Some difficulties in reading lessons of students at Sao Viet centre and some suggested solutions

Some difficulties in reading lessons of students at Sao Viet centre and some suggested solutions

Ministry of education and training

I could not complete my assignment without the great help and useful advice from

my teacher, my family as well as my friends

Firstly, I would like to express my great thanks to y supervisor, M.A Nguyen Thi

Secondly, I would like to express my deep thanks to all the teachers in ForeignLanguage Department of Vinh University for giving me helpful lectures.

My thanks also go to my director, Ms Nguyen Thi Yen and all the colleagues atSao Viet English Centre, Nghean Branch for their helpful and enthusiastic helps duringthe time I did the survey

Furthermore, my thanks are also sent to all of my friends from class 17 MasterDegree of Arts Course for their encouragements and helps

To everyone, thank you very much

Vinh, December 2010

Le Thi Huong

List of tables

Table 1: Students complete the text or not

Table 2: The reasons that students can not complete the table

Table 3: Factors that affect students’ understanding

Table 4: How students deal with unknown words

Table 6: The way students get main idea

Table 7: How students get specific information

Table 8: how teachers teach vocabulary

1 Rationale of the study 3

2 Aims of the study 3

4 Method of the study 5

5 Design of the study 6

Part II: Content Chapter 1: Theoretical background 1.1 Definition of reading 6

1.2 Factors that affect learners’ reading result 7

1.2.1 Subjective factors 8

1.2.1.1 Students’ motivation 8

1.2.1.2 Purpose of reading 9

1.2.1.3 Strategies of reading 10

1.2.1.4 Skills of reading 11

1.2.2 Objective factors 12

1.2.2.1 Reading materials 12

1.2.2.2 Teaching methods 13

Chapter 2: The study 2.1 Research questions: 14

2.2 Research setting 15

2.3 Research procedure 16

2.3.1 Difficulties in reading materials 17

2.3.2 Difficulties in students’ reading strategies 17

2.3.2.1 How students deal with new words 18

2.3.2.2 Difficulties in students’ ways of reading the text 18

2.3.3.3 Difficulties in getting main ideas of the text 19

2.3.3.4 The way students get specific idea 19

2.3.3.5 Difficulties in teachers’ teaching methods 20

Chapter 3: Teaching Implications 3.1 Suggestions for students 21

3.1.1 Previewing 21

3.1.2 Predicting 21

3.1.3 Guessing from the context 22

3.1.4 Skimming 22

3.1.5 Scanning 23

3.2 Suggestion for teachers 23

Part III: conclusion

Appendix

References

Part I: introduction

Nowadays, with the tendency of globalization and integration, English plays the role of an effective international communicative language Therefore, learning English has been considered a very important duty of many students One of the most important skills in learning English as well as other languages is reading skill Reading not only helps students widen their knowledge but also enables them to develop language skills such as listening, writing, and speaking

Besides, realizing the importance of learning English, many students go to the English centers which are opened every where However, both teacher and students at Sao Viet English centre do not feel satisfied with the results of the students in reading

performance disappointing And in fact, most of the students read with less understandingthan one might expect them to Many of them can not complete the reading text in thecourse book Also, lots of them complain that they can not understand the meaning of thereading text Why do the students fail to learn reading in English? What are the factorsthat affect them in reading? What are their difficulties in reading? How to improve theirreading? These questions are in concern with many teachers in general and theyespecially interest me.

For these reasons, I decide to choose the subject: Some difficulties in readinglessons of students at Sao Viet centre and some suggested solutions

2 Aims of the study

- To investigate some difficulties that the students at Sao Viet Centre face when learningreading

- To give some suggested solutions to help the students overcome the difficulties in order

to improve their reading effectiveness

3 Scope of the study

Due to the limitation of time and knowledge, this thesis mainly focuses on thedifficulties faced by students at Sao Viet English centre in reading lessons and somesolutions suggested to improve students’ reading skill

4 Method of the study

This study uses the following methods:

- Statistic and classifying

- Annalistic and synthetic method

- Qualitative and quantitative

5 Design of the study

The thesis consists of three main parts:

Part I: Introduction

This part contains five smaller ones:

