Luận văn thạc sĩ VNU ULIS improving students’ reading comprehension through the use of graphic organizers at military medical university an action research

Figure 1: Initial Questionnaire: Question 1 results Figure 2:Initial questionnaire: Question 2 results Figure 3:Initial questionnaire: Question 3 results Figure 4:Initial questionnaire:

bảng biểu tại Học Viện Quân Y – Nghiên cứu hành động)

MA MINOR THESIS

Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10

Hanoi, 2011

Vietnam national university, Hanoi

bảng biểu tại Học Viện Quân Y – Nghiên cứu hành động)

MA MINOR THESIS

Code: 60 14 10 Cohort: MA 18 Supervisor: Lương Quỳnh Trang, M.A

Hanoi, 2011

Declaration i

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract iii

Table of content iv

List of Abbreviations vii

List of figures viii

List of tables ix

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale 1

2 Research questions 2

3 Methods of the study 2

4 Research procedure 2

5 Scope of the Study 3

6 Significance of the study 3

7 Design of the study 4

PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5

CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

1 1 Action research 5

1 1 1 What is action research? 5

1 1 2 Why does a teacher need action research? 5

1 1 3 How does a teacher perform action research in a language classroom? 6

1 1 4 Summary 6

1 2 Reading 7

1 2 1.What is Reading? 7

1 2 2 What is Reading Comprehension? 7

1 2 3 Reading Comprehension Process 8

1 2 3 1 The Schema Theory 8

1 2 3 2 Bottom – up and Top-down processing 8

1 2 3 3 Interactive Processing 9

1 2 4 An Overview of ESP 9

1 2 4 1 What is ESP? 9

1 2 4 2 English in Medicine 10

1 2 5 Approaches to Teach Reading 10

1 2 6 Techniques to teach EE reading 12

1 2 6 1 In Pre-reading 12

1 2 6 2 In While-reading 13

1 2 6 3 In Post-reading 13

1 2 7 Reading Comprehension Levels 13

1 3 Graphic organizers 14

1 3 1 Definition of Graphic Organizers 14

1 3 2 Roles of Graphic Organizers 14

1 3 3 Types of graphic organizers employed in the research 15

1 3 3 1 Mind maps 15

1 3 3 2 The KWL 15

1 3 3 3 Venn Diagram 15

1 3 3 4 The “5 W’s” 15

1 4 Previous studies 15

CHAPTER TWO: METHODOLOGY 17

2 1 Setting and participants 17

2 2 Stages of the action research 18

2.2.1 PRE – IMPROVEMENT STAGE 18

STEP 1: IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM 18

2 2 1 1 Conducting a survey to get information from students 18

2 2 1 2 Employing reading pre-test to evaluate students’ reading levels 18

STEP 2: FINDING CAUSES OF THE PROBLEM 19

2 2.1 3 Reading professional books and journals for ideas or suggestions 19

2 2 1 3 1 English language learners (ELL) 19

2 2 1.3 2 Factors Influencing Comprehension 20

2 2 2 TRY – OUT STAGE 20

STEP 3: DESIGNING STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVEMENT 20

