Reading culture among students in Vietnam

This paper, based on second research, discusses three questions of what current situation of reading among students nowadays, why students are lazy to read book and what have been done

Reading plays vital role in society; however, it is a serious problem among students in Vietnam nowadays Particularly, reading culture among pupils has decreased sharply owing to many reasons, which come from both students and society To cope with that situation, many measures have been taken This paper, based on second research,

discusses three questions of what current situation of reading among students nowadays, why students are lazy to read book and what have been done to improve reading habit All in all, the paper illustrates the conclusion that inspite of the fall of reading culture, many efforts are made to address that issue and there is actually hopeful that reading will become popular habit of Vietnamese again.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ···2

1 Introduction···4

2 Discussion of findings···4

2.1 What current situation of reading among students···4

2.2 Why students are lazy to read book···5

2.3 What have been done to improve reading habit···6

3 Conclusion … 7

References 8

Reading is a good routine of many people all over the world as it is the shortest way to approach enormous knowledge of human Although books readers’soul a lot of benefits such as relaxing, gaining understanding and nourish soul, Vietnamese students are gradually far away from reading culture According to a survey conducted by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in 2013, each Vietnamese only reads 0.8 books on an average and merely 0.38 book are read at public liberaries Compared with other countries in the region, the percentage of people reading Vietnam rather low for example Malaysian read 10-20 books per year and this figure continues rising (Tran Trong Thanh, cited in Ho 2013) These figures related to Vietnamese reading culture are alarming The circumstances are

so complicated that it needs time and scheme of many aspects to overcome Therefore, this paper, with main purpose to inspirit reading habit among students, presents current situation, causes and solutions to tackle this serious trouble

2 Discussion of findings

2.1 What current situation of reading among students

Before showing current situation, it is worth to understand what reading culture is? Reading culture is reading behavior, values and norms read of each individual, the society and the community of regulators and state authorities Conduct, values and standards also include three components: reading habits, hobby reading and reading skills (Nguyen) From above explaination, reading is a process, so how students read today

It is worth mentioning here that Vietnamese people in general and Vietnam in particular students less and less reading Vietnamese read less than one book/ year while French read 15 books / year; Americans read 12 books / year or more recently Malaysia, according to the statistics of 2012, every citizen of this country read 10-20 books / year A survey of recent Labour newspaper, books read the most widely by Vietnamese is manga (60%), followed by short stories (50%), communications services (35%), domestic fiction (30%) and poetry (20%), Tran said Most Vietnamese readers like books for entertainment purpose only, rather than reading books for additional knowledge and skills because it is hard to read these books, which force them to think more, Director of Alpha Books Nguyen Canh Binh pointed out In abroad, people can easily catch sight of students read books with concentration on the subway in the morning, even on the way to class,

in the hallway corner waiting on more classroom time, in canteen school at recess, and of course in the library - where book lovers often look for book Yet Vietnamese people, especially young people do not like reading, mostly using computers, mobile phones to search for information, play games, chat,…

In addition, the reduction of reading culture also expresses through the number of people go to the library In the study, carried out in College of Natural Science,

asked 100 students about reading book Only 30% of students access information from the book, and the rest mainly use the internet Similarly in Hanoi Pedagogical University is only about 25% of students regularly read However, the time for reading only represents between 10-15% of student learning time Meanwhile, the training requirements of the credit, the majority of the time, students must be reserved for self-study Nguyen Thi Thuy, Deputy Head Serves readers, library information center of Hanoi National University, said: "Libraries are about 11 million cases of books Total turns reading material more than 309,000 in 2014 was down 15% from last year The humanities books are read more often than natural books Students only spend the most hard-to library focusing on the final exam seasons in December and January 6 But other times, weekdays, the libraries largely fall in sparse situation”

2.2 Why students are lazy to read book

Books give people many advantages but many students rarely read books Why? Firstly, it causes by external factors The distribution of reading materials between urban and rural is imbalanced: the public library systems cover new provinces and districts whereas vast rural communes and villages only develop very few and poor in content; books, newspapers and magazines published primarily consumed only in big cities, provincial capitals and districts Publishers tend to release the thick books in various fields, in fact, just aim at high-income readers in society No matter what the figure of books has reached about 26,000 names annual, 80% is the textbook curriculum ( Nguyen)

Besides, many people believe that the current price of books is much higher than the income of almost Vietnamese ( Song 2015) Cost of a novel, collection of short stories or commentaries in VN is approximately 350000 dong or more so book lovers can not afford to buy a couple of books each month

A very important reason is that learning from high school to university students are not given the habit of reading Formed, stereotyped, rigid, restrictive teaching method has eliminated needs and reading skills of students Students depend on knowledge provided by teachers and forget that what we become depends on what

we read after all of the professors have finished with us The greatest university of all is a collection of books (Phuong Chi, cited in “Kinh nghiệm đọc sách và tự học hiểu quả”)

Apart from those reasons, audio-visual media has overwhelmed paper books so students are more attractive by that Students can spend much time on surfing web, joining social networks as opposed to read book

Other reason is that many students are very busy In modern life, racing against time everybody tries his/her best to make money, to compete for a job, and even race against time to play so reading and digesting the works is really hard opposed to read book Futhermore, there are too many kinds of books so that students do not know what are interesting and valuable books for specific demands Espcecially, students are lack of habits to study and explore knowlegle actively All of these cause student are much father away from reading (Tran 2015)

2.3 What have been done to improve reading habit

Lenin once wrote: "There is no book, no knowledge", awareness of the significance of books, therefore, some efforts have been done to relieve that dispute

Firstly, government, particularly in the cultural and educational sectors should pay more attention and support, better investment for the library system, reducing the cost of books; choosing and adding types of books match with cognition and psychology of students Fully aware of the importance of reading culture towards to

a learning society, the Prime Minister issued decision 284 / QD-TTg of taking the annual 21/4 Vietnam Book Day on 02.24.2014

Parallel to the activities of the campaign committee, the school needs to further promote the role of the management staff, teachers in the reading They must be the pioneers, then as a model to build habits, arouse passion of student reading Officials and teachers should guide students choose to read the book to read concerning the lecture; teachers force students to read documents and books to make the essay, dissertation; instruct students how to choose books to read and manipulate the reading proficiency different for each type of reading material; know how to navigate the necessary resources for itself in the directory and the library catalog, especially to know how to apply in practice what has been read is indispensable reading habits of students will gradually created ( Do 2016 )

However , joining hands of students is necessary to develop reading culture Students need to understand that “literacy is the door to knowledge, essential to individual self-esteem and empowerment Books, in all forms, play an essential

role here” (Irina Bokova) to create interest when reading Choosing right way to

read book is key to read book effectively Thus, Dr Mortimer J Adler & Dr Charles Van Doren suggest four main questions about any book while reading:

1 What is the book about as a whole?

2 What is being said in detail, and how?

3 Is the book true, in whole or part?

4 What of it? If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance Why does the author think it is important to know these things?

Is it important to you to know them?

This solution brings hope to raise awareness about the great significance and the importance of reading for the development of knowledge, skills, thinking,

personality; encouragement and development reading movement in the community, contributing to building Vietnam culture advanced, bold ethnic identity

3.Conclusion

The above exploration shows that lack of reading culture is massive impact and has negative effects on futurable generations of country Both external and interal factors affect reading habits of students dealing with this issues need close combination from individuals, families, shools and society Then, hopefully, reading book soon becomes the most popular habit of all Vietnamese for The more that you read, the more things you will know The more that you learn, the more places you'll go (Dr Seuss)

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