- Rationale of the study

- Scope of the study

- Aims of the study

- Methods of the study

- Design of the study

Part II: Content

This part consists of 3 chapters:

- Chapter 1: Theoretical background

- Chapter 2: The study

- Chapter 3: Teaching Implications

In chapter 1, there are the following parts:

- Definition of reading

- Factors that affect learners’ reading result

In chapter 2, the author deals with 3 main parts:

- Research questions:

- Research setting

- Research procedure

In chapter 3, 2 main parts are solved:

- Suggestions for students

- Suggestion for teachers

Part III: Conclusion

Part II: content Chapter 1: Theoretical background 1.1 Definition of reading

As in learning a foreign language in general and learning English in particular,reading is considered the most skill of the four ones to ensure students in masteringsecond language Actually, there are different ways to understand the definition ofreading

Silberstein (1993) suggested “reading is a complex information processing skill inwhich the readers interact with the text to create the meaningful discourse

Besides, there are some ideas about reading that is cited from the Internet, thesescholars assume that “reading is the process of constructing meaning through the

dynamic interaction with the given text; the readers will be able to interpret and thencreate a meaningful one which helps them understand the text better”

Inferring from the above definitions, it is possible to come a conclusion thatreading is an active and receptive skill in which readers play a very active roe inanalyzing the text for realizing the communicative functions

1.2 Factors that affect learners’ reading result.

1.2.1 Subjective factors

1.2.1.1 Students’ motivation

Students’ motivation is a very important part to ensure the success ofstudents‘learning in general and reading in particular When students are motivated, theirmind is opened, learning is visiting, knowledge is welcome and it is easy for students toachieve The more students achieve, the more they are motivated This is such a goodmood that many students can considerably improve in leaning

1.2.1.2 Purpose of reading

Besides, the reading purpose is also a very important factor that affects students’reading Grabe and Stove (2002) classified Reading purpose into seven types as followed:

- reading to search for simple information

- reading to skim quickly

- reading to learn from texts

- reading to integrate information

- reading to cite

- reading to criticize

- Reading for general comprehension

1.2.1.3 Strategies of reading

Usually, it is not easy for students to know all the words, phrases and thestructures used in the texts Thus, they may apply their reading strategies to fulfill theirtasks Reading strategies mean the way readers use their reading skills to read the textsand to deal with the words or phrases that are unfamiliar t get information These aresome reading strategies:

- Previewing

- Predicting

- Skimming and scanning

- Guessing the context

- Paraphrasing

1.2.1.4 Skills of reading

To fulfill the task while reading, students need to have certain skills Skill meansthe ability to perceive and perform something Mumphy (1987) distinguished readingskills a following:

- Recognizing the script of language

- Deducing the meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items

- Understanding the meaning of explicitly stated information

- Recognizing indicators in discourse

- Interpreting texts by going outside it

- Identifying the main point or important information in a piece pf discourse

- Distinguishing the main ideas from supporting details

- Extracting salient points to summarize the text or an idea

- Skimming

- Scanning to locate specifically required information

- Transcoding information to diagrammatic display

- Basic reference skills

Chapter 2: The study 2.1 Research questions:

- What are the difficulties that students at Sao Viet English Centre encounter in thereading lesson?

- What are the solutions to help students improve their reading skills?

- Step 2: Giving questionnaires to the teachers at Sao Viet English centre

- Step 3: Analyzing the figures of the questionnaires

- Step 4: summing up the questionnaires to find out the difficulties of the students and theimplications for teaching

2.3.1 Difficulties in reading materials

The question: Do you complete the text in reading lesson? is given to bothteachers and students And this is the result for this question:

In reading lesson, do students

complete the text?

Teachers’ opinion Students’ opinion

Table 1: Students complete the text or not

It easy to see from the table above that the results from asking the students is quitesimilar to the one asking teachers There are 60% of teachers and students think that thestudents sometimes complete the text There are more students who think that theycomplete the text (14%) than the teachers who have the same idea (10%) In contrast,more teachers think that their students do not fulfill the task (30%) than those of students(26%)

Thus, the amount of students can always finish the reading task of the text in reading lesson is very small while a very large amount of students sometimes or can not finish the reading task It shows that the reading materials also cause difficulties for students However, what are the reasons for this? The next question is delivered to answer this question:

The reason that students can not

complete reading the text?