2 2 2 1 Using a mind map 20

2.2 2 2 Using the KWL 20

2 2 2 3 Using the 5 W’s 21

2 2 2 4 Using Venn diagram 21

STEP 4: TRYING – OUT STRATEGIES 21

2 2 3 POST – IMPROVEMENT STAGE 23

STEP 5: EVALUATING THE TRY – OUT 23

3 1 1 The results of the Initial Student Questionnaire 24

3 1 2 The results of the Final Student Questionnaire 28

3 2 Results of the DRA 32

3 2 1 Result of Initial DRA 32

3 2 2 Result of Final DRA 32

CHAPTER 4: IMPLICATIONS FOR READING TEACHING 34

4 1 Summary and discussion of the main findings 34

4 2 Implications for more effective reading lessons 36

PART C: CONCLUSION 38

1 Conclusion 38

2 Limitations of the Study 38

3 Suggestions for further Research 38

References 39 Appendices X The Sample Lesson Plans XXI

DRA Developmental Reading Assessment EM: English in Medicine

ESP: English for Specific Purposes MMU: Military Medical University L: Level

SLP: Sample Lesson Plan

Figure 1: Initial Questionnaire: Question 1 results Figure 2:Initial questionnaire: Question 2 results Figure 3:Initial questionnaire: Question 3 results Figure 4:Initial questionnaire: Question 4 results Figure 5:Initial questionnaire: Question 5 results Figure 6:Initial questionnaire: Question 6 results Figure 7:Initial questionnaire: Question 7 results Figure 8:Final questionnaire: Question 1 results Figure 9:Final questionnaire: Question 2 results Figure 10:Final questionnaire: Question 3 results Figure 11:Final questionnaire: Question 4 results Figure 12:Final questionnaire: Question 5 results Figure 13:Final questionnaire: Question 6 results Figure 14:Final questionnaire: Question 7 results Figure 15: Reading Comprehension Levels

Table 1: Initial Student DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) scores Table 2: Final Student DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) scores

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

In teaching and learning English as a foreign language in Viet Nam, reading seems

to be the most important and useful activity in any language class, especially for the students of English as a foreign language Of the four language skills, reading has always received a great deal of attention, which is emphasized by Carrell (1981: p1) that “For many students, reading is by far the most important of the four macro skills in a second language, particularly in English as a second teaching of foreign language” In fact, reading is considered an indispensable tool for academic study and career advancement

And it is quite true to the case of Military Medical University, where the author is teaching

Reading comprehension is crucial to a student’s success at school and further to becoming to a lifelong learner However, many students at Military Medical Academy are struggling with reading comprehension They find it difficult to catch the main ideas

of the text, to distinguish facts and details, and to retain information longer Basically, they are at literal reading comprehension level Therefore, they often fail to catch the author’s thought

From this fact, as a teacher of English, the author herself thinks that it is essential to find something new to improve her students’ reading comprehension level so that they can improve their reading comprehension As a result, the author decided to carry out the

entitled study: “Improving students’ reading comprehension through the use of

graphic organizers” The purpose of the study is to find out if graphic organizers can

help students read more effectively

The author of this research chose to carry out the action research to find out how much graphic organizers affected the students’ reading comprehension Based on the results of this action research, some changes and improvement were applied in the author’s lessons, and some appropriate strategies needed to be designed with the hope that the students would work more effectively in a reading lesson

3 Methods of the study

This action research study used qualitative and quantitative research methods The goal of this study is to determine whether the examined techniques and strategies used to enhance students’ comprehension skills would have a positive affect on the ability of students to make sense of what they read

Students would be able to build their comprehension skills of written material because of the exposure to and practice of the graphic organizers strategy Using these strategies would be increasingly beneficial to students as time goes on and they become comfortable and accustomed to applying them to their reading activities Allowing the students to apply these strategies to ESP texts would assist them in recognizing how the strategies could be flexible in helping them to gather an understanding of any genre of

text for any comprehension skill

For this action research project the author used two kinds of data collection instruments to gather information about the students involved, monitor the progress of the students when they applied the strategies throughout the research, and determine the effectiveness of the strategies based on the pre-tests and post-tests

DRA is an assessment in which the students are given a passage to read and answer comprehension questions based on the reading Comprehension is the most important thing tested during this assessment This test was used to get a baseline comprehension score for the students

The pre-tests were necessary to assess the reading comprehension level and skills the students possessed before the intervention of the strategy and used as a baseline score

The post-tests were used to determine the effectiveness of the strategy used by the students during the research process by comparing the pre-test scores to the ones taken at the end of the six practice reading lessons

The questionnaire was a useful way of gaining insight on the feelings the students have toward reading before exposure to the reading strategies and how those feelings were altered if any after exposure to the strategies

Each of these tools was extremely useful in determining the effectiveness of the

strategies being examined in this research project

Step 1: Identify the problem which was desired to solve or an area which was wished to improve by:

+ Initial Questionnaire + Pre – test DRA assessment Step 2: Finding causes of the problem by:

+ English language learners (ELL) + Factors Influencing Comprehension

Stage 2: Trying – out stage

Step 3: Designing strategies for improvements (plan for action) Step 4: Trying – out the strategies (action) and making records of what happened in class

