A study on the difficulties in reading comprehension skills of english majored sophomores at tay do university

Among these skills, reading is an important skill which needs to be developed, especially reading comprehension ability.. In the process of teaching and learning English as a foreign lan

Can Tho, May 2020

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This research proposal could hardly finish without enthusiastic help of many people First of all, I want to express my deep gratitude toward my supervisor, Ms Dang Thi Hanh, MA at Tay Do University This proposal could not have been completed without her enthusiasm, thoughtfulness, and informativeness Actually, she instructed, commented, and provided me useful references and materials so that I could complete

my research proposal In addition, she spent her valuable time on guiding and encouraging me during the time I was conducting the research

Secondly, I want to show my special thanks to all lecturers in the Faculty of Linguistics and Literature of Tay Do University for their teaching and helping me widen knowledge of English over the past four years

I also would like to extend my special thanks to the Faculty of Linguistics and Literature of Tay Do University for giving me the opportunity and permission to carry out the proposal research

Finally, I want to give my wholehearted thankful words to my family and my friends for love and support They have always encouraged and motivated me during my studying process

COMMENTS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT i

COMMENTS ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iii

ABSTRACT v

CHATER 1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationale 1

1.2 The significance of study 3

1.3 The organization of study 3

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 4

2.1 The definitions of reading skill and reading comprehension 4

2.1.1 The definitions of reading skill 4

2.1.2 The definitions of reading comprehension 6

2.2 The importance of reading comprehension 7

2.3 Difficulties in reading comprehension 9

2.3.1 Grammatical structures 9

2.3.2 Vocabulary 12

2.3.3 Background knowledge 15

2.3.4 Lack of reading comprehension skills 16

CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH AIMS – RESEARCH QUESTIONS – HYPOTHESIS 19

3.1 Research Aims 19

3.2 Research Questions 19

3.3 Hypothesis 19

CHAPTER 4 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 20

4.1 Design 20

4.2 Participants 20

4.3 Instruments 20

4.3.1 Questionnaire 21

4.3.2 Interview 21

4.4 Procedure 21

CHAPTER 5 EXPECTED OUTCOME 23

5.1 Motivation 23

5.2 Grammatical structures 23

5.3 Vocabulary 24

5.4 Background knowledge 24

5.5 Reading comprehension skills 24

REFERENCES 26

APPENDIX A 29

APPENDIX B 37

ABSTRACT

Reading comprehension is often considered one of the most difficult aspects of language learning In reality, many language learners find it difficult to express their thinking in the reading comprehension process because each student has their own problem This survey research presents the process of study about "A study on the difficulties in reading comprehension skills of English majored-sophomores at Tay Do University" The participants of this research are the sophomores from Bachelor of English class at Tay Do University In study process, questionnaire and interview are used as two instruments to collect the data The results of the research will point out the difficulties in reading comprehension skills Therefore, the study is expected to help students improve their reading comprehension skills

When learning English, students often concentrate on four basic skills They are listening, speaking, reading and writing Among these skills, reading is an important skill which needs to be developed, especially reading comprehension ability This is because the goal of most foreign language students is to get access to the knowledge they need through the medium of the foreign language they are learning In addition, reading is very important, even the most important source of linguistic input through which the students acquire the foreign language Unfortunately, there are many factors, both linguistic and non-linguistic, that makes reading comprehension a difficult skill

for the students to acquire According to Carrell (1981) “For many students, reading is

by far the most important of the four skills in a second language, particularly in Engish

as a second or foreign language”

There is no denying that reading is one of the important skills in English and gives a variety of benefits to us Reading is the window of the world because of the fact that

people can get more knowledge and information from books, magazines, newspapers, etc It helps readers to discover new words and phrases that they come across in everyday conversations Many foreign language students often regard reading as one of the most important goals in the learning process and social interaction because, first, reading is an indispensable communication tool in a civilized society Second, the reading materials produced in any period of time in history are most influenced by social background Third, the developments over the period of the recorded history of reading have led to two very different poles In the process of teaching and learning English as a foreign language in Vietnam in general, and at Tay Do University (TDU)

in particular, reading has always been paid a great deal of attention from both teachers and students Like many other universities in Vietnam, English at TDU is learned and taught in a non-native environment, therefore, reading is not only considered as a means to gain knowledge but also a means by which further study takes place Traditionally, reading is a passive activity, but in fact, it should be active As Block

