English Reading Strategies By Students From Northern Moutainous Provinces At The Faculty Of Information Technology, Thai Nguyen University.pdf

Output file VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES & * & PHÙNG THỊ THANH TÚ ENGLISH READING STRATEGIES BY STUDENTS[.]

& * &

PHÙNG THỊ THANH TÚ

ENGLISH READING STRATEGIES BY STUDENTS FROM

NORTHERN MOUTAINOUS PROVINES

AT THE FACULTY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY,

THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY

CHIẾN LƯỢC ĐỌC HIỂU TIẾNG ANH CỦA SINH VIÊN

CÁC TỈNH MIỀN NÚI PHÍA BẮC TẠI KHOA CÔNG NGHỆ THÔNG TIN - ĐẠI HỌC THÁI NGUYÊN

M.A MINOR THESIS

Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10

Ha Noi - 2010

***************

PHÙNG THỊ THANH TÚ

ENGLISH READING STRATEGIES BY STUDENTS FROM

NORTHERN MOUTAINOUS PROVINES

AT THE FACULTY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY,

THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY

CHIẾN LƯỢC ĐỌC HIỂU TIẾNG ANH CỦA SINH VIÊN

CÁC TỈNH MIỀN NÚI PHÍA BẮC TẠI KHOA CÔNG NGHỆ THÔNG TIN - ĐẠI HỌC THÁI NGUYÊN

M.A MINOR THESIS

Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10

Supervisor: HOÀNG THỊ XUÂN HOA, Ph.D

HaNoi - 2010

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

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1.4 Research on teaching and learning reading strategies in second language learning

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2.4 Data analysis Error! Bookmark not defined CHAPTER III: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS Error! Bookmark not defined

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APPENDIX 1: Questionnaires for students

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PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Reading is an essential way of obtaining information in contemporary society Research discovered that readers spontaneously use reading strategies in the reading process (Pritchard, 1990) Literature also suggested that the use of appropriate reading strategies may improve reading comprehension (Oxford, 1990) Using reading strategies can be of great help to non-native readers because it may serve as an effective way of overcoming language deficiency and obtaining better reading achievement both for regular school assignments and on language proficiency tests (Zhang, 1992)

Reading is an activity with a purpose A person may read in order to gain information

or verify existing knowledge, or in order to critique a writer's ideas or writing style Another person may also read for enjoyment, or to enhance knowledge of the language being read The purpose(s) for reading guide the reader's selection of texts Reading strategies help readers to acquire a text quickly Successful language learners know how to use reading strategies efficiently In language learning, students read to learn the language,

to broaden their knowledge, and to do assignments The purposes of reading strategies are

to have general knowledge, to get a specific detail, to find out the main idea or theme, to learn, to remember, to delight, to summarize and to do research

In the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT), Thai Nguyen University, English has been considered as the important subject due to the fact that many informational technology documents are now written in English Once students master the English language, or are capable of comprehending satisfactorily documents written in it, they can more easily grasp new technology than those weaker in this language

There is a new rule for (FIT) students enrolling this academic year: After graduation, students need to attain an English competency equivalence of 400 points (TOEFL-PBT) This seems to be a bit high of a requirement for the students; however, this is a motivation for them to study and concentrate more on the language

It is natural that in order to master a language, learners often want to improve in all four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing For the FIT students, the most important skill is reading as almost all English books about Information Technology are

written in English Moreover, Vietnamese books about Information Technology are sometimes out of date and difficult to understand due to bad translation FIT students are taught reading skills from their first academic year Through observing English reading classes, this author has realized that most students read the text and then translate it into Vietnamese They don’t know what or how to use reading strategies to comprehend the text When dealing with a reading lesson, students often suffer from a lack of reading strategies which are essential for them to overcome the reading comprehension challenges

in the classroom A large body of research has found that effective readers are aware of the strategies they use and that they use strategies flexibly and efficiently (Garner, 1987; Presley, Beard EL, Dinary & Brown, 1992 cited in Nguyen (2007)) Researchers believed that these strategies can be taught to ineffective language learners so that they can then become more successful at language learning

