04051001866 tóm tắt an analysis on the readability of english reading texts in the textbooks tiếng anh 9 of the 10 year curriculum for lower secondary schools = phân tích Độ khó của các bài Đọc tiếng anh trong sách giáo khoa tiếng anh 9 mới

04051001866 tóm tắt an analysis on the readability of english reading texts in the textbooks tiếng anh 9 of the 10 year curriculum for lower secondary schools = phân tích Độ khó của các bài Đọc tiếng anh trong sách giáo khoa tiếng anh 9 mới

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

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

HỒ PHƯƠNG ANH

AN ANALYSIS ON THE READABILITY

OF ENGLISH READING TEXTS IN THE TEXTBOOKS TIẾNG ANH 9

OF THE 10-YEAR CURRICULUM FOR LOWER- SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Phân tích độ khó của các bài đọc tiếng Anh

trong sách giáo khoa Tiếng Anh 9 mới

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Language Teaching Methodology Code: 8140231.01

Hanoi, 2022

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

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

HỒ PHƯƠNG ANH

AN ANALYSIS ON THE READABILITY

OF ENGLISH READING TEXTS IN THE TEXTBOOKS TIẾNG ANH 9

OF THE 10-YEAR CURRICULUM FOR LOWER- SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Phân tích độ khó của các bài đọc tiếng Anh

trong sách giáo khoa Tiếng Anh 9 mới

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Language Teaching Methodology Code: 8140231.01

Supervisor: Prof Dr Hoàng Văn Vân

Hanoi, 2022

AN ANALYSIS ON THE READABILITY

OF ENGLISH READING TEXTS IN THE TEXTBOOKS TIẾNG ANH 9

OF THE 10-YEAR CURRICULUM FOR LOWER- SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Ho Phuong Anh

Abstract: This study aimed to examine the readability of reading passages in the two volumes

of the English textbook Tiếng Anh 9 joint published by Viet Nam Education Publishing House and Pearson Education Two methods for determining readability were applied, namely the Flesch Reading Ease formula and Cloze procedure test To obtain the data for the Flesch Reading Ease formula, Microsoft Word was employed to generate the Flesch Reading Ease score automatically Additionally, to involve the target readers in the analyzing process, a cloze test was distributed to twenty ninth graders at an English center The Flesch Reading Ease scores suggested the estimated reading grade and the scores gained from the Cloze test were compared to the criterion level of reading materials The results from the Flesch Reading Ease formula suggested that six out of twelve examined texts were above ninth graders‟ level Regarding the Cloze test score, 75% of the texts could be read by students on their own, while the rest might require teacher‟s help It was recommended that further changes be made to certain texts before they serve as in-class materials

Keywords: English textbooks, readability, Flesch Reading Ease formula, cloze test, difficulty

of reading texts

PHÂN TÍCH ĐỘ KHÓ CỦA CÁC BÀI ĐỌC TIẾNG ANH

TRONG SÁCH GIÁO KHOA TIẾNG ANH 9 MỚI

Tóm tắt: Nghiên cứu này nhằm kiểm tra độ khó của các bài đọc trong hai tập sách giáo khoa

Tiếng Anh 9 do Nhà xuất bản Giáo dục Việt Nam và Nhà xuất bản Pearson liên kết xuất bản Hai phương pháp nhằm xác định độ khó của các bài đọc gồm công thức Flesch Reading Ease

và bài kiểm tra điền từ dành cho 20 học sinh lớp 9 Kết quả thu được từ công thức Flesch được đối chiếu với lớp học tương ứng và điểm đạt được từ bài kiểm tra điền từ (cloze test) được so sánh với cấp độ tiêu chí của tài liệu đọc Kết quả từ công thức Flesch chỉ ra rằng một nửa số bài đọc trong nghiên cứu vượt quá trình độ của học sinh lớp 9 Về điểm số của bài kiểm tra đọc điền từ, học sinh có thể tự đọc 75% số bài đọc, trong khi đó, 25% bài đọc còn lại cần sự trợ giúp của giáo viên Vì vậy, một số bài đọc trong sách giáo khoa này cần được sửa lại trước khi sử dụng trên lớp học

Từ khóa: sách Tiếng Anh, nội dung văn hóa, nguồn văn hóa, chủ đề văn hóa, sự thể hiện văn

hóa

1 INTRODUCTION

During academic life, people have been exposed to a variety of materials, and among them, the most common type may be textbooks In order to internalize the knowledge packed in this source of information, apart from the teacher‟s guidance, students need

to have basic reading comprehension skills Textbooks that are quite challenging to read may hinder student‟s motivation On the other hand, students who are highly motivated may lose their interest in reading books which are too easy or less challenging Therefore, it is essential that educators make sure inputs are comprehensible to students; in other words, textbooks must be selected with careful consideration, with a view to moitvating students‟ learning In their work, Manzo and Manzo (1990) consider the difficulty level of a text as the text‟s readability