Stage 3: Post – improvement

Step 5: Evaluating the try – out by

+ Final Questionnaire Results + Final Student DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) levels

5 Scope of the study

This study was carried out with sixteen 43th grade students at Military Medical University in Hanoi The research focuses on how graphic organizers affect these students’

reading comprehension in ESP reading lessons

6 Significance of the study

Many factors influence students’ abilities to answer comprehension questions including poor decoding skills, an undeveloped vocabulary, and the inability to make a connection with prior knowledge When teachers only focus on building students’ decoding and fluency skills, they are contributing to students’ comprehension problems In order to support students to gain the necessary skills to make them successful readers, they must develop good vocabulary skills and use their prior background knowledge (Albers & Foil,

2003, p 22) The unfortunate reality is that those students who have difficulty comprehending text are often lacking the knowledge of reading comprehension strategies that could aid them in doing so Using reading strategies as a central part of the author’s instruction can make a profound difference in the comprehension skills that students gain from their time in the classroom Knowing what strategies are most beneficial to the students

can help teachers immensely As a teacher, the author certainly wants to make the most of the time she has with students in the classroom Being able to pinpoint the most effective ways to reach students and to assist them in comprehending and retaining the information will allow researcher more time to concentrate on making those strategies work and thus, improve teacher’s instructional practices

The results of this study would possibly assist other teachers and educators in knowing how the strategies used in this research project may affect their students’ reading comprehension skills Based on findings of the study, these strategies could be extremely

beneficial to classroom instruction

7 Design of the study

The research consists of three main parts: Introduction, Development and Conclusion

Part A: Introduction presents the rationale, the research questions, the method of

study, the research procedure, the scope of the study, the significance of the study and the design of the study

Part B: Development In this part, four chapters are presented

Chapter 1 deals with an exploration of the theoretical background of the research It is

concerned with the issues relevant to the topic of the research: reading and reading comprehension, an overview of English for Specific Purpose and English in Electronics, approaches and techniques to teach reading EE

Chapter 2 is the methodology This chapter presents the background information of the

subjects of the study, the instrument used to collect the data, the procedure of data collection and the procedure of data analysis

Chapter 3 is aimed at describing data analysis in detail and a thorough discussion of

the findings of the study Some explanations and interpretations of the findings are also presented in this chapter

Chapter 4 gives the summary of the findings and some implications which are

proposed for teachers teaching EM reading in particular and ESP reading in general

Part C: Conclusion presents briefly the answers to the research questions, the

limitations and some recommendations for further research are also explored

The appendices lie at the end of the study, following the References

PART B: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW

1 1 ACTION RESEARCH

1 1 1 What is action research?

As stated by Grebhard (1999), the concept of action research emerged from the work

of Lewin (1948, 1952) He was a social psychologist who brought together experimental approaches to social – science research and the idea of “social action” to address social issues Corey (1952, 1953), a Columbia University Professor, was among the first to employ action research in the field of education He argued that formal research following a scientific method had little impact on educational practice Through action research, he claimed, changes in educational practice were possible

In term of what action research was, having considered what it was not, action research had been defined in many different ways According to Wallace (1998), action research is

“the systematic collection and analysis of data relating to the improvement of some aspect of professional practice” (p 227) Tsui’s definition, however, was more detailed and simpler:

“action research is a very effective way of helping teachers to reflect on their teaching and to come up with their own alternatives to improve their practice” (Tsui, 1993) In another way, action research was mentioned at two levels by Grebhard and Oprandy (1999):

“At one level, action research is about teachers identifying and posing problems, as well as addressing issues and concerns related to the problem It is about working toward understanding and possibly resolving these problems by setting goals and creating, initiating a plan of actions, as well

as, reflecting on the degree to which the plan work At another level, it can be about addressing educational practices that go beyond each teacher’s classroom”

Also, Wisker stated that “action research is research that we carry out with our students

in order to try out an idea or an innovation, test a hypothesis about their learning and to see what would happen if …”(p 156)

In short, action research is a sort of scientific study which is often conducted by a teacher or an educator in order to work out the difficulties which are associated to all actions and activities in a classroom The problems which are resolved by action research are often empirical and helpful

1 1 2 Why does a teacher need action research?