Besides developing reading proficiency for students, teachers who train students to use reading strategies can also help them become autonomous language learners Consequently, teaching students learning strategies is an important duty of the language teachers since learning strategies can help students monitor and take responsibility for their own learning Helping students understand good language learning strategies and training them to develop and use them can be considered the desired characteristics of a good language teacher (Lessard C., 1997:3)

Due to the aforementioned reasons, it's necessary for this author to investigate what English reading strategies students use and ascertain what reading strategies English teachers in FIT teach Therefore, implications for teaching and learning reading strategies can be obtained via the results of the research titled "English Reading strategies by Students from the Northern Mountainous Provinces at the Faculty of Information Technology, Thai Nguyen University"

2 Aims of the study

This study aims to:

- Investigate what reading strategies FIT students employ when reading in English

- Explore what reading strategies FIT English teachers teach

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

- What are the reading strategies in English used by students at Faculty of Information Technology, Thai Nguyen University?

- What reading strategies do the English teachers in FIT teach?

3 Methods of the study

In order to achieve the aims mentioned previously, the study employed quantitative methods including survey questionnaires for students The survey questionnaires for students were used to determine what reading strategies employed by the students when reading in English And survey questionnaires for teachers were also administered to explore what reading strategies English teachers in FIT taught

After the data is analyzed and discussed, all comments, remarks, recommendations, assumptions and conclusions pertaining to the study will be available and some suggestions will then be raised concerning the thesis

4 Scope of the study:

A learners' success or failure in acquiring a language can be affected by many interrelated factors Among these factors, the teaching of reading strategies should be taken into consideration However, this study only focuses on the learning reading strategies of students at the Faculty of Information Technology – Thai Nguyen University and includes suggestions for employing these strategies in those classrooms

In order to survey learners' reading strategies and investigate the teachers' teaching methods, numerous ways of collecting data may be used However, the present study employs only the questionnaire Therefore, there is a limitation concerning the reliability of the data used As Dornyei Z (2003) states questionnaires have some serious limitations, and some of these have led certain researchers to claim that questionnaire data are not reliable or valid

PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter reviews theories related to reading and reading activities in general and reading strategies in particular It also reviews current research on teaching and learning reading strategies that have been conducted so far All of these serve as a basis for an investigation into reading strategies in English employed by students from northern mountainous provinces at Faculty of Information Technology, Thai Nguyen University which is carried out and presented in the next chapter

1.1 Reading

1.1.1 What is reading?

The definition of reading has changed substantially during the past few decades, from

a focus on reading as decoding or as set of decontextualized or context free skills, to a view of reading as information processing (Goodman, 1967, Pang S.E., Muaka A., Bernhardt B E and Kamil L M., 2003) or as an interactive process in which reader is actively involved in using available content knowledge to construct the meaning of the text (Anderson & Pearson, 1984, Richards and Schmidt, 2002, Anderson, 2003)

Richards and Schmidt (2002) define reading in Pang S.E., Muaka A., Bernhardt B E

and Kamil L M.(2003) perceiving a written text in order to understand its contents This

can be done silently called silent reading The understanding that results is called reading comprehension Saying a written text aloud which can be done with or without an understanding of the contents is called oral reading

Pang S.E., Muaka A., Bernhardt B E and Kamil L M.(2003:6) also consider "reading

is about understanding written texts Reading is a complex activity that consists of two related processes: word recognition and comprehension Word recognition refers to the process of perceiving how written symbols correspond to one’s spoken language Comprehension is the process of making sense of words, sentences and connected text Readers typically make use of background knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, experience with text and other strategies to help them understand written text"

1.1.2 Models of reading

Researchers have created models that describe what happens when people read According to Aebersold J A & Field M L (1997), in Hudson T (2007), there are three main model of how reading occurs identified as bottom-up, top-down and interactive

* Bottom-up theory

In bottom-up theory, the smallest units of a text from letters to words to phrases to sentences, etc are constructed by a reader Bottom-up processing focuses on how readers extract information from the printed page, claiming that readers deal with letters and words

in a relatively complete and systematic fashion According to Nunan (1991), reading was viewed as ― "the process of meaning interpretation'' in which ―the language is

"translated from one form of symbolic representation to another" The bottom-up theory (Hudson T (2007) to reading focus fairly on text rapid processing and word identification

By mapping the input directly on to some independent representational form in the mental lexicon, the reader can have the ability to recognize words in isolation Researchers of bottom-up model are primarily interested in how a reader reads rather than in what the reader comprehends The view from Perfetti (1997) in Hudson T (2007) is that reading comprehension is equal to language comprehension, plus decoding, plus some minor other contributing variable In other words, in the bottom – up model, the reader begins with the written text (the bottom) and constructs meaning from letters, words, phrases and sentences found within, and then processes the text in a linear fashion Theories of reading that stress bottom-up processing claim that the reader processes all of the letters in the last word of the sentence, regardless of its predictability Obviously, in the view of this driven model, the reader seems to play a relatively passive role because the basis of bottom – up processing is the linguistic knowledge of the reader

Another shortcoming of the bottom-up model shown by Samuel and Kamil (1988: 31)

is that "because of the lack of feedback loops in the early bottom – up models, it was difficult to account for as facilitating variables in word recognition and comprehension" Because of this drawback, and as well as the introduction of the top-down model of reading, many researchers was not interested in the bottom-up model

* Top-down theory

Top-down model rejects the notion that identification of letters to form words, and the derivation of meaning from these words is efficient reading On the contrary, it assumes that efficient reading requires the readers to make predictions and hypothesis about the text content by relating the new information to their prior knowledge and by using as few language clues as possible It is further assumed that the readers can check whether the hypothesis are correct or not by sampling the text

Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith are the researchers who are most closely identified with top-down theory to the reading process Goodman use the term

"psycholinguistic guessing game" (also Carrell, 1998: 2) to "value the cognitive economy

of linguistic information over graphemic information" He specifies four processes in reading: predicting, sampling, confirming, and correcting In top-down process, the reader guesses the meaning of the text and samples the print to confirm or disconfirm the guess

In other words, the reader brings to bear not only knowledge of the language, but also internal concepts of how language is processed, past experiential background and general conceptual background

The top-down model is influenced by schema theory, which emphasizes the importance of the reader’s background knowledge in the reading process (Carrell, 1998:4) According to this theory, so as to comprehend a text, readers make use of both the text and their background knowledge Therefore, interaction of the background knowledge and the text is essential for efficient reading

Smith (1971, 1994) in Hudson T (2007) see that reading instruction should take place when comprehension of a text is possible, rather than focus on isolated phoneme-grapheme correspondence activities and drills

The 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, 1976)

Apparently, according to Eskey (1988), the top-down model tends to emphasize higher level skills as the prediction of meaning by means of context clues or background knowledge at the expense of lower skills like the rapid and accurate identification of lexical and grammatical forms 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 This model is good for the skillful, fluent reader for whom perception and decoding have become automatic, not for the less proficient, developing reader Stanovich (1988) stated that ― the generation of hypotheses would actually be more time – consuming than decoding Therefore, a top-down model of reading is essentially a model of the fluent reader and does not account for all the needs of students who are acquiring reading skills

For many reading theorists who recognized the importance of both the text and the reader in the reading process, a combination of the two emerged the interactive model

* Interactive theory

Presently, interactive model of reading is accepted by most researchers and teachers (Hudson T (2007) Reading is seen as a skill that can be understood independently from issues of general comprehension Context can aid in the process, but has less direct influence than the cognitive processing of print The interactive model reflected in Smith (1994) that language has a surface structure, the observable characteristics of language as it exists in print or speech, and it also has a deep structure, the meaning obtained from the message In such views of the interactive nature of reading, priority is given to the process

of sampling the text, making predictions about the intended meaning, and then evaluating the message through subsequent reading The third orientation focuses on the necessity of addressing social context, and is associated with the new literacy studies This orientation sees reading and writing together rather than as separate skills The interactive models of reading assume that skills at all levels are interactively available to process and interpret the text In this model, good readers are both good decoders and good interpreters of text, their decoding skills becoming more automatic but no less important as their reading skill develops

In short, the interactive process of reading involves not only the processing of text on a page or elsewhere, and cultural background knowledge, but also the power relationships in the society which have produced concepts of the reading process