the survey about the difficulties that students often face had the same calculation
According to Corbin and Strauss (2008), qualitative data analysis should begin immediately following, and even during, the data gathering phase As a result, I transcribed interviews and compared them to the study questions and interview guide in order to assess the data The interviews were conducted in Vietnamese for ease and complete understanding, and they were all recorded
A total of ten people were coded Student number one was coded S1, student number two was coded S2, and so on The places and time for interviews are presented in the table below:
Participant code Place interview Time length
To analyse the semi- structure interviews, I followed Burn‟s (2010) procedure as summarized below:
Step 1: reading transcripts very carefully line by line, again and again
Step 2: labeling relevant pieces in words and phrases about: difficulties, reading strategies used, inferential reading process
Step 3: deciding which codes are the most important, and create categories by bringing several codes together
Step 4: labelling categories and decide which are the most relevant and how they are connected to each other
Summary 30
In fact, to answer the research questions, questionnaire and interview were two main tools for collecting dat Through 4 phases of data collection procedure it was easy to analyze the data both quantitatively and qualitatively.
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
Results
A hundred and twenty copies of questionnaire were delivered to students in three classes at An Nhon 3 High School where the researcher is teaching These classes were chosen randomly to ensure the reliability for the research As an attempt to answer the first question “ What are tenth graders‟ problems in doing inferential reading tasks ?”, this section presents the datta from tenth graders‟ problems in doing inferential reading tasks questionaire The questionaire was in the form of a five-point Linkert scale, ranging from one “Never true” to five “Very true” Hence, the higher the score obtained, the more agreement with the statement the participants had The mean values were interpreted follows what was recommened by Srakang & Jansem (1998): 4.50 – 5.00 Very true of me
1.50 – 2.49 Untrue of me 0 – 1.49 Never true of me
To investigate the reading problems reported using by the researcher in tenth grade class, a questionnaire was utilized The data collected from the questionnaire were subjected to SPSS version 20 and considered to be reliable (α= 913) The results of the first questionnaire are as shown in the Table 4.1
Table 4.1 Tenth graders’ problems in doing inferential reading tasks
N Minimum Maximum Mean Std Deviation
In general, when we look at Table 4.1, we can see that all the values have M
= between 2.5 and 3.49, which shows that for all the problems given in the survey, students have encountered In the process of doing reading comprehension exercises, all the problems raised made it difficult for students to solve the exercise From Table 4.1, it is obvious that the students had the highest difficulties on the indicator of inferences about “the author‟s attitude” that was showed by the highest rate (M = 3.26) As shown in Table 4.1, descriptive statistics shows that there were 120 students (N = 120) taking part in the study Minimum column is the minimum value of the variable The minimum value of all the variable is 1 The maximum column shows the maximum value of the variable The largest value of all items is 5 The average value of the variable is shown in the mean column This is the table's most informative column The average value (Mean) of this section is varied, as can be observed It values from 2.72 to 3.26 Among nine problems that students often face, P6 had the highest rate (M = 3.26), followed by P9 (M 3.16) and P8 (M = 3.11) while P1 had the lowest rate with (M = 2.91) In more detail, all of the items are at neutral scale which means that the participants agreed with the given statements These findings indicates that the level of agreement of the respondents is below the intermediate level of 3
SD column is the standard deviation of the variable The smaller this value shows, the less respondents who answered the answer differ from each other
On the contrary, if this value is high, it shows that the survey subjects have very different opinions about that variable, so the scores for each other are quite different
To investigate the reading strategies reported using by the researcher in tenth grade classes, a questionnaire was utilized The data collected from the questionnaire were subjected to SPSS version 20 and considered to be reliable (α=.959) The results of the first questionnaire are as shown in the Table 4.2
In order to identify types of reading strategies students reported using, the descriptive statistics was run on the mean score and fluency of the 11 strategies in the questionnaire The descriptive statistics (Table 4.2) shows that most of the strategies are reported using at moderate and high level, except for S1, S5, S7, S8, S9, S10, S11 The most preferred strategies include S2, S3, S4, S6
Table 4.2 Tenth graders’ strategies in doing inferential reading tasks
N Minimum Maximum Mean Std Deviation
Table 4.2 indicates that the frequency students employing different strategies in inferential reading tasks None of the strategies were used at high level of frequency It could be said that students balanced in the use of these strategies Seven of these strategies were placed in the medium category of use (M = between 2.5 and 3.49) and the other items are at the high rate (M > 3.49) However, through the table above, the strategy “ I deduce the content of the readings from the available information (title, known vocabulary, topic sentences)” was used the most among those strategies with M = 3.62 and “I guess the semantic relation between various elements of the text by analyzing the cohesive devices used to connect the elements” was utilized the least with
M = 2.72 To see the statistic clearly, Table 4.2 shows the data
Table 4.3 The detail description of item S1
Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative
The table gives information about one of the reading comprehension strategies that is “Use the senses to understand and remember” Half of the students chose to use this, which shows that this is an quite important strategy that makes it easy for students to use and finish their reading exercises There are 57 students think they use this strategy and 39 students think that they often use it which mean more than half of the students believe using senses can bring about positive effects for them
Item S2 (Activate knowledge to understand the reading text) has high rate with M = 3.57, around more than the number of students chose this strategy, so this is one of the most important trategies that students have to possess
Table 4.4 The detail description of item S2
There were very few students who disagree with this strategy, with about 10% of 120 saying that they had not used it in the reading process There are 33 students use this strategy occasionally and 61 students regularly used this strategy However, this is a rather surprising result for the researcher, applying their own knowledge to understand the passage can be seen as not easy, but the results that the survey brings about said that the application of this strategy accounts for a very high rate
The next two variable are S3 and S4, as we can see the mean values from the table, M = 3.52 and M = 3.59, which are high rates, so we know that students appreciate these two strategies
Table 4.5 The detail description of item S3
Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative
Table 4.6 The detail description of item S4
Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative
The majority of participants strongly agreed that it‟s essential to use these two strategies because they help them much in doing inferiential reading exercies, too large student number make them necessary to pay attention to , which accounts for approximately 90% Just 9 of them disagreed with the ideas
Different from the mentioned strategies, the next one seems a bit difficult so the mean is slightly down
Table 4.7 The detail description of item S5
Obviously, text guessing is not an easy strategy to apply to reading comprehension However, the average value taken from the data table is not low with M = 3.29, there are about 20 students who did not choose this strategy in the survey The reason is that most students have low vocabulary, they do not understand the meaning of words or phrases or even concepts a, so it is difficult to guess the meaning of the text
Strategy 6 is the strategy most commonly used by the participants, who can infer the content of the passage from the given information
Table 4.8 The detail description of item S6
Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent
Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent
This is the strategy with the highest mean with M = 3.62 This result is quite encouraging because most of the reading comprehension passages have questions that require the reader to understand the main idea of the text, if this strategy is applied correctly, it will improve the student's reusult
Combining with the interview and survey results, we can see that analyzing to understand the main content of the passage is a strategy used by many students, in my opinion to understand the content of the passage, it's not difficult, but what makes the students choose the wrong answer is that the answers given are quite equivalent and misleading, so they choose the wrong one
Table 4.9 The detail description of item S7
Valid Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative
Discussion
In light of quantitative and qualitative findings of the study, this part focuses on examining to which extent the research aim and objectives have been addressed and achieved Based on the results of the data analysis presented in Table 1.1 The study stated that using strategies is necessary to improve students' ability in inference As discussed in Literature Review, inference is a cognitive process, constructive thinking process used to construct meaning Inference in reading comprehension is a constructive thinking process because the reader expands knowledge by proposing and evaluating competing hypotheses about the meaning of the text in an attempt to progressively refine understanding More clearly, my research‟s finding was utilizing strategies effectively plays an important part in enhancing inferential reading skill Students used various strategies in understanding reading text The results of the correlation analysis show that whether the use of strategy has a positive or negative contribution to the results of reading comprehension depends on the appropriateness of the selection strategy in accordance with the text he reads Among 120 students who did the questionnaires, many ofthem confessed that they hadn't been trained inferential reading skill before, and they found they were less skilled readers When strategies were applied to reading, the ability of many students in inference was improved
The study stated that students understood more about the strategies in doing inferiential reading tasks and they could adopt them into different types of exerceises The attitude toward this kind of exercise had been changed, or they could tackle the challenging tasks as quoted : “I saved time in reading than before being introduced the strategies” ,“To me, using strategies are very important to boost my ability in reading inferential tasks ”
Among the factors that contribute to my high results on inferential reading tasks, using appropriate cognitive strategies is the most important In fact, they play a deciding role
As what has explained in the previous chapter, inference is one of reading strategies the students should have in order to be a good reader Inferring is reading between the lines, and for many students, it is a difficult strategy to master Inferring involves drawing a conclusion or making an interpretation that is not explicitly stated in the text Furthermore students infer when they take what they already know, their background knowledge, and merge it with clues in the text to draw a conclusion, surface a theme, predict an outcome, arrive at a big idea, and so forth If readers don‟t infer, they will not grasp the deeper essence of texts they read
Being an active or good reader is not easy since it needs two elements of reading – external and internal Having the external one element only is not enough External element which needs students as readers to decode words needs to be supported by the internal element which is the actual understanding of the text that allows students to comprehend the content In other words, in order to be engaged with the text and truly think about what they are reading, decoding words only is not enough Students who can decode words do not guarantee that they can understand what decoded words and sentences mean
My findings supported for Rumelhart‟s hypothesis The results of the questionnaire were consistent with previous research by Hosenfeld (1977), dealing with what successful and unsuccessful students do to assign to printed texts By means of the surveys, we can easily figure out that our class students do encounter several degrees of difficulty in reading comprehension
Results of this survey showed that the two most serious problems preventing the students‟ comprehension from English reading were: (1) insufficient vocabulary and (2) the need to reread Ironically, most English teachers spent a large amount of class time explaining vocabulary Meanwhile, most of the students‟ time was spent reading each word carefully, consulting a dictionary Their difficulties in making inference can influence them in understanding the text Compared with other researches, this research and the others, as they have been mentioned above, are similar due to their inference making investigation However, they are different in terms of subjects, the texts given to the subject of their research, and theme or topic of investigation
Since this research analyzed the students‟ difficulties in making inference in reading tasks, this research was very beneficial to English teachers By knowing their difficulties in making inference in reading passages, the teachers then can follow up the problems by giving the students some treatments or by improving their teaching quality so that the students‟ difficulties in making inference in reading texts can be recovered
Seeing the results of this research, actually this was not a bad news to the English teachers It did not reflect the teachers‟ failure in teaching English to the students due to the “moderate” level of the students‟ difficulties in making inference Moderate level here means that actually the students did not have fatal difficulties in making inference in reading passages Since the students‟ biggest problem was on making inferences about the authors‟ Attitude, the teacher then can give more reading exercises related to the problem so that the problem can be solved then Further, the teachers can improve their teaching quality when teaching the students inferential skill by finding out interesting teaching and or learning technique to figure out the students‟ problems in reading comprehension The teacher should think of ways so that reading can become enjoyable and fun for the students so that their difficulties in understanding reading text can be reduced
Meanwhile, for students, it is better for them to read more passages especially regarding making inferences about the authors‟ attitude so that when they meet such type of passages in the future, they did not have the same difficulties anymore.