Exploring difficulties faced by students of accounting in learning reading in english at nguyen tri phuong vocational college phong dien district thua thien hue province

Many teachers at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College have difficulties designing lesson plan with interesting learning materials or motivating their students to learn ESP because of the

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale

The global spread of English over the last forty years is remarkable by the increasing number of users of the language, by its depth of penetration into societies and by its range of functions Nowadays there is a requirement to study English usually because of the known role of English as an international language of communication, trade and research In addition, with the globalization of trade and economy and the continuing increase of international communication in various fields, the demand for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is expanding, especially

in countries where English is learned as a foreign language

The success of English language has turned it into a vehicle for international communication and the orientation of linguistic studies towards language as communication in social contexts has largely contributed to enhance the dignity of ESP studies Currently, there is a greater interest in the content with which ESP must be involved – the subject matter which ESP students have to study and work with through English Furthermore, there have been a growing number of individuals who require language for occupational or vocational purposes This has necessarily led to a corresponding increase in attention on teaching and learning ESP so as to provide appropriate knowledge toward the ESP students

ESP has become one of the most important areas of EFL teaching (Brunton, 2009) In Vietnam, ESP plays an essential role in teaching and learning English because it prepares learners to “use English within academic, professional, or workplace environment” (Basturkmen, 2006, p.17) Many ESP courses such as English for Science and Technology, English for Business and Economics, English for social Science (Hutchinson & Water, 1987) have been organized in order to meet students‟ demand As for students of economics, especially for accounting, the

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demand for learning ESP is more increasing because of the requirements of an accountant in the future

As a teacher of a vocational school, I have found that the reading capability

of students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College is still much limited First, the level of General English of most students is low, they could not read effectively, so they cannot gain understanding of major materials Even some students don‟t know how to speak, listen or write in English, they know nothing in English Second, many ESP students have a background knowledge in their specific area However, one of the challenges that most of them face is their English language inadequacies, especially the specific English language competence necessary to read their content subjects Third, ESP teachers who devote a lot of time and energy to students‟ skills lessons find that constraints in the process of teaching are unavoidable Many teachers at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College have difficulties designing lesson plan with interesting learning materials or motivating their students to learn ESP because of the limit of time for preparatory work, the limit of students‟ knowledge of English, the lack of necessary skills on the part of the teacher and the limited resources And the last is that although there are some accounting books available on the market, the bookshop, no books meet the needs of students interested in becoming Certificated Public Accountant Some books are out of date, some books do not have various and interesting activities to motivate the learning process of students Correspondingly, this research was carried out for the following reasons:

Firstly, ESP has become more and more important, so the needs of studying ESP of accounting students have been stronger and stronger nowadays, especially reading skill needs to be paid much more attention

Secondly, English for accounting is a compulsory subject of learning process

at university in general and at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College in particular

Last, I am now a language teacher of ESP class for the accounting students

of Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College As a matter of fact, how students actually learn reading is one of my major concerns Exploring the students‟ difficulties in their learning reading ESP can help me better my teaching practices

as well as providing my students‟ implications for a more efficient ESP reading learning With these assumptions in mind, I decided to conduct a study with the following topic:

Exploring difficulties faced by students of accounting in learning reading in English at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College, Phong Dien District, Thua Thien Hue Province

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- Making some suggestions to overcome the difficulties and improve ESP ability of learning reading comprehension for students of accounting

1.3 Research questions

 How is ESP reading skill learned at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College?

 What difficulties do students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College often encounter in learning reading ESP?

 Which factors lead to such difficulties in learning reading ESP of Accounting students at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College?

1.4 Scope of the study

This study is mainly carried out on a small scale including 3 language teachers, 3 content teachers, 100 third – year students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College

1.5 Organization of the thesis

This thesis is divided into five chapters as follows:

Chapter 1: Introduction includes the rationale for the research, the purpose of the

study, the objectives, research questions, scope and organization of the study

Chapter 2: Literature Review will be an introduction about the previous study

related to the problem under investigation The theory background such as theory of reading, reading comprehension, English for specific purposes, accounting is included in this chapter

Chapter 3: Method and Procedure will present research method, procedure of data

collection, description of samples, data analysis and research procedures.

Chapter 4: Findings and discussion will analyze the results from the

questionnaires, the classroom observation as well as interviews The results is the

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base to suggest some solutions to help students of accounting study better at ESP reading skill in the next chapter

Chapter 5: Conclusion and Implication summarizes the major findings of the

research and gives implications for teaching and learning reading ESP at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College, and point out the limitations of the study There are also some suggestions for further research works related to the study

According to Kitao (1982), Japanese learners meet a lot of difficulties when reading because of the following reasons:

Firstly, vocabulary plays an important role in reading in English Students often use an English-Japanese dictionary whenever they read English materials As soon as they find a new word, they look it up in the dictionary and write down the first meaning in Japanese language They do not care whether the meaning of the word fits in that context or not They continue reading until they find another word After knowing all the meaning of all new words one by one, they replace all English words into Japanese words one by one They do not pay attention to the meaning of the context

Secondly, most students know a little about the culture or social implication

of words, sentences or discourse

Thirdly, some students considered reading aloud as reading strategies If being asked to read a text aloud, most of the students can read it so that it is understandable to native speaker of English However, these students cannot remember anything about the content of the text after finishing reading if they do not read it again silently In order to overcome the above problem, Kitao (1982) gave some solutions such as:

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Textbooks should not use exercises that involve replacing Japanese words with English words Students need to read English without using Japanese

Students should be encouraged to read faster, for example, by keeping track

of their speed In this way, students can improve not only their reading speed but also their reading comprehension

Students should know a purpose for reading each time they read

In Vietnam, Nguyen (2012) in her research paper, she did an investigation on difficulties encountered by students majoring in general practitioner in reading at Hue University, College of Medicine and Pharmacy She indicated many problems

in reading texts such as limited vocabulary knowledge, difficult terminology Among them, vocabulary is considered as the biggest problems

To overcome the above problems, Nguyen (2012) stated that teachers should improve their methodology They should apply different approaches to teach vocabulary, giving homework and checking previous lesson frequently

Similarly, Nie (2011) carried out a case study on the difficulties in learning English reading comprehension by 11th grade students at a high school in Daklak province This study showed that these 11th grade students did not face any difficulties relating to the issue of perception of reading comprehension However,

it pointed out a number of difficulties resulted from teaching method of the teachers

as well as learning materials The findings of this research were significant and helpful in drawing solutions to deal with these difficulties and help students improve their reading comprehension skill

In brief, there are many researches of problems in reading skill and many solutions for the above problems However, these pieces of research focused on students who learn general English For ESP students, realizing difficulties in their learning reading ESP is also important and necessary Thus, difficulties in reading ESP faced by subjects are worth investigating

William (1984) and Grellet (1981) argues that “Reading is a process

whereby one looks at and understands what has been written or printed in a given text” (p.2) According to Lefevre (1964), reading is one of the great practical

significances to everyone It helps us to open our minds to understand and watch everything in every field in the world It brings us new overview about society and

human beings Moreover, Witty (1963) claims that “Reading is one of means of

communication” (p.16), and explains that reading is considered as a two-way action

that involves both the writers and readers, and reading is successful when the writer‟s meaning is clear in the reader‟s mind In addition, Nuttall (1982) also asserts that reading is a process of communication between writers and readers through a text This process shows us that the writer has a message, which he wants the readers to share through the form of encoding and decoding Kenneth Goodman (1967, cited in Carrell and Eisterhold, 1998) refers to reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game (p.41) The “guessing”, however, is far from random It is principled guessing, which draws upon two sources to guide it However, Godman (1973, cited

in Carrell and Eisterhold, 1998) admits that reading is not always an exact process

of perceiving, but by using available information enough in the text, the reader can predict the decodable language structure

In conclusion, reading is the process of recognition, interpretation, and perception of written or printed material In other words, reading is a process of communication from the writer to the reader It involves the recognition of letters,

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words and clauses Thus an efficient reader makes use of this to take what s/he needs, and no more to obtain meaning Moreover, reading is also a complex activity and no one can claim to the most correct and general view of what reading is

2.2.2 What is reading comprehension?

There are many different definitions on reading comprehension but the following definitions have been used as the theoretical support for the study

Reading comprehension is the ability that the learner can apprehend and receive the meaning and content of a written text According to the definition of

Grellet (1981), reading comprehension is considered as “Understanding a written

text means exacting the required information from it as efficiently as possible”

(p.3) It means that we apply different reading strategies when looking at a notice board to see if there is an advertisement for a particular type of flat and when carefully reading an article of special interest in a scientific journal With this view Sheng (2001) suggests that comprehension is the understanding of the meaning of the written material and covers the conscious strategies that lead to understanding

In other words, reading comprehension is a process of negotiating understanding between the reader and writer It is a more complex psychological process and includes linguistic factors, such as phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic elements It means that the reader can receive information from the author via the words, sentences, paragraphs and so forth, and try to understand the inner feelings of the writer However, it is not necessary for readers to understand the content of an article or the whole text If being a competent reader, she/he will be able to reject the irrelevant information and find the facts she/he needs quickly In contrast, the reader cannot understand the gist of the text It is essential to take some elements such as what she/he reads, why she/he reads or how she/he reads and so on into his/her consideration

2.2.3 Stages of teaching reading

is important in building confidence and creating security in learners To do this, teachers should activate students‟ background knowledge and schema in regards to the target text

Ghani (1993), Stott (2001) and Chan (2003) suggest that in the pre-reading phase, provision of background knowledge to students through the pre-reading activities are useful for facilitating their reading comprehension and motivating their reading interest Ringler and Weber (1984) also agree that pre-reading activities provide a reader with necessary background to organize information and

to comprehend the materials (cited in Ajdeh, 2003) However, some traditional reading activities simply comprise questions to which the student is required to find answer from the text In other words, this type of activity is designed to test comprehension Thus, the students read the text quickly in order to find specific information related to questions Other pre-reading activities are word definitions to clarify the meaning of difficult words; and some syntactic explanation to help the students understand complex structures in the text

pre-However, if teachers follow such an approach to teach reading, students may rely much on bottom-up processing of individual words and analyzing sentence

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structures In essence, students may have no problems with understanding both words and sentence structures of the paragraph, but they cannot read satisfactory interpretation of the text (Chia, 2001) For this reason, employing traditional pre-reading activities seems to be a questionable practice

Carrell and Floyd (1987) claimed that the teacher must provide the students with appropriate schemata that she/he is lacking and must also teach the students how to connect their existing knowledge with the new knowledge Therefore, such schemata theory based pre-reading activities such as previewing, questioning and semantic mapping, which pay attention to the activation of students‟ background have been proposed for facilitating reading (Ghani, 1993; Ajideh, 2003 and Ahmadi, 2007)

From the points above, it can be concluded that it is better for the teacher to use pre-reading strategies to help students relate new information in written discourse to their existing knowledge Through the use of such pre-reading strategies, the students will construct appropriate schematic knowledge to allow satisfactory interpretation of the text In this way, teachers teach learners how to build bridges between existing knowledge and new knowledge

2.2.3.2 While – reading stage

This step draws on the text rather than the learners‟ ideas previous to read Richard (1990, p.87) sees reading “as an integration of top-down processes that utilize background knowledge and schema, as well as bottom-up processes that are primarily text or data driven” Therefore, the role in the classroom of a second language teacher should be to encourage and stimulate students in regards to the use

of both processes, top – down and bottom-up when they tackle the text The aims of this step are:

 To help understanding of the writer‟s purpose

 To help understanding of the text structure

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 To clarify text content

With the aims teachers can ask learners as a guide to while-reading work as follows:

 What is the function of this text?

 How is the text organized or developed?

 What content of information is extracted from the text?

 What may the reader infer or deduce from the text?

 What reading styles may be practiced?

The answers to the questions relate together and help learners clarify the text content easily From that teachers can devise appropriate exercises

2.2.3.3 Post – reading stage

This is the final step for reading a text to check students‟ comprehension and retention of the information of the text that students have tackled, teachers should employ the last stage- the post reading stage William (1987, p.2) claims “the aims

of the post-reading stage are to consolidate or reflect upon what has been read, and

to relate the text to learners‟ own knowledge, or opinion.” Therefore, the teacher needs to organize activities suitable for this stage

Obviously, teachers can be flexible in conducting these three steps It depends on the context and different occasions, for example teachers can cut out the pre-reading step and get learners to work on the text directly Sometimes, post-reading is not suitable However, the three steps are not simply isolated in teaching reading process

2.2.4 Understanding vocabulary in the texts of reading comprehension

Vocabulary is fundamental to reading comprehension; the reader cannot understand the texts without knowing what the meanings of the words are Also, a reader‟s general vocabulary implies how well that reader can understand texts

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(Anderson and Freebody, 1981) In context of the reading text, the meanings of words can make it meaningful as well Moreover, vocabulary is considered as the weak point for a large number of students, so for students, the list of some vocabulary in each text will help them learn and finish the exercises or understand the subjects

Vocabulary is essential in helping readers to read better with deep comprehension and improvement The more the readers read, the more their vocabulary improves and verifies, and as a result, it is easier for them to understand any text Therefore, there is a need of applying the prior knowledge into what to read to obtain sufficient comprehension

In grasping a reading text, students should group words in order to understand meanings of the words in related groups

Additionally, vocabulary is a necessary element for good reading Students can understand vocabulary thanks to the context of the paragraphs in each reading texts Thus, they can see the kinds of the words, clauses and sentence structures besides the new words This proves that they do not need to memorize all the meanings of the words in the dictionary

In addition to mastering the skills, students need to know vocabulary knowledge and majoring knowledge to monitor their understanding as well

Estes (1999) points out that some key vocabulary and ideas in each text need

to be explained Besides, before reading a text, teachers should explain important vocabulary for students to get information

A learner should comprehend the new words to read a passage successfully

in the text But teaching readers suitable vocabulary essentially does not enhance their comprehension (Tuinman & Brady, 1973)

As students read the texts, they encounter unknown words in the whole passage Teachers should give instructions for them to read To make students have

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the ability to develop reading comprehension strategies, teachers do not show difficult words for students clearly before they start reading the text Especially, teachers need to give students a chance to guess the familiar words in each context This helps to facilitate the learning of new words from texts