As stated by Mettetal, “classroom action research is research designed to help a teacher find out what is happening in and his or her classroom, and to use that information to make

wise decisions for the future” (2001, p 7) Action research at schools colleges or universities work out every day realistic problems experienced by teachers, rather than the “theoretical problems” defined by non – teaching researchers

Action research in education focuses on the three related stages of action:

1 Initiating action, such as, adopting a text, choosing an alternative assessment strategy

2 Monitoring and adjusting, such as, seeing how a pilot project is proceeding, assessing the early progress of new programme, improving a current practice

3 Evaluating action, such as, preparing a final report on a completed project”

(Sagor, 1992) Three causes are given for the teacher’s need of action research by Anders (1988), Curtis (1988) and Tsui (1993); (1) to resolve own problems in scientific process and better own practice; (2) to adapt theory (finding of conventional research) to rehearse (own

problems); and (3) to share the results of action research with other teachers

1 1 3 How does a teacher perform action research in a language classroom?

Tsui (1993) has proposed 5 steps in carrying out action research:

Step1: Identifying problems you desire to solve or an area you wish to enhance by:

- Running a survey to hear from your students

- Reviewing an audio – or a video – taped lesson and the transcription of a segment of the lesson that illustrates the problem

Step 2: Finding causes of the problems by:

- consulting with your colleagues, trainers

- reading professional books/ journals for ideas and suggestions Step 3: Designing strategies for improvement (plan for action) and writing a proposal for action research

Step 4: Trying out the strategies (action) and keeping a diary of what happened in the class Step 5: Evaluating the try – out by:

- reviewing a lesson that illustrated the changes that have been made

- reflecting on the reasons for those changes

- carrying out a survey to get information from students

1 1 3 Summary

Action research is a sort of scientific study conducted by teachers which solve the realistic difficulties in a classroom The teachers need action research to adapt theory to practice Action research can be carried out in collaboration with other teachers or educators

and it needs the supports from both students and education administrators Its results should

be popularized and shared with anybody who is interested in

1 2 READING

1 2 1 What is Reading?

Reading is known as an interactive process that connected the reader with the text, making comprehension The text displays letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs that express meaning The reader manipulates knowledge, skills, and strategies to decide what that meaning is Up to now reading has been described differently by lots of academics

Goodman (1971, p.135) declared that “reading is a psycholinguistics process by which the reader, language user, reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded

by a writer as a graphic display” From his point of view, readers not only gain knowledge or skills of how to read the text, to better grammatical structures…but also realize the content expressed in the text

According to William, (1990, p.2) “reading is a process whereby one looks at and understands what has been written” In his opinion, in the reading process, there are two activities taking place at the same time: looking and understanding Therefore, readers have

to “encode” meanings of a word decided by the context in which it is shown

Also, Harmer (1989, p.153) shares his ideas “reading is an exercise dominated by the eyes and the brain The eyes receive messages and the brain then has to work out the significance of these messages”

Hence, clearly, ideas of reading have been diverse in exploiting words and expressions but they all focus on two actions: studying with eyes and comprehending with brains of which the latter is more significant The most obvious thing in the latter is that the readers not only look at and understand the meaning of what is written but also read authors’

thinking

1 2 2 What is Reading Comprehension?

Grellet (1981: p 3) has considered reading comprehension or “understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible” Swan (1975:1) also shared “a student is good at comprehension” if “he can read accurately and efficiently, so as to get the maximum information of a text with the maximum of understanding” In the same view, Richard and Thomas (1987: p 9) have pointed out

“reading comprehension is best described as an understanding between the author and the reader” Though these opinions are not exactly the same, they all show that reading

comprehension is the process in which the readers, as they read, can recognize the graphic forms of the reading text and understand what is implied behind these forms

In brief, reading becomes meaningless without comprehension since only reading comprehension can appreciate how much readers get the text Therefore, how to aid students

in having efficient reading comprehension methods is considered to be the most powerful task in teaching reading

1 2 3 Reading Comprehension Process

The nature of reading comprehension process – how people learn to process textual information – has been researched by cognitive and behavioral scientists for many decades

So far reading has sometimes been characterized as “passive” or “receptive”

1 2 3 1 The Schema Theory

According to Nunan (1999, p.201), “schema theory is based on the notion that experiences lead to the creation of mental frameworks that help us make sense of new experiences.”