(1992: 319-343) indicates, "reading is such a hidden process that it is often unnoticed

in the language classroom Teachers often believe that reading classes should be teacher-centered" However, according to Bedir (1998), if teachers adopt rote

learning, learners are usually expected to tackle comprehension difficulties by themselves Moreover, teachers must focus not only on language development but also

on reading strategy practice English majored-sophomores at Tay Do University are less exposed to training in reading skills and they do not know how to activate their schemata Thus, they encounter difficulties in comprehension This results in poor marks in reading sections of their examinations For the second-year students of English at TDU, although they have been learning English for at least several years, it

is still often difficult for them to understand the text or passage in English, since they still lack vocabulary, grammar, reading skills, and poor background knowledge Besides, the teachers sometimes have to face difficulties in dealing with the students’

learning demands and newly introduced sources of materials In addition, teaching methods and teaching techniques in general, are still below the international standard

of education From these reasons above, the researcher decided to carry out "A study

on the difficulties in reading comprehension skills of English majored-sophomores

at Tay Do University"

It is hoped that the study will make some contributions to improve learning English in general and reading in particular for the second-years students of English at TDU The researcher also hopes that students can recognize their difficulties in reading comprehension and through it will be possible to make useful suggestions or methods

to help them improve their reading skill

1.2 The significance of study

The results of the present study can be meaningful in both theoretical and practical aspects For theoretical significance, it is expected to supplement previous studies on the field of learning reading comprehension Also, it would provide valuable information and make suggestions for later researchers concerned For practical significance, it can be shed light on deeper difficulties in reading comprehension of English majored-sophomores at Tay Do University

1.3 The organization of study

The research consists of five chapters

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Literature review

Chapter 3: Research aims – Research questions – Hypothesis

Chapter 4: Research methodology

Chapter 5: Expected outcome

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

The current chapter reviews the theoretical framework relevant to difficulties and reading comprehension It comprises four sections The first section states the definitions of reading The second section presents the definitions of reading comprehension The third section expresses the importance of reading comprehension

In the final section, the focus is on the difficulties effect reading comprehension skills

2.1 The definitions of reading skill and reading comprehension

2.1.1 The definitions of reading skill

Reading is referred to as the importance of the four skills for EFL (English Foreign Language) learners, as it enables students to gain exposure to the target language and receive valuable linguistic input to build up language proficiency (Erten & Raz1, 2003) We cannot be sure when reading activity begins, but we have to admit that reading is an essential activity that provides a great contribution to obtaining knowledge It is obvious that in real life we usually spend much time reading all sorts

of things like books, magazines, newspapers, novels, stories However, sometimes we read but we do not understand what they mean, or cannot understand the text we read

In this case, it cannot be called reading So what is reading?

There have been numerous definitions of reading, each of which is the reflection of its author’s view of the reading process Anderson (1999: 1) explains this very neatly as

follows: “Reading is an active, fluent process which involves the reader and the

reading material in building meaning Meaning does not reside on the printed page or occurs in reading, which combines the words on the printed page with the reader’s background knowledge and experiences.”

According to Harmer (1989: 153), reading is a mechanical process that “eyes receive

the message and the brain then has to work out the significance of the message” In his

definition, Harmer focuses on both two actions dominated by the eyes and the brain as

well as on the speed of the process “a reading text moves at a speed of the reader”,

which means that the readers themselves decides how fast he wants to read the text

Sharing the same opinion, Smith (1985: 102) defines “reading understands the

author’s thought” He also added that “understanding print or even receiving communication can hardly be said to explain reading” The problem still remains how

the reader understands the print or the message “It means that we – the reader read

the author’s mind, not the author’s words” Roe, Stood and Burns (1987: 2) describes

reading in a more extensive way In their opinion, “reading is thinking”

Another definition of reading was offered by Allen and Valletta (1977: 249) In their

opinion, “reading is developmental process” We learn reading not only to know how

to read, to master the symbols, the sound, the language, the grammar etc, that used in the text but also to understand the ideas, the information expressed in that text or to develop the ability of reconstructing its content using our own words One more

researcher called Goodman (1971: 153) considers reading is a “psycholinguistic

process by which the reader - a language user, reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display”

Reading involves a reader, a text, and a writer Reading skills are developed in an active process This process involves the surface representation encoded by a writer and the reader (Goodman 1969 in Carrell 1988) If the writer is careless, the reader may not get the message If the writer makes demands that the reader cannot fulfill, the message will not be received, even though to another reader it might be clear If the reader is careless, reading will result in incomplete interpretation The reader tries to interpret the text through his/her own experiences, but they may differ from the writer’s experiences This explanation proves that reading is not just an active process, but also an interactive one Reading is closely linked with meaning For this reason, lack of shared assumptions presents the most difficult problem in reading

To sum up, from all these opinions above, it is obvious that no definition can possibly capture all the ideas and features of what reading is Each linguist’s definition reflects what reading means as seen from his own point of view However, they all have some features in common that reading means comprehending written language and it employs a variety of skills In addition, they all concentrate on the nature of reading

2.1.2 The definitions of reading comprehension

In teaching and learning a foreign language in general and teaching reading in particular, reading comprehension plays an important part It can be understood as the ability to draw attention to the required information from the text as efficiently as possible So what is reading comprehension?