2.2.5 The importance of teaching reading in ESP classes

Theories of reading and numerous teaching techniques have made an awareness of the influence of reading on listening, speaking, writing and even translating Among the skills, reading, perhaps, is the most important academic skill (John, 1981; Lynch and Huson, 1991) and the most difficult one to develop In fact, reading is a sophisticated process in language teaching, as it requires learners the ability to carry out a number of mental operations such as analysis, synthesis and comparison

In addition, reading has been identified as the single most powerful skill of language input, a source that students can access whether they are in class or outside class Therefore, it is argued that it is important to encourage students to read as often as possible Especially, the continuing expansion of the role of English as an international language in ESP has also led to an increase in interest in reading in English (Crandall, 1995, p 80)

ESP is a particular case of the general category of special – purpose language teaching Hutchinson and Walters (1989, p.18) define “ESP is not a matter of teaching specialized varieties of English” and “Understood properly, it is an approach to language learning, which is based on learner needs…ESP, then, is an approach to language teaching in which all decisions as to content and method are based on learner‟s reason for learning” That is to say, ESP is just one branch of EFL/ESL

According to Hutchinson and Walters (1989), the acquisition of skills related

to reading and comprehending texts seems to be the main aim of the ESP courses

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Some researches and a need analysis reveal that the ESP learners need English in order to be able to read texts in their subject specialism and that students‟ competence in ESP seems to consist of knowledge of specific lexis and register, and the development of the reading skill Actually, ESP books are mainly made up of collections of texts, which are usually adapted to fit students‟ level, dealing with topics related to the subject area, followed by comprehension activities These materials are often filled with specialized concepts and loaded with much content information Thus, students must acquire reading skills, not only to read the textbooks that are often the basis of classroom instruction, but also to read other materials that will be important to their careers Through reading, students develop the empathy not only for the language but also for the content of the text they read,

as well as issues related to their subject areas coming to represent in their understanding

Owing to such reasons, teaching reading in ESP classes is indispensible, and how to teach ESP reading successfully is always in search of While much work has been done in material development and syllabus design in ESP, not much information about ESP methodology, especially teaching ESP reading is available

2.3 Theory of accounting

2.3.1 What is accounting?

According to Frank Wood & Alan Sangster (2005), accounting can be defined as the process of identifying, measuring, and communicating economic information to permit informed judgments and decisions by users of the information A bit of a mouthful really, but what it means is that accounting involves deciding what amounts of money are, were, or will be involved in transactions (often buying and selling transactions) and then organizing the information obtained and presenting it in a way that is useful for decision making

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Despite what some people think, accounting is not a branch of mathematics It may not require knowledge of mathematics but you do need to be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide – things you need to be able to do in your daily life anyway

2.3.2 Learning accounting and financial terms and vocabulary

According to Eoin Baxter (2007),English for accounting is the learning of English specifically geared towards accounting, finance, auditing or whatever area

of finance you need to learn The main difference between learning English for accounting and learning basic English or business English relates to vocabulary Knowing the technical vocabulary related to specific job or area of study is essential

if top performance is to be achieved Business English classes tend to focus on meetings, negotiations and other business functions A business English class might focus on the area of expertise irregularly (especially if students are learning in a group) English for accounting, however, involves regular study (as in every class)

of related financial and accounting themes

Some students find that learning English for accounting in every class is a bit difficult For many students, the English class is a break from the working routine Students want to relax during their class, have some fun and learn English They don`t necessarily want to focus on accounting during class when they are trying to relax and forget about work for a while! If this is the case, then they should have classes of general English and forget about technical financial English

If students want to learn English for accounting, there are various methods teachers can use It is great for reading about accounting and for learning new vocabulary New vocabulary learning can be reinforced by doing vocabulary exercises such as crosswords, definitions, etc The teacher will be able to supply these Also ask the teacher for listening exercises related to finance or accounting Video is fairly easy to find by recording from financial television stations Grammar can be revised by adapting existing grammar exercises to a financial context

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Finally and most importantly, speak to the teacher about your job, financial matters etc Do role-plays with teachers by teachers put students in a financial situation and asks students to speak (always prepare the vocabulary first)

In short, English for accounting is a branch of English for specific purposes,

it requires students and teachers to make a lot of efforts However, it is quite difficult to find an accounting English teacher The teacher must have knowledge of accounting, but is not an expert A qualified, experienced teacher who has a diploma or degree in business, finance or accounting is a good profile Or a qualified, experienced teacher who has worked in the financial/accounting world is acceptable also

2.4 Some features of ESP

Since the 1960s, ESP has become a vital and innovative activity within the teaching of English as a second or foreign language movement (Howatt, 1984, cited

in Evans & St John, 1998) ESP is part of a more general movement of teaching language for specific purposes (LSP) LSP has focused on the teaching languages such as French and German for specific purposes, as well as English (Dudley-Evans

& St John, 1998) ESP is an enterprise, which involves education, training and practice, and drawing upon three major realms of knowledge: language, pedagogy and the students / participants' specialist areas of interest

English for Business and Economics (EBE) is largely the most popular form

of ESP EBE noticed in both private setting and official institutions It undeniably encompasses a range of actions that are essential in everyday interactions: negotiation and communication in different environment, letter writing, and workplace jargon and business culture The common aim of all activities is just of all to learn something about the cultural institutions and then concentrate on proposal writing so that students might attain proficient communicative skills

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In short, ESP largely addressed to learners who acquire English to have further education or to perform a social or working role

2.5 Roles of ESP teachers

“What is the difference between ESP and General English?” Hutchinson et al (1987, p.53) answer this quite simply, “in theory nothing, in practice a great deal.” Accordingly, the following questions put forward: “Who are ESP teachers?” and

“What are their roles?” The answers to these questions can be found in this part of the research According to Anthony (1998), teachers, nowadays, are much more aware of the importance of needs analysis, and published textbooks have improved dramatically allowing teacher to select materials that closely match the goals of the learners Perhaps, this demonstrates the influence that the ESP approach has had on English teaching in general Nevertheless, the line between where “General English” courses stop and ESP courses start has become very vague indeed Ironically, although many General English teachers can be described as using an ESP approach, basing their syllabi on a learners‟ needs analysis and their own specialist knowledge of using English for real communication, many so-called ESP teachers are usually unable to rely on personal experiences when evaluating materials and consider curse goals Even, according to Nunan (1998), few teachers are in the position of being able to design their own syllabus In addition, in reality,

at the university level in particular, ESP teachers are also unable to rely on the views of learners, who tend not to know what English abilities are required by the profession they hope to enter The result is that many ESP teachers become slaves

to the published textbooks available (Anthony, 1998), and worse, when there are no textbooks available for a particular discipline, resolve to teaching from textbooks which may be quite unsuitable

Dudley – Evans (1998) stated that a true ESP teacher could perform five different roles These are teacher, collaborator, course designer and material provider, researcher and evaluator The first role as “teacher” is synonymous with

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that of the General English teacher It is in the performing of the other four roles that differences between the two emerge In order to meet the specific needs of the learner and adopt the methodology and activities of the target disciplines, the ESP practitioner must first work closely with field specialists When team teaching is not

a possibility, the ESP practitioner must collaborate more closely with the learners, who will generally be more familiar with the specialized content of materials than the teacher him or herself ESP teachers do not only teach but also they are often required to design, set up and administered the ESP courses It is here that the ESP practitioner„s role as researcher is especially important, with results leading directly

to appropriate materials for the classroom The final role as “evaluator” is perhaps the role that ESP practitioners have neglected most to date

In summary, ESP is a challenge for all who teach it and it offers virtually unlimited opportunities for professional development Teaching ESP is demanding, time-consuming, and different for every group of students (Smoak, 2003) Consequently, ESP teachers are required for knowledge of the professional fields they are teaching and ability to cope with the different groups of students flexibly

To do all of this, ESP teachers must take advantage of training and professional development opportunities in ESP, and they should rely on the expertise of more experienced colleagues and field specialists

2.6 Challenges both ESP learners and teachers have encountered

In the discussions of the challenges both ESP learners and teachers have encountered, most teachers teaching ESP course ask themselves the question whether they are teaching English for economics, law, etc, or teaching electronics, accounting, etc in English Everyone can agree that language for accounting, electronics is a different language

In his research, Helsvig (2010) focused on the challenges both ESP learners and teachers encounter during learning/teaching specific content and specific vocabulary of ESP course The main issue for teachers is often insufficient

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knowledge of a specialist field The survey carried out at Vilnius College, Electronics and Informatics faculty revealed learners‟ preparedness and attitudes towards the ESP course The researcher used literature analysis, a questionnaire, data analysis for his study

Research has shown that the more content-specific the course, the more students will find it useful and be motivated He thinks in reality there might be a conflict between research findings and their implementation, involving organization and teaching In reality teachers may have difficulty teaching both language and content but in the real world people learn language and content simultaneously, and teachers need to be able to address both language and content within their classrooms

In short, it is important for teachers to establish channels of communication with content teachers ESP teachers should not try to teach the subject itself, but strongly advice students to discuss the matters with the subject teacher and even homework assignments should be associated both with the specialty and the skills

2.7 Chapter summary

In this chapter, the researcher has briefly presented previous studies related

to difficulties in reading as well as reviewed some basic theoretical background of reading, reading comprehension, namely its definition Besides, the researcher also mentioned some features of ESP, teachers‟ role in teaching ESP, challenges both ESP learners and teachers encounter and theory of accounting as well The next chapter will present the findings of the study from the instruments describe with regard to quantitative and qualitative results respectively

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CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY 3.1 Overview

This chapter looks into the methodology and the procedure of the research issues such as research design, hypotheses, participants, data collection and data analysis are all presented in detail

3.2 Research design

Descriptive research

In this study, the descriptive research with statistical techniques was used as the main method for the study because it was used for frequencies, averages and other statistical calculations with the following characteristics:

- Gathering, organizing, tabulating, depicting and describing the data accurately and systematically so that everything can be counted and studied

- Using description as a tool to organize data into pattern that emerge during analysis

Qualitative and quantitative approaches

Also, this research used both qualitative and quantitative approaches for the following reasons

- Quantitative method helps with the collection and analysis of numerical data and statistics

- Qualitative method is used to understand the meaning of the numbers produced by quantitative method

These two approaches can supplement one another and make analyzing data become reliable

3.3 Hypotheses

3.5 Data Collection methods

The data presented in this research were collected in three ways:

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collect information from language teachers, content teachers and students at Nguyen tri Phuong Vocational College

 Reasons of using the questionnaires for this study

+ Saving more time for collecting data than any other methods

+ Being easy to collect data exactly from learners

 The questionnaires are distributed directly to research subjects by hand at different time and classes, and then collected to analyze

 Reasons of choosing interview

+ Comparing with the results collected from the questionnaires

+ Getting more ideas from teachers to be able to analyze the problems of the study exactly and practically

 The in-depth interview is carried out with each teacher from 15 to 20 minutes at their houses or at teacher‟s office During the interview, the teachers are encouraged

to express their opinion, thoughts about the experience, tasks, curriculum, difficulties, etc in teaching process and learning process of students Besides, they can give some suggestions to overcome their difficulties During the interview, the researcher has to take notes of the necessary information to analyze and compare

3.5.3 Class observations

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The aim of observation was to clarify information given in the questionnaires

by participants This method was conducted to observe learning style as well as learning conditions that affect students‟ ESP learning and from which the analysis

of the situation of the learning ESP at the college is implemented

 Reasons of choosing observation

+ Knowing exactly about the situation of learning ESP of students at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College From there, the researcher can combine the other methods to analyze problems more accurately

+ Discovering difficulties faced by learners in ESP learning process practically + Checking and comparing the similarities and differences of information collected from observation and questionnaires

 In order to have detailed and exact information, the observation procedure had been carried out for about 4 weeks at classes CK6.1 and CK6.2 at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College, then the author combines the methods above to provide exact results for study

3.6 Data Analysis

Data analysis was based mainly on both quantitative and qualitative approach The data were analyzed according to statistical frequency and percentage Basing on information received from the questionnaires and interview as well as observation, we illustrate the data by means of statistics and tables and charts

3.7 The procedure of study

During the research process, we carried out the following activities:

- From September to November, 2012: Designing the questionnaires and distributing them to teachers and students at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College then collect them to analyze data

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- From December 2012 to January 2013: Observing the reality of learning ESP

of students at full time class at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College to compare with the data from questionnaires

- From March to April 2013: Interviewing teachers to get practical information

- From May to August 2013: Trying to carry out capture and processing

data-3.8 Summary

In sum, with the application of both qualitative and quantitative approaches together with data collection methods such as questionnaires, interviews and class observations on students of accounting and teachers at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College, the data were collected and analyzed carefully so that the results of the research could be highly appreciated

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CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 4.1 Overview

This chapter focuses on the analysis of the results obtained from the teachers and students‟ questionnaires Based on analyzed results, research questions are discussed in detail to discover the difficulties students of accounting face in real learning ESP Thenceforward, many suggestions and implications can be drawn for

the success and effectiveness of ESP reading teaching and learning

4.2 Findings and discussion

ESP is one of the compulsory subjects of accounting students at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College It is also a subject that provides accounting students with many useful things and benefits related to their major However, the students‟ level of success in ESP reading skill is quite different The number of students who often fail in this skill is bigger These students often feel bored, stressed when coping with all reading texts As a result, they often read very slowly and hardly achieve high marks in their examination because of many different reasons However, the main reasons for the problems above are students‟ learning styles, their limitation of language competence, knowledge of background, majoring vocabulary, terms, learning conditions and even teachers‟ teaching method and so on By using questionnaires combining with interview to survey 3 language teachers, 3 content teachers and 100 students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College, the author has collected data to answer the research questions: what difficulties do students of accounting encounter in leaning reading ESP? The question focuses on the following problems:

- Students‟ attitude towards ESP reading

- Students‟ difficulties about leaning styles (the habit of reading)

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- Students‟ difficulties about learning time and learning conditions

- Students‟ difficulties about knowledge

- Students‟ difficulties about motivation

- Students‟ difficulties about curriculum

4.2.1 Students’ attitude towards ESP reading

One factor contributing to teachers‟ success is learners‟ attitudes towards both the subject and teachers‟ teaching method It is accepted that what is learnt is controlled

by the learners; it means that the learning process is not only affected by the textbooks or by the teachers but also the learners themselves Therefore, students‟ attitudes should always be taken into consideration so that teachers can adapt methods of teaching adequately and objectively In order to have good understanding of students‟ feedbacks to ESP reading, the first question was designed to explore the students Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 will show the brief description of the survey result

Question 1: Do you enjoy ESP reading lessons?