The schemata are recognized as a useful concept in understanding how we are able to interpret texts When a reader reads a text, he must use his own background knowledge, the situational context and the cues provided by the author to interpret the text How much he can understand a text depends on whether his schemata are sufficiently similar to the writer’s That is why many arguments suggest that the concepts which a reader brings to the text are actually more important than the text itself for comprehension Therefore, the more experiences of the world we have, the better we can interpret texts A reader who is rich in background knowledge will comprehend the text more than another whose schemata are poorer In addition, the schemata enable the reader to predict about what she might get from

a certain context

To sum up, it is essential for teachers to recognize that the schemata are the basis for comprehending Therefore, in order to comprehend texts in Standard English foreign language students need to develop new schemata of language, text and interpretation, as well

as schemata of alternative cultural practices and values

1 2 3 2 Bottom – up and Top-down processing

According to Silberstein (1994), “text comprehension requires the simultaneous interaction of two models of information processing”

The bottom – up processing occurs when readers get the meaning of a text through recognizing letters and words, working out sentence structures and then interpreting paragraphs and the whole text According to this view, reading is a linear process by which

readers decode the text word by word, linking the words into phrases and then sentences

When first reading makes readers confused or they are not really sure of what writers intended, understanding the meaning a sentence can have on its own will help readers fully grasp what writers conveyed

In the top – down processing, reading is not just extracting meaning from a text but a process of connecting information in the text with the knowledge readers bring to the act of reading Reading, in this sense, is a dialogue between the reader and the text It is seen as an active cognitive process in which readers’ background knowledge plays a key role in the creation of meaning (Tierney & Pearson, 1994) This is called knowledge-based or conceptually driven information processing

In short, there are two ways that readers can use to deal with a text: using the bottom –

up processing to get detailed understanding of the text and using the top-down to understand main ideas about the text Readers may use one of the two ways to comprehend texts, however, readers usually need both of them to deal with difficult texts As a result, this leads

According to Hayes (1996, p.7), “in interactive models, different processes are thought

to be responsible for providing information that is share with other processes The information obtained from each type of processing is combined to determine the most appropriate interpretation of the printed pages”

In short, the popularity of interactive processes shows that interactive processing can maximize the strengths and minimizes the weaknesses of the bottom – up and top – down processing

1 2 4 An Overview of ESP

1 2 4 1 What is ESP?

ESP originates from a famous saying “Tell me what you need English for and I will tell you the English that you need” So far, ESP has been defined differently by different authors According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987, p.19), ESP is “an approach to language

teaching in which all decisions as to content and approach are based on the learner’s reason for learning”

Sharing with Hutchinson and Waters, Strevens (1988, p.1) said “ESP is a particular case of the general category of special – purpose language teaching”

However, all the above authors have the same opinions about the ESP’s features:

1) It is purposeful and aimed at the successful performance of occupational or educational roles by an individual or a group

2) It is based on an analysis of the students’ needs and is tailor-made to meet these needs

3) It may differ from another general language course in its selection of skills, themes, topics, situations, functions, language and approachology

Most of all, according to Munby (1978), one important feature which characterizes ESP as being different from other general language courses is that “the domains not only relate to distinctive content, but also to discipline-specific lexis, genres and registers.”