Teachers’ opinion Students’ opinion

2 the text is too difficult 6/10 (60%) 35/50 (70%)

Table 2: The reasons that students can not complete the text

There are many students think that it easy difficult for them to read the text if it isdifficult (70%) and long (63%) The same number of students (65%) also thinks that thedifficult tasks prevent them from completing the text However, for the teachers, thedifficult tasks are the main reason to make students not complete reading the text

To complete reading the text, students must understand its main idea This tablewill show out the factors that affect students’ understanding:

Reasons that make students difficult to

understand the text

Teachers’ opinion Students’ opinion

2 there are too many new grammatical

structures

3 The topic and content are unfamiliar 1/10 (10%) 15/50 (30%)

4 the type of the text is unfamiliar 0/10 (0%) 0/50 (0%)

Table 3: Factors that affect students’ understanding

It is not difficult to recognize from the table that most of the teachers (80%) andthe students (94%) think that vocabulary is the main factor that makes students hard tounderstand the main idea of the text Meanwhile, the type of the text does not hinder thestudents to understand the text

The results of the survey indicate that the vocabulary is the biggest difficultiesthat most of students face while reading In other words, the results of the survey confirmthat when reading the text, students encounter so many difficulties that prevent them fromunderstanding the text The difficulties include unknown words, new grammatical

unknown word in the reading text The new grammatical structures and the unfamiliartopic and content of the text are also the hindrance to students’ comprehension.

2.3.2 Difficulties in students’ reading strategies

2.3.2.1 How students deal with new words

As analyzing above, unfamiliar words are the factor that most of the students face.Therefore, the way students deal with these words is very important to help themunderstand the text The result of the question “What do you do when you meet unknownwords in you reading text?” will show students’ problems concerning to the vocabulary:

1 Stop reading and look up the words in the dictionary 42/50 (83%)

Table 4: How students deal with unknown words

The table shows that a large number of students (83%) stop reading when they see theunknown words This causes them difficult to concentrate on the flow of the text.Looking up the words takes time and interrupts their reading This process may makestudents forget the idea they have got before

Another way that students (23%) treat the new words is that they ignore newwords Sometimes, this strategy is effective; however, this is not a good way actually forsometimes they can ignore the important words of the text that help them understand thetext

However, the best way for students to deal with unfamiliar words is guessing itsmeaning This way is suggested by only 19% of students

To sum up, students have used inappropriate way to treat the unknown words sothat they find it difficult to understand the text

2.3.2.2 Difficulties in students’ ways of reading the text.

Each student has his own way to read the text, the question “how do you read the text?” is delivered and here is the answer:

Table 5: How students read the text

The result of the survey indicates that 16% of students skim the text to get quicklythe main idea, and only 19% of them choose scanning through the text as the way ofreading A large number of students (80%) are in the habit of reading slowly and try tounderstand every word Translating the text into Vietnamese the approach that is chosen

by most of the students (90%) while reading The number of students chooses reading thetext aloud and reading the text in silence is quite similar with 37% of students read aloudand 34% of students read silently

It is sure that the students read effectively or not partly depend on the readstrategy they use However, the result found in the table above confirms that most of thestudents appear to be inefficient readers

In short, the students utilize inappropriate reading strategies when dealing with

are reading for different purposes And the way they apply most is translating the textinto Vietnamese while reading, that’s why they read slowly and try to understandimportant and unimportant words either It is inappropriate reading strategy partly causeinefficient reading.

2.3.3.3 Difficulties in getting main ideas of the text

The question “what do you do to get the main idea of the text?” The authorreceives the result as following:

Table 6: The way students get main idea

The table shows that there are 58% of students skim to get main idea Similarnumber uses reading title (45%) and reading topic sentence (48%)

In conclusion, the strategy getting main idea while reading a text of students is ataverage level They do not use much skimming skill and not pay much attention to thetitle or topic sentence of the text, neither

2.3.3.4 The way students get specific idea

Besides getting main idea, getting specific idea is also a very important duty ofthe student when reading text to fulfill their reading tasks This table shows out howstudents get specific idea:

Table 7: How students get specific information