When it comes to reading texts in English textbooks for EFL learners, readability of texts is likely to become more important as in this case, besides the content, students are also learning the English language As a result, readability of texts in English textbooks has received considerable attention from educators Many readability formulas have been developed to predict the readability of reading materials Many of these formulas calculate the readability of a text using figures relating to sentence length and number of syllables per word (Khodadady, 2017) A number of studies have been conducted to examine the readability of certain English textbooks employing these types of formulas

In the context of Vietnam, English is a compulsory subject at primary, lower and upper secondary schools Specifically, in the four English textbooks for lower secondary education, reading is stated to be “the first of the four language skills that receives special attention” It can be said that almost all reading texts in textbooks are used in the classroom As a result, it is essential to gain a thorough understanding of the

readability of the English reading texts of these textbooks However, it is rather difficult to find research concerning this issue in countries where English is taught as a foreign language like in Vietnam

“essentially concerned with meaning” which can be interpreted that readers are responsible for getting the meaning out of text The main aim of the reading texts and reading tasks, therefore, is to develop students‟ reading strategies that help them to comprehend texts All in all, reading is an active process in which the reader interacts with the text to construct meaning based on their knowledge, imagination, belief and culture

Reading text

A text is a group of words put together to communicate a meaning (Anderson and Anderson, 1998, as cited in Amaniy, 2014) Apart from words, a text, according to Nuttall, also includes other elements such as autographic symbols and non-verbal elements (e.g capitalization, punctuation, and format) In their work, Hedgcock and Ferris (2009) mention certain parameters of texts which are expected to be read by students, namely text types, text forms, graphic features, topics, style, lenth, range of vocabulary, range of grammar and readability There are two types of text, according to Anderson and Anderson, which are literary text types (narrative texts, poems and

drama scripts) and factual text types (explanation, report, discussion, factual description, and procedure)

The textbook

Brown (2000) states that the most obvious and most common material support for language instruction comes through textbooks Even though various types of novel media have been developed for teaching and learning in innovative ways, textbooks remain one of the most common materials used Textbooks serve to support and enhance students‟ learning process It also serves as a guideline for both teachers and students in the learning journey Van Els et al (1984) define textbooks as "a coherent body of teaching materials which may consist of either just the course book(s), but also

of a learning package consisting of several parts." This can be understood that a textbook is a collection of teaching materials and also an instructional tool used as the teaching sources or as a guideline for teachers in the teaching and learning process

Readability

One of the methods to help the teacher choose appropriate English textbooks for students is by considering the readability of reading materials found in the textbook Readability is the ease of understanding or comprehension of the text There are six factors affecting the readability of a text They are lexical knowledge, background knowledge, syntactic appropriateness, organization, discourse phenomenon, and length Lexical knowledge is of paramount importance as the higher the number of unknown vocabulary is, the more difficult the text becomes for readers to deal with Background knowledge helps readers comprehend a passage quickly and accurately Syntactic appropriateness refers to the complex of structures used in the text Organization deals with the rhetorical organization of the text and the clarity of the organization Discourse phenomenon engages cohesiveness and coherence of the text Length of the text also affects students‟ comprehension

Measuring readability

According to Alderson (2001), there exist three approaches to measuring readability, namely expert judgment, cloze procedure and readability formulas

Judgment

There is an assumption that experts in certain fields know their field the best Therefore, the first way of measuring readability is seeking experts' evaluation of the materials Experts here can be teachers and librarians, as Pikulski (2001) believes However, the assumption above may not be reliable and trustworthy Judgment is such a subjective matter and may vary from one person to another It is possible to get different results if

a text is judged by different evaluators

Readability formula

Dubay (2004) summaries and discusses a number of readability formulas commonly used nowadays Three of them are mentioned below: The Dale-Chall formula, The Flesch Reading Ease Formula, and the SMOG Index These formulas have some things

in common They estimate syntactic complexity and lexical density from texts In this research, the researcher decided to use The Flesch Reading Ease Formula because it is easy to use The calculation of this formula can be done manually or automatically using MS Word or other tools available on the Internet The Flesch Reading Ease Formula is said to be a simple formula to assess the readability or the difficulty of reading passages written in English The specific formula of The Flesch Reading Ease Formula is as follows:

Score = 206.835 – (1.015 x ASL) – (84.6 x ASW)

Where:

Score = position on a scale of 0 (difficult) to 100 (easy), with 30 = very difficult and 70

= suitable for adult audiences

ASL = average sentence length (the number of words divided by the number of sentences)

ASW = average number of syllables per word (the number of syllables divided by the

number of words)

In his work The Art of Readable Writing, Flesch (1949, as cited in Dubay, 2004) describes his scale as followed:

Table 1 Flesch’s Reading Ease Scores

Reading Ease Score Style Description Estimated Reading Grade

to fill in the blanks The percentage of correct answers is called the cloze score Texts with lower scores are said to be more difficult Bormuth (1971), as cited in Wagner (1986), proposed a criterion level of reading materials used in primary and secondary schools