1 2 4 2 English in Medicine

Traditionally, ESP can be classified into two major groups: English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) English for Academic Science belongs to EAP and English in Medicine is one of the branches of English for Academic Science Therefore, EM has the following characteristics:

1) designed to meet specified needs of the learner in the field of Medicine;

2) related in content (that is in its themes and topics) to medicine disciplines, occupations and activities;

3) centered on language appropriate to Medicine activities in syntax, lexis discourse, semantics and so on, and analysis of the discourse;

1 2 5 Approaches to teach Reading

In fact, there are quite a lot of approaches of teaching general English reading in general and ESP reading in particular However, in this study, I would like to mention about two approaches which are most commonly used in teaching ESP reading: Grammar – Translation approach and Communicative Language Teaching approach

1 2 5 1 Grammar – Translation Approach

The Grammar Translation Approach is the oldest approach of teaching in the world A number of approaches and techniques have been evolved for the teaching of English and also other foreign languages in the recent past years, yet this approach is still in use in teaching

The main principles on which the Grammar Translation Approach are based are the following:

possible manner

process of interpretation

contrast with those of mother tongue

Advantages:

easiest way of explaining meanings or words and phrases from one language into another

will not have much difficulty in responding to questions in the mother tongue

Disadvantages:

traditions and modes of behavior is, indeed, a difficult task and exact translation from one language to another is not always possible

through rules and not by use Researchers in linguistics have proved that to speak any language, whether native or foreign, entirely by rule is quite impossible

1 2 5 2 Communicative Language Teaching Approach

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) dated from the late 1960s is perhaps the latest in a long succession of revolutions in language teaching since it presents a fundamental

“paradigm shift” – a radically new approach to teaching-learning process (Christina, 1984)

In terms of ESP reading teaching, CLT is most used with two approaches: Content – based teaching and Task-based teaching

Advantages:

1 Language learning is contextualized and purposeful

2 The content-based approach motivates learners’ activeness Learners are forced to think and activate their knowledge to guess the terms as well as the whole content of one text

Disadvantages:

The content-based approach is difficult to apply especially for learners who are low

in English competence Furthermore, learners who use this approach to read ESP materials have certain knowledge about that specific field

1 2 5 2 2 Task-based approach

According to Brown (2001, p.50), task-based learning “puts task at the center of one’s methodological focus” It views the learning process as a set of communicative tasks that are directly linked to the curricular goals they serve…”

In reading comprehension, tasks are especially important since they will guide the readers in a correct reading procedure and help them have thorough understanding of reading texts

There have been criticisms that task-based learning is not appropriate as the foundation

of a class for beginning students Others claim that students are only exposed to certain forms of language and are being neglected of others such as discussion or debate

1 2 6 Techniques to teach EM reading

1 2 6 1 In Pre-reading

At this important stage, teachers should make sure that students have the relevant schema for understanding the text This is achieved by having students think, write, and discuss everything they know about the topic, employing the most common techniques such

as prediction, semantic mapping and reconciled reading

Prediction is defined as “the prior elimination of unlikely alternatives” (Smith, 1994,

p 19) According to him, predictions are questions readers ask the world and comprehension

is receiving the answers

Previewing occurs when students look at titles, headings, and pictures, and read the

first few paragraphs and the last paragraph; these activities can then help students understand

what texts are about by activating their formal and content schemata and making them be familiar with the topic before they begin reading

Semantic mapping is another pre-reading technique that Carell, Pharis and Liberto

(1989, p.651) describe as a useful way to pre-teach vocabulary and to “provide the teacher with an assessment of the students’ prior knowledge or schema availability on the topic”

This activity asks students to brainstorm about the reading topic as the information is displayed on a graphic “map”

Reconciled reading lesson reverses the sequence presented by many textbooks where

the text is followed by questions Instead, the teacher develops pre-reading questions from the questions that appear at the end of the reading

1 2 6 2 In While-reading

This stage requires teachers to guide and monitor the interaction between readers and texts One important skill teachers can impart at this stage is note-taking, which allows students to compile new vocabulary and important information and details, and to summarize information and record their reactions and opinion

Furthermore, during reading, readers’ minds repeatedly engage in a variety of processes, seemingly all at one Using top-down and bottom-up approaches, readers use pre-reading information to make some predictions about the text Using bottom-up approach, readers start by processing information at the sentence level

1 2 6 3 In Post-reading

This stage offers the chance to evaluate students’ adequacy of interpretation, while bearing in mind that accuracy is relative and that “readership” must be respected as long as the writer’s intentions are addressed (Tierney & Pearson, 1994)

Post-reading aims at extending the understanding obtained from the pre-reading and while-reading stages into writing tasks, such as summarizing, evaluating, synthesizing, commenting and reflecting

By engaging students in pre-, while-, post-reading activities, teachers not only support students’ understanding of content but also provide them with opportunities to hone their comprehension, vocabulary, and study skills without interrupting content learning

1 2 7 Reading Comprehension Levels

According to the Barrett Taxonomy of Cognitive and Affective Dimensions of Reading Comprehension, there are five reading comprehension levels as illustrated below:

Figure 15: Reading Comprehension Levels

1 3 GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS

1 3 1 Definition of graphic organizers

Bromley, Vitis, and Modlo (1995, p.6) defined “A graphic organizer is a visual representation of knowledge It is a way of structuring information, of arranging important aspects of a concept or topic into a pattern using labels”

Sharing the same ideas, Amin (2004, p.3) claimed that “A graphic organizer is a visual and graphic display that depicts the relationships between facts, items, and ideas within a learning task”

Graphic organizers are a great way to improve reading comprehension Basically, these tools are visual versions of outlines They help readers organize information so that it becomes more understandable and more memorable

1 3 2 Roles of graphic organizers

Bromley, Vitis, and Modlo (1995, p.66) has outlined four benefits from using graphic organizers They are:

- Improving comprehension skills and strategies

- Facilitating the recalling or retelling of literature

- Connecting prior knowledge and new knowledge for students

- Easing the organization and direction of students writing

Ruffini (2008, p.57) also shared some advantages of using graphic organizers to reading comprehension as:

- Aiding learning by explicitly integrating new and old knowledge

- Generating ideas through brainstorming

Literal Comprehension (L1) Reorganization (L2)

Inferential Comprehension (L3)

Evaluation (L4) Appreciation (L5)

Critique, appraise, comment, and appreciate

analyze, appraise, evaluate, justify, reason, criticize, judge

predict, infer, guess classify, regroup, rearrange, assemble, collect, categorize

label, list, name, recall, repeat, state

- Assessing understanding or diagnosing misunderstanding

- Increasing recall

- Designing a complex structure

- Communicating and understanding complex relationships

1 3 3 Types of graphic organizers employed in the research

1 3 3 1 Mind maps

A mind map is a kind of graphic organizers, it is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid to studying and organizing information (see appendix C)

A Venn diagram is an illustration of the relationships between and among sets, groups

of objects that share something in common Usually, Venn diagrams are used to depict set intersections (see appendix E) This activity will sharpen students’ skills for comparison and contrast between or among things

1 3 3 4 The “5 W’s”

Five W's diagrams are a type of graphic organizer that let the student think about and list the "Who, When, Where, What, and Why" of a story or event in a simple visual way (see appendix F) This activity will help students understand of what they have read, and they can see the relationship between all the information

1 4 Previous studies

There are some previous studies related to this study such as the study of Kim, Vaughn, Wanzek, & Wei, (2004) and the study of Natalie (2001) Both of them dealt with the use of graphic organizers in reading lessons Kim, Vaughn, Wanzek, & Wei, (2004) aimed at finding out if whether or not graphic organizers would have positive effects on reading comprehension of students with learning disabilities His findings showed that semantic organizers, cognitive maps with a mnemonic and framed outlines were all found to

be highly effective in improving reading comprehension Cognitive maps without a mnemonic were found to be moderately effective Besides, graphic organizers were effective regardless of whether they were implemented by teachers or researchers Also, students ranging in age from elementary to high school all benefited significantly from using graphic organizers

Natalie (2001) studied of “The effects of Graphic Organizers on the Post-Reading Comprehension of Students in a Collaborative Team Teaching Setting” The purpose of the study is to find out if the use of a graphic organizer would have an effect on reading comprehension The finding was shown that “5 W’s” had a positive effect on reading comprehension

Summary chapter

This chapter has presented the issues relating to teaching reading in terms of the role of reading in foreign language learning with both positive and negative points Some approaches to teach reading have been presented In addition, the chapter reviews some theoretical issues of graphic organizers that were employed to improve students’ reading comprehension ability The next chapter presents the research methodology employed in the

study