Figure 4.1: Students’ attitude towards ESP reading classes

It is obvious that over a half of the students at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College had positive attitude towards learning ESP reading and high awareness of learning ESP reading However, some certain reasons prevented them from enjoying ESP reading classes

Question 2: Which factor(s) activate(s) your interest in ESP learning reading lessons?

Figure 4.2: Factors that motivate students in ESP Reading Classes

As far as student‟s interest in ESP reading materials is concerned, a good finding is that 81.8 % enjoy ESP reading lessons because they can accumulate

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knowledge of English related to their specialism, meanwhile 54.5% of them claimed that information in reading materials was interesting and necessary Besides, materials are asserted to be suitable for students‟ ability (50.9 %) because reading texts, based on their specific areas, were easy to understand Another surprising factor that motivated students to learn ESP reading is that there were not many new structures in the reading texts (63.6%) In addition, 27.2% of the students show their appreciation of the teachers‟ methods (as shown in Figure 4.2)

Question 3: Which reason(s) demotivate(s) your interest in ESP learning reading?

Concerning factors demotivating students in learning ESP reading, this finding indicated that students were under the influence of many things more than expected (See Figure 4.3)

Figure 4.3: Demotivating factors to students’ interest in ESP reading classes

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A big obstacle to students‟ interest is that too much ESP vocabulary and many economic terms lessened students‟ interest and motivation In addition, economic terms were claimed difficult to understand or to memorize; this lowered many students‟ interest, taken up 44% of total students that have negative attitude towards ESP learning reading

One factor demotivating 55.5% of the students was their insufficient English knowledge, such as pronunciation, vocabulary, structure, grammar, etc Also, some students (6.6%) thought that information in the texts was unfamiliar to them, which reduced their enthusiasm Furthermore, 22.2% of the students did not enjoy ESP reading classes simply because they disliked English

On the other hand, the results showed that the biggest hurdle confronting students and also most challenging to teachers was teachers‟ teaching practices Only 27.2% of the students who like ESP reading classes showed their appreciation

of the teacher‟s methods Far from it, 26.6% of the students reckoned they were demotivated to ESP reading classes by their teachers‟ dull and poor teaching methods It also revealed that the teachers tended to use the traditional grammar translation method in their teaching According to some students, teachers‟ instructions were not clear and motivating enough Moreover, the use of visual aids

or projector were remarked to be limited, and reading tasks usually focused on comprehension questions, grammar and vocabulary, which were not diversified and communicative

The last but not least important factor that some students (11%) had to overcome in learning ESP reading was their personal characteristics These students commented that they were so shy, timid and afraid of speaking in English, even they were not self-confident enough to speak to their partner or when they were asked to answer something in front of the class

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In conclusion, it is seen that both subjective and objective causes had impact

on students‟ motivation for learning ESP reading

4.2.2 Students’ difficulties about the style of learning reading ESP (the reading habits)

As we know, reading is receptive activity of information Therefore, learning styles and methods of reading play an important role and strongly affect learners‟ reading quality However, nobody has the same style in reading Each person has specific habit in reading, and that habit exactly reflects readers‟ ability In fact, if the students have appropriate learning styles or effective reading methods they will easily get what they need from the texts as well as to gain the purpose of learning and vice versa

In order to see how students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College learn ESP reading and to know more about what their reading habits are, the author observes their reading periods and surveys the following questions:

Question 4: How do you usually read an ESP text?

From the results of observation of reading classrooms and survey the author found that majority of students (account for 70%) often have the following reading habits These students often divide reading activity into three stages

Firstly, students always use English – Vietnamese dictionaries and never leave them during reading process They look up dictionary as soon as they meet a new word and then write its meaning down in Vietnamese In fact, when students

do this, they just seem to concern about the meaning of that new word and write it down automatically, but do not pay attention to if its meaning is suitable for the context or not

Secondly, after checking the meaning of new words students start reading the text again

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Thirdly, they translate the text into Vietnamese to understand its content and then do the reading tasks

Figure 4.4: Students’ reading habits

The evidence indicates that students here are dependent so much on the dictionaries They have not made efforts to use the technique of guessing new words from the context during reading process Meanwhile, this technique is considered one of the effective and necessary ones in learning ESP reading, because

it can help students to predict what they are going to read Moreover, the process of understanding the text is the one of seeing how the content of the text matches up to these predictions The prediction of students will be the result of what they expect while they read However, the prediction will change when students get more information from the text In reality, the number of students who guess meaning from the context of the text and ignore some new words possesses a very low rate (only 10%) This issue illustrates that many students have not been encouraged,

Moreover, the difference between the number of students who always take notes or underline what they do not understanding in reading process and those who never take note of anything is rather clear The rate of 10% of students who never take note of anything often belongs to good students Their knowledge of background and language seem to be enough for them to read and understand the text Therefore, they can finish reading tasks quickly and exactly Besides, there are 80% of the students stating that they always have to take notes during reading process, because many things in the text are beyond their thinking ability, so they must be explained This problem shows that the students‟ language competence and their logical thinking ability are still limited

In summary, from the result above we can affirm that most of the students here have not been provided effective reading techniques They often read basing on their habits, but the habits are very difficult to gain the goal as well as to develop reading skill For that reason, this problem requires the interest from language and ESP teachers

Question 5: When reading ESP, which of the following factors do you often focus on?

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In order to gain the purpose of reading, all students have to focus on some factors that can help them easily succeed in reading Looking at the results of the research at Figure 4.5 below, we can clearly see that the factor that possesses the highest rate is “What you learn from the text”, which accounts for 70% In addition, the second factor that takes up 53% is the rate of the students who often pay attention to their level of understanding when reading the ESP text

Figure 4.5: Students’ attention when reading ESP

The next rate 31% belongs to the students who often focus on “reading techniques” Finally, the two factors that have similar rates are “skills of taking notes” (13% of the students) and “The speed of reading” (11% of the students) The evidence above shows that the students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College tend to focus on the outcomes that they achieve from the text than the skills of taking notes and speed of reading Besides, the rate of students focusing on reading techniques is not high Obviously, most of the students only read the text basing on their instinct They do not care much about the reading techniques, while reading technique is one of the most important factors having high determination in their success

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In sum, when reading a text, students have not paid attention to necessary factors influencing their reading ability Thus, they cannot help avoiding series of difficulties in reading process

Question 6: According to you, what are the determinants of your ESP reading comprehension ability?

Table 4.1: Determinants of students’ reading ability

Factor Vocabulary or

lexical knowledge

Translating ability

Background of knowledge

Background of language

The second determinant that the vast majority of students admit its influence

on their reading comprehension capability is translation ability According to the survey, in order to understand the content of the text and to finish reading tasks, 73% of the students answer that when reading a text, they often want to translate it into Vietnamese In fact, these students have misunderstood about the concept of reading comprehension They think that reading comprehension means the learners have to read the text, then translate it into their language to understand the content

of the text Moreover, they believe that their understanding level about the text depending on their translating ability Thus, if a text is not translated into

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Vietnamese, they only read as a reading-machine without understanding anything or they cannot answer the questions or do all reading tasks in the text As a result, the success in reading is very difficult to achieve

Indeed, William (1984) states that the readers bring to the text knowledge of language, knowledge of background and even knowledge of the writing system and

so on, the students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College also think that In learning reading ESP, they also try to use their knowledge in their reading process For that reason, through the survey of 100 students of the two classes (CK6.1 and CK6.2), 50 out of them, taking up 50%, think knowledge of background is one of the essential factors and great determinant of their reading comprehension ability In other words, students can understand the text or not, it depends on their ability in applying their knowledge of background into the text In fact, some students have good background knowledge, but they cannot achieve the success in reading, because they are confused in applying that knowledge into practice Furthermore, background knowledge is not the same for every student, so the results of reading are also different From the result of this study, we can affirm that students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College have a bit good awareness of the role and the importance of background knowledge in learning ESP reading It is not surprising when students think that knowledge of background is one of the determinants of their reading comprehension ability

Meanwhile, 65 of all 100 students choose knowledge of language and it accounts for 65% These students claim that when bringing their knowledge of language to reading, it is not necessary to explain all of that knowledge but the students just know the meaning and master grammatical structures of the language, especially they have to know how to use this language to serve their reading, it means that the better at knowledge of language they are, the more successful in reading they become Consequently, this factor strongly influences students‟ reading comprehension ability

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In a word, the different rates among the factors above indicate that students

of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College meet difficulties in language competence, especially, lexical knowledge which plays an important role

in obtaining the meaning of the text In addition, the students‟ background knowledge is still a big problem Therefore, many students failing in learning reading ESP are obvious

4.2.3 Students’ difficulties about learning time and learning conditions

4.2.3.1 The difficulties about time

Time plays an important role in human life in general and in students‟ learning in particular In fact, if the learners spend more time on learning and use the time well, they will achieve desired effect However, it is not simple to allocate and arrange the time suitably for all work, for everyone It requires artistic management of time of each person In order to study about time for reading ESP of students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College, the author focuses on the question

Question 7: Have you got enough time to improve ESP reading?