Reading comprehension is the ability to process text, understand its meaning, and to integrate with what the reader already knows Fundamental skills required in efficient reading comprehension are knowing meaning of words, ability to understand meaning

of a word from discourse context, ability to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and references in it, ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents, ability to identify the main thought of a passage, ability to answer questions in a passage, ability to recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage and determine its tone, to understand the situational mood conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining etc, and finally ability to determine writer's purpose, intention and point of view, and draw inferences about the writer (discourse - semantics)

According to Richard and Thomas (1987: 9), “Reading comprehension is best

described as an understanding between the author and the reader” This point of view

concentrates on the reader’s understanding of the message based on the individual’s

background knowledge They stated that “reading is much more than just pronouncing

words correctly or simply knowing what the author intends: it is the process whereby

the printed pages stimulate ideas, experiences and responses that are unique to an individual”

In his book, Swan (1975: 1) pointed out that “A student is good at comprehension We

mean that he can read accurately and efficiently, so as to get the maximum information

of a text with the minimum of understanding” For Roe, Stood and Burns (1987: 9),

“Reading comprehension is reconstruction, interpretation, and evaluation of what

author of written content means by using knowledge gained from life experience”

Study the nature of reading comprehension, Grilled (1981: 3) indicated that “Reading

comprehension or understanding written text means extracting the required information from it as effectively as possible” This means that the student can show

his understanding by re-expressing the content of the text in many ways such as summarizing the text, answering questions etc

From these theories above, it can be understood that reading for comprehension is the primary purpose for reading; raising students’ awareness of main ideas in a text and exploring the organization of a text are essential for good comprehension It is the process in which the readers – as they read, can recognize the graphic form and understand the relation between the writing and the meaning It means that after reading, student can master grammar structures, words, pronunciation etc and can understand the content of the text and use it in their real life effectively Furthermore,

“reading without comprehension is meaningless” (Karolin and Karin, 1988: 2)

Reading means comprehending written language so when understanding breaks down, reading actually does not occur

2.2 The importance of reading comprehension

Well, without proper comprehension skills, students lack the ability to understand what they read The point of reading isn't to make sounds in your brain or out loud, but

rather, to understand important lessons, stories, and arguments Through the act of writing, our ancestors have recorded important knowledge that we can understand simply by reading By understanding what we read, we pick up important information, understand scientific theories, past opinions, and new frontiers (In Layman's terms, it

is through reading that we no longer have to “discover” gravity, or the independence of

182 nations with every new generation)

Having excellent reading comprehension skills is crucial It increases the enjoyment and effectiveness of reading and helps not only academically, but professionally, and in

a person's personal life Imagine your employer has just handed you an important document to read and tells you he expects a summary of the material on his desk by tomorrow You take a look and see it is written in a language totally foreign to you After your initial confusion, you may try to make some sense of it and scan the document While you may be able to phonetically decipher the words and sound them out, that’s where your “reading” would end You wouldn’t have any idea what the words you just read actually meant

Obviously, this is an extreme example but sadly, classrooms across the nation are interspersed with students who experience the same type of frustration every day They don’t possess adequate reading comprehension skills to do what is expected of them Without comprehension, reading is simply following words on a page from left

to right while sounding them out The words on the page have no meaning And while people read for many different reasons, the chief goal is to derive some understanding

of what the writer is trying to convey and make use of that information - whether for fact gathering, learning a new skill, or for pleasure That’s why reading comprehension skills are so important The lack of strong reading comprehension skills obviously affects a student’s success at school Academic progress depends on understanding, analyzing, and applying the information gathered through reading Without them, the

reader cannot gather any information and use it to efficiently function and enjoy the richness of life

But it goes much further than that Poor reading comprehension skills have been also linked to poverty and crime According to a survey, over 60% of inmates in the U.S prison system have reading skills at or below the fourth-grade level; 85% of U.S juveniles in prison are functionally illiterate; 43% set of adults with extremely low reading skills live at or below the poverty line And even more alarming, nearly 2/3 of students who reach the fourth grade without proficient reading skills end up on welfare

or in prison While these statistics are not meant to shock you, they do send a message that is loud and clear: developing strong reading comprehension skills is essential for a rich academic, professional, and personal life Imagine trying to survive and thrive in a society where you couldn’t comprehend the basic meaning of your cable bill, your mortgage agreement, or how to follow road signs Even worse, imagine not being able

to read the label on a bottle of medicine or a container of dangerous chemicals Living safely and productively is only one of the many outcomes of proper reading comprehension skills Being able to derive meaning from the written word also enables students to develop intellectually, socially, and emotionally

2.3 Difficulties in reading comprehension

In learning English as a foreign language, it is not easy to be a good learner in four basic skills, especially reading comprehension ability in reading skills For the sophomores majoring in English at Tay Do University, they have already faced some difficulties In this research, the researcher would like to analyze four common reasons that most students meet in their reading comprehension

2.3.1 Grammatical structures

In reading comprehension, the first problem is grammatical structures Reading comprehension skill is a complex skill (Kintsch & Rawson, 2005; Perfetti, Landi &

Oakhill, 2005) Readers need to recognize or decipher individual words, access their meanings and interpret grammatical structure Rarely is a text completely literal: readers need to draw on general knowledge and an appreciation of pragmatic factors in order to understand the intended message Successful reading demands that readers construct a coherent and integrated mental representation of the text, rich in referential relations (Gernsbacher, 1990; Kintsch, 1998; van der Broek, 1994)

Besides, readers have to face various difficulties The first and foremost problem is that they may have to work with unfamiliar and difficult topics There are called “text problem” The content of the text might be rather strange to the students and the grammatical structures might be new Therefore, they cannot understand it The readers will find the text very challenging and might not have any motivation left to keep on reading, students may have difficulty adjusting their reading strategies to match the author’s intent or purpose They may not be familiar with a particular story “grammar”

or genre and the literary devises used in text

Doan (2017) conducted a study on the difficulties in reading comprehension of second years English majored for specific purposes, department of foreign language studies, the University of Quy Nhon The topic of this study is the difficulties in reading comprehension She investigated students by questionnaire In addition, she consulted some previous research to make her research more reliable In this research, she used the qualitative method She found that about 77% of students had difficulty understanding and using verb tenses, or word form and sentence format; 21% of the reviewers said it was appropriate and the remaining 2% said that they did not encounter any problems with the grammar problems that appeared during the reading process Students may lack knowledge of English grammar and syntax and therefore, may read word by word They may encounter too much unfamiliar vocabulary to grasp the

overall concept conveyed in the sentence They are also challenged when reading idiomatic expressions and unfamiliar grammatical constructions

In addition, students may have difficulty with more complex and compound sentences They may lose the meaning of references within the text, such as with frequent use of pronouns Pronoun usage may be different or less frequent in the native language Connectives may be overlooked or misunderstood so they lose the relationships between concepts and ideas They encounter a lot of difficulties in dealing with proverbs idioms, synonyms, and antonyms, polysemantic, and subtechnical vocabulary Metaphor, metonymy and other types of transference of meaning also cause great difficulty for them

According to Timothy Shanahan, who is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois in Chicago where he was Founding Director of the Center for Literacy and Chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction,

“There is a lot of evidence showing the importance of grammar in reading comprehension Studies over the years have shown a clear relationship between syntactic or grammatical sophistication and reading comprehension; that is, as students learn to employ more complex sentences in their oral and written language, their ability to make sense of what they read increases, too”

There tends to be a school of thought that when we present grammar to our students in such a detailed and methodical manner, they lose the creative side of writing The cognitive effort spent to make certain their sentence structure is grammatically correct stifles any of the student’s efforts at being creative with their written expression There

is also an assumption that students will intuit grammar without direct instruction and the students are the ones who suffer from this assumption that they will eventually “get it.” They should be explicitly taught grammar in order to successfully reach the end goal of reading comprehension

2.3.2 Vocabulary

The second but not less important kind of problem is the vocabulary As everyone knows, grammatical knowledge accounts for a great deal of competence in reading, however, knowledge of vocabulary is a great deal more important as a factor of reading comprehension than awareness of grammatical structures (O’Donnel, 1961:313-316) Reading comprehension and vocabulary are inextricably linked together The ability to decode or identify and pronounce words is self-evidently important, but knowing what the words mean has a major and direct effect on knowing what any specific passage means while skimming a reading material It has been shown that students with a little vocabulary than other students comprehend less of what they read It has been suggested that to improve comprehension, improving word groups, complex vocabularies such as homonyms or words that have multiple meanings, and those with figurative meanings like idioms, similes, collocations, and metaphors are a good practice

One of the most persistent findings in reading research is that the extent of students’ vocabulary knowledge relates strongly to their reading comprehension and overall academic success (Becker, 1977) This relationship seems logical; to get meaning from what they read, students need both a great many words in their vocabularies and the ability to use various strategies to establish the meanings of new words when they encounter them Young university students who do not have large vocabularies or effective word-learning strategies often struggle to achieve comprehension Their bad experiences with reading set in motion a cycle of frustration and failure that continues throughout their schooling (Hart &Risley, 2003)

Andrew Biemiller argues that teachers should give out topics with related words and phrases before reading a book to students, teaching includes topic related word groups, synonyms of words and their meaning with the context, and he further says to

familiarize students with sentence structures in which these words commonly occur Biemiller says this intensive approach gives students opportunities to explore the topic beyond its discourse - freedom of conceptual expansion However, there is no evidence

to suggest the primacy of this approach Incidental Morphemic analysis of words - prefixes, suffixes, and roots - is also considered to improve understanding of the vocabulary, though they are proved to be an unreliable strategy for improving comprehension and is no longer used to teach students

There’s a lot going on in reading, from the letter and word recognition to understanding meaning at the phrase, sentence, and paragraph level When a beginner reader encounters vocabulary they do not know or do not recognize due to inaccurate decoding, they are likely to skip ahead The more blanks in a line of text, the harder it

is to make meaning and the more cognitively challenging and frustrating the reading task becomes That’s why poor comprehension can result when a student struggles with decoding, has a limited vocabulary or attempts to read a text that is at too high of a level However, reading also requires being able to pay attention to the narrative Students need to identify gist, main ideas, and specific details and even make inferences about what they are reading If a student has problems staying focused, it can impact on comprehension

It has been known for a long time that vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension are strongly correlated (Davis, 1944, 1968; Thorndike, 1973) Jabberwocky indicates that the relationship between reading comprehension and vocabulary is likely to be rich, interactive and complex On the one hand, it is clear that vocabulary is needed for comprehension Without a doubt, our lack of knowledge concerning the meaning of individual words impedes our understanding At the same time, however, it is equally clear that we can construct some meaning from the text, despite the fact that many of the words are nonsense In turn, this constructed meaning

provides an emerging context that helps us construe possible meanings to some of individual words

Limitations in vocabulary knowledge have been suggested to be a putative cause of reading comprehension failure (Cromley & Azevedo, 2007) and many interventions for poor reading comprehension involve strategies designed to increase vocabulary knowledge (Beck, 1982) It is very clear that reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge are closely associated What is less clear is how this association is best interpreted One interpretation sees individual differences in reading ability being responsible for individual differences in vocabulary knowledge According to this view, students learn the meaning of new words via reading Consequently, better readers will develop larger vocabularies over time, whereas poor readers, who read less, lack print exposure and this serves to hamper vocabulary development (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1991, 1997; Nagy & Anderson, 1984; Nagy & Scott, 2000) An alternative view sees individual differences in vocabulary knowledge being responsible for individual differences in reading comprehension In this view, if students have limited vocabulary knowledge, or if they are unable to access word meanings rapidly and efficiently, this will be detrimental to their reading comprehension (Beck, Perfetti & McKeown, 1982; Daneman & Green, 1986)

According to the results of Doan's research (2017), in the question of vocabulary difficulties, she gets 90% of the answers saying that they all face a lot of difficulties in the vocabulary of specialized fields when reading documents as well as the ability to understand and remember all vocabulary in that specialized field In addition, most students do not know the meaning or it is difficult to guess the meaning of idioms or phrases (such as verb phrases, noun phrases, adjective phrases, etc.) that appear in the reading 8% of students, they rated the number of vocabulary words in such a reading as

moderate, they could fully guess the meaning of words based on context, or based on the specialized knowledge they had learned and only 2% for that is easy

In fact, lack of vocabulary is a reason why students cannot show what they are thinking They just keep it inside because they do not have enough vocabulary to

fluently think and express ideas

of the panel, Daniel Willingham explained: “Whether or not readers understand a text depends far more on how much background knowledge and vocabulary they have relating to the topic than on how much they’ve practiced comprehension skills That’s because writers leave out a lot of information that they assume readers will know If they put all the information in, their writing would be tedious But if readers can’t supply the missing information, they will have a hard time making sense of the text.” Willingham and like-minded literacy experts posit that the best way to boost students’ reading comprehension is to expand their knowledge and vocabulary by teaching them history, science, literature, and the arts, using curricula that guide kids through a logical