Table 2 Cloze scores and the purpose of reading (Bormuth, 1971)

The cloze score Purpose/ Level of the text

50% and above Independent level

35 - 49% Instructional level

0 - 34% Frustration level

All in all, the methods of measuring readability the researcher used in this study are: The Flesch Reading Ease Score and the Cloze procedure The Flesch Reading Ease Score was selected because it is easy to be collected automatically using the available feature in Microsoft Office Word Besides, the Cloze procedure takes into account both factors affecting readability of a reading text, readers and texts In other words, the target readers were involved in the process of evaluating the readability of the texts This made the researcher decide to employ the cloze test as another research instrument

Previous studies

For the last decades, a number of studies have been conducted to investigate the readability of English textbooks in contexts where English is the first or primary language Owu-Ewie (2015) identified the readability of 48 reading texts chosen from four different types of Junior High School 1 to 3 English textbooks in West Africa He employed The Gunning FOG Readability test, the Flesch Reading Ease Formula, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Coleman Liau, Automatic Readability Index, and SMOG Index He found that many of the texts were inappropriate with the level of the students, which was above their level A similar pattern can also be observed in the study of Gyasi & Slippe (2019) The authors examined the readability of English language textbooks for diploma students Three textbooks were studied with two formulas namely Flesch reading ease and Flesch – Kincaid grade level indexes The results revealed that almost all of the textbooks were between „fairly difficult‟ and „difficult‟ Besides, quite long sentences (22-25 words per sentence) might have led to the low readability of the textbooks

Besides, a certain number of studies relating to readability have been carried out in countries where English is taught as a second or foreign language A large number of studies concerning this issue are conducted in the country of Indonesia One example is

the study of Octaviani (2006, as cited in Budiarti, 2014) in which the researcher investigated the readability of English reading texts used by sixth graders in Indonesia The study concluded that the textbooks have readable and suitable reading materials for students of this grade A more recent study carried out by Kurniawan (2008) showed the same results In this research, the English worksheet for elementary school was examined, using three different tools namely the Flesch Reading Ease score, Gunning Fox Theory and the Cloze test The findings showed that there was a good match between the difficulty of the texts examined and the target learners

In his study, Sari (2020) investigated the readability of 24 reading texts for secondary students (specifically grade 7, 8 and 9), using the Cloze procedure Results pointed out that not all texts are suitable for the target readers Hidayatillah and Zainil (2020) examined three random texts from an English textbook for university students majoring

in education Questionnaire, interview and Flesch Reading Ease formula were employed to collect the data Results from the questionnaire and interview for students showed that the texts were hard because of unfamiliar words and complex structures However, results gained from the formula indicated that the texts were suitable for university students

Regarding the Vietnamese context, readability of texts, yes, has been paid attention, but quite little Nguyen Duy Khang (2010) studied teachers‟ perception towards the readability of authentic texts and the ways of modifying authentic materials employed

in reading lessons Twenty-six EFL teachers in a Vietnamese community college and a TESOL class participated in the questionnaire and the test The findings showed that although the participants do a great job towards text modification, text readability does not have enough awareness Nguyen Ngoc To Ngan and Nguyen Thi Thu Thao (no date) studied the lexical density and readability of non-English majored freshmen‟s writing in Vietnamese context The readability of students‟ writing are calculated using available feature in Microsoft Word Results pointed out that most of the students only

reach an average level of lexical density and readability Readablity of reading texts in textbooks were not a concern in these two aforementioned study Therefore, it could be reaffirmed that there is a lack of research into the readability of English textbooks used

in the context of Vietnam and this is the gap for this research

3 METHODOLOGY

This is a descriptive quantitative research This research aimed at describing the eeadability level of English reading texts from two approaches, one is a readability formula, the Flesch Reading Ease Score and the other is a cloze test

There are two types of subjects in this study The first one is twenty ninth grade students from the English center that the researcher is currently working at in the academic year of 2021-2022 The other subject is twelve reading texts from the two

textbooks Tiếng Anh 9, Tập Một and Tiếng Anh 9, Tập Hai for the ninth graders of

lower secondary school

Research material

The textbook Tiếng Anh 9 (English 9) is claimed to adopt a theme-based syllabus

approved by the Ministry of Education and Training This syllabus focuses on the use

of language (pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar) to develop the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing)” The teaching contents for each unit are summarized in a book map that is provided on the first page of each book There are 12 teaching units and four review units Each unit covers a topic and is structured into 7 sections: Getting started, A closer look 1, A closer look 2, Communication, Skills 1, Skills 2, and Looking back & Project Each unit is supposed to be taught in 7 lessons of 45 minutes

Data collecting procedure

There are two sources of data collected The data needed in this research were the data from analysing the reading passages by Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES)