A study on using word guessing strategies in reading comprehension of economics texts of third year students majoring in economics at phuc yen college of industry

I hereby state that I - Hoang Thi Minh Chiem, being an M.A candidate of the Faculty of Post-graduate Studies, ULIS, VNU, certify my authorship of the study entitled A STUDY ON USING WORD

VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY,HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST–GRADUATE STUDIES

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

HOÀNG THỊ MINH CHIÊM

A STUDY ON USING WORD GUESSING STRATEGIES IN READINGCOMPREHENSION OF ECONOMICS TEXTS OF THIRD YEARSTUDENTS MAJORING IN ECONOMICS AT PHUC YEN COLLEGE

OF INDUSTRY

(Nghiên cứu việc sử dụng các chiến thuật đoán từ trong kỹ năng đọc hiểu cácbài khóa chuyên ngành kinh tế của sinh viên năm thứ 3 chuyên ngành kinh tế

trường Cao đẳng công nghiệp Phúc Yên)

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGYCODE: 60140111

Hanoi, 2014

VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY,HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST–GRADUATE STUDIES

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

HOÀNG THỊ MINH CHIÊM

A STUDY ON USING WORD GUESSING STRATEGIES IN READINGCOMPREHENSION OF ECONOMICS TEXTS OF THIRD YEARSTUDENTS MAJORING IN ECONOMICS AT PHUC YEN COLLEGE

I hereby state that I - Hoang Thi Minh Chiem, being an M.A candidate of the Faculty of Post-graduate Studies, ULIS, VNU, certify my authorship of the study entitled

A STUDY ON USING WORD GUESSING STRATEGIES INREADING COMPREHENSION OF ECONOMICS TEXTS OFTHIRD YEAR STUDENTS MAJORING IN ECONOMICS AT

PHUC YEN COLLEGE OF INDUSTRYThe thesis is my own research and the substance of the thesis has not, wholly or

in part, been submitted for a degree to any other universities or institutions

Hanoi, September 2014

Hoàng Thị Minh Chiêm

Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude and love to my supervisor,

Ms Pham Thi Thanh Thuy, Ph.D for her guidance, patience, comments, andespecially her sympathy throughout the whole research process Her guidancehelped me in all the time of research and writing of this research

My sincere thanks also go to Dr Le Van Canh for his helpful suggestions duringthis study I would also like to thank all teachers at the Postgraduate Department,ULIS, VNU, whose lectures and guidance have contributed to my understanding ofthe problem and led to the completion of this thesis

Especially, I wish to express my thankfulness to the teachers who will take theirprecious time reading and commending on this thesis

I would like to express my special thanks to all the students who have been reallyhelpful and cooperative in the implementation of the study

My thanks go to many writers whose important ideas and notions are exploited anddeveloped in the study And thanks also go to all librarians for their effort to makethe atmosphere of reading rooms as convenient and friendly as possible

I warmly thank my parents for giving birth to me and supporting me spirituallythroughout my life

And finally, I wish to send my thanks to my lovely sweet daughter for being a nicegirl and to my husband who always supports, cheers me up and stands by methrough the good and bad time

ABSTRACTThis study aims at examining the general strategies and the word guessingstrategies used by the third year students majoring in economics at Phuc YenCollege of Industry to deal with unknown words in reading comprehensioneconomics texts in reading lessons; and the difficulties they experience in usingthese strategies Three research questions are submitted and answered accordingly.

A survey questionnaire and a task sheets are used as two research methods in thisstudy The results indicate that: the participants of this study make use of variousgeneral strategies to deal with unknown words Of all strategies, guessing meaningfrom context is most frequently used one by the students Using local context andusing discourse context are two most preferred guessing strategies by the students.Most of them particularly have difficulties in using strategies requiring knowledge

of syntactic, association or collocation and extra-textual to work out the meaning

of unknown words Discussion, research limitations and implications for pedagogyand further research are also presented

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

EFL: English as foreign language

ELT: English language teaching

ESL: English as second language

ESP: English for specific purpose

L2: Second Language

PCI: Phuc Yen College of Industry

FIGURE AND TABLESFigure: Types of ESP

Table 1: Frequency use of general strategies for unknown words

Table 2: General strategies use for unknown words: Mean analysisTable 3: Frequency use of guessing strategies for unknown words

Table 4: Guessing strategies for unknown words: Mean analysis

Table 5: Guessing strategies for unknown words

Table 6: Ranks of strategies use in the Questionnaire and the Task sheets.Table 7: The outcome of word inferencing

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES iv

PART I: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale for the study 1

2 Aims of the study 2

3 Research questions 3

4 Scope of the study 3

5 Significance of the study 3

6 Methods of the study 4

7 Organization of the study 4

PART II: DEVELOPMENT 5

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

1.1 Overview of ESP 5

1.1.1 Definitions of ESP 5

1.1.2 Characteristics of ESP 5

1.1.2.1 Characteristics of ESP in general 5

1.1.2.2 Characteristics of English for Economics 6

1.1.2.3 Characteristics of English Economics Texts 7

1.2 The Nature of Reading Comprehension 9

1.2.1 Definitions of Reading Comprehension 9

1.2.2 Reading Comprehension Strategies 9

1.2.2.1 Definition of Reading Comprehension Strategy 9

1.2.2.2 Classification of Reading Comprehension Strategies 10

1.3 Guessing/ Inferencing Strategy 11

1.3.1 Definitions of Strategy 11

1.3.2 Guessing/ Inferencing strategy 12

1.3.3 Classification Types of Guessing/ Inferrencing strategies

1.4 College Students’ Characteristics

1.4.1 Definitions of Student

1.4.2 Characteristics of College Students in General

1.4.3 Characteristics of Economics Students

1.5 Summary

CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

2.1 Research Context

2.1.1 An overview of Phuc Yen College of Industry

2.1.2 Students’ background

2.1.3 Teachers and teaching methods

2.1.4 Course book for teaching ESP

2.2 Research Questions

2.3 Participants

2.4 Data Collection Instruments

2.4.1 Survey questionnaire

2.4.2 Task Sheets

2.5 Data Collection Procedures

2.6 Data Analysis Procedures

2.7 Summary

CHAPTER 3: DATA, DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 Data analysis

3.1.1 The students’ general strategies used for unknown words

3.1.2 Word guessing strategies used by the students

3.1.2.1 The guessing strategies used by the students collected through the questionnaire

3.1.2.2 The guessing strategies used by the students collected through the task sheets

3.1.2.3 The comparison of word guessing strategies used by the students in the

questionnaire and the task sheets 32

3.1.3 The difficulties the student encounter when using the word guessing strategies to make the guess 33

3.2 Discussion 34

PART III: CONCLUSION 37

1 Conclusion 37

2 Pedagogical Implications of the Study 38

3 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research 39

REFERENCES 40 APPENDICES I

PART I: INTRODUCTION

In the last three decades, the “learner-centeredness” theory has becomevery popular It demonstrates that learners are the key component of the languageacquisition process There is a fact that in the classroom, learners’ studying resultsare not the same though they are taught by the same teachers and under the samestudying condition Some students can acquire the language successfully but somefail to master it One of the main reasons is that different learners employ differentlearning strategies In other words, to be success in learning a second language,learners themselves should use some suitable learning strategies to make theirlearning more effective

Reading is not simply a receptive process of getting information from thepage in a word-by-word manner (Grabe, 1991, p.1) It is considered a selectiveprocess and characterized as an active process of comprehending Therefore, tobecome more successful, non-English-speaking readers will need to learn to usedifferent strategies to deal with unknown words encountered in reading This isalso true for dealing with reading comprehension texts of English for SpecificPurpose (ESP) Generally, a good reader has appropriate strategies to deal withunknown words in reading such as guessing or inferring the meaning of unknownwords in a text Therefore strategies of guessing word meaning play an importantrole in dealing with unknown words encountered in reading comprehension

With the hope of helping students to be equipped with necessaryqualifications to get a good job after graduation, the English Faculty at PCI hasapplied ESP courses for all majors in this college and major of economics is not anexceptional one Throughout the teaching ESP courses for economics majorstudents at this college, the researcher observed that the students’ results in readingcomprehension are not as good as what they have expected though they have tried

a lot This situation has made the researcher wonder how the students

deal with their reading comprehension tasks, especially what general strategies andwhat guessing strategies they employ to work out the meaning of unfamiliar wordswhen reading economics texts in reading lessons and what difficulties theyencounter in using these strategies In an effort to find out the idea to deal with thissituation, the writer find that there are a lot of researches on guesswork in readingcomprehension, however almost no researches on using word guessing strategies

in reading ESP texts were carried out Therefore, there is a need to have someworks on this issue with the hope that the study will be able to shed some light onhow the students actually do to deal with unknown words in readingcomprehension economics texts It also seeks to inform teachers on the problemsthe students encountered when they read

The facts mentioned above have inspired the author to conduct a survey

research with the title: “A Study on Using Word Guessing Strategies in Reading

Comprehension of Economics texts of third Year Students Majoring in Economics

at Phuc Yen College of Industry”.

The study aims at examining the general strategies that the students used

to deal with unknown words in the reading passages in English, the guessingstrategies the students used when they encounter unknown words in readingcomprehension economics texts and the difficulties they experience in usingthese guessing strategies to make their guess The specific aims of research are

as follow:

unknown words in English reading comprehension lessons

with unknown words when reading economics texts in readingcomprehension lessons

to make the guess

(3) What difficulties the students experience in using these guessing

strategies?

Due to the limited time and small scale of the research, the author onlyfocuses on examining the general strategies the third year students at PCI use forunknown words, the guessing strategies they employ to make out the meaning ofunknown words when reading economics texts in reading lessons and finding outthe difficulties the students encounter when employing these strategies

The study examines the general strategies used by the students to dealwith unknown words when reading economics texts in reading lessons, all possibleword guessing strategies employed by the participants and their difficulties inusing these strategies to make the guess to solve unknown words problem inreading comprehension, so it would be of great value in making students aware ofthe strategies they use for unknown words, the guessing strategies they employ, therole of these strategies in improving their reading comprehension skills foreconomics texts in English and help them have ideas to turn reading lessonsbecome more exciting and successful ones

6. Methods of the Study

To achieve the aims mentioned above, the author employs a task sheetswhich includes an article and a post quiz; and survey questionnaire to collect thedata for the study These will be discussed in detail in chapter 2, methodology Theauthor believes that with the combination of different methods to collect data theinformation for analysis would be more reliable and valid

There are three main parts in this thesis:

Part I – Introduction provides an overview of the study

Part II – Development consists of three chapters:

Chapter 1- Literature Review presents the theory background which relates to

the research topic including the overview of ESP, the nature of readingcomprehension, guessing/ inferencing strategies

Chapter 2 – Research Methodology deals with information of the research

context, participants, data collection instruments, data collection procedures, anddata analysis procedures

Chapter 3 – Result and Discussion reports and discusses the main findings

Part III – Conclusion describes the summary of the findings, implications,limitations and recommendations for further studies

PART 2: DEVELOPMENTCHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

1.1.1 Definitions of ESP

Until now there have been many ideas and different definitions by differentauthors of the English term “English for Specific Purposes” (ESP) to distinguish itfrom the other term - "General English" (GE - Basic English) According toHutchinson and Waters (1987, p.19), ESP is “an approach to language teaching inwhich all decisions as to content and approach are based on the learner’s reason forlearning” They see ESP as an approach which is instructed by particular andobvious reasons for learning Strevens (1988, p.1) defined: “ESP is a particularcase of the general category of special – purpose language teaching” He definedESP by identifying its absolute and variable characteristics

1.1.2 Characteristics of ESP

1.1.2.1 Characteristics of ESP in General

In their recent study, Dudley-Evans and St John (1998: 4-5) have improvedsubstantially Strevens’ definition by removing the absolute characteristic that ESP

is “in contrast with General English” (Johns et al., 1991: 298), and have includedmore variable characteristics

Absolute characteristics

ESP is defined to meet specific needs of the learners;

ESP makes use of the underlying methodology and activities of the discipline it serves;

ESP is centered on the language (grammar, lexis, and register), skills, discourse and genres appropriate to these activities

Variable characteristics

ESP may be related to or designed for specific disciplines;

ESP may use in specific teaching situation, a different methodology from that of General English;

ESP is likely designed for adult learners, either at the tertiary levelinstitution or in a professional work situation It could, however, be for learners atthe secondary school level;

ESP is generally designed for intermediate or advanced students;

Most ESP courses assume some basic knowledge of the language system, but it can be used with beginners.”

The division of ESP into absolute and variable characteristics is veryhelpful to distinguish ESP from what is not ESP It is very clear that the absolutecharacteristics concern about the methodology of teaching and the factors oflanguage Both the methodology and activities used in the ESP classroom,therefore, are different from those of GE However, according to Munby (1978),one important feature which characterizes ESP as being different from othergeneral language courses, is that “the domains not only relate to distinctivecontent, but also to discipline-specific lexis, genres and registers.”

1.1.2.2 Characteristics of English for Economics

All the above definitions show that ESP belongs to English languageteaching (ELT), and it may use, in specific teaching situations, a differentmethodology from that of general English It seems that English for Economicsforms an inseparable part of English for Business and Economics (EBE) Thesimplified "Tree of ELT" (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987) illustrates the relationshipsbetween EBE and ESP

ESP is divided into 3 branches: English for Science and Technology (EST),English for Business and Economics (EBE) and English for Social

Studies (ESS) Each of these branches falls into two categories: English forAcademic Purposes (EAP) and English for Occupational Purposes (EOP).

Figure: Types of ESP (Hutchinson, 1987: 16)

From the figure above, it is obvious that ESP which is taught to studentsmajoring in economics at Phuc Yen College of Industry belongs to English forManagement Finance and Economics and it is a type of English for AcademicPurposes Therefore, English for Economics has the following characteristics:

disciplines, occupations and activities;

discourse, semantics and so on, and analysis of the discourse;

1.1.2.3 Characteristics of English Economics texts

In a recent study about the relevant translation skills, principles reflected intranslated economics texts, Wang & Fan (2014) summarize three prominentlinguistic characteristics of economics texts as follows:

(1) Terminology

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2005) defines terminology as "the

set of technical words or expressions used in a particular subject” From the

definition of “terminology”, it is clearly that this word is connected with specificsubject field, and it can be described as a structured set of concepts that clarify andput bases for a particular subject field or as an infrastructure of specializedknowledge In economics texts, there are a lot of terminologies or technical termswith particular meaning The words involving in expressions are simple and easy

to understand One example is “closed economy” (one that does not interact withother economies in the world) It is just made up by two simple words

(2) Long Sentences

The second feature of economics texts involves with sentence length Ineconomics texts, there are many long sentences It is not difficult to findeconomics texts with sentences consisting of several short pieces For example,

“However, in recent years, some scholars and practitioners, particularly from thedeveloping world, argue that the impact of minimum wages on poverty is morenuanced in theory and practice, particularly when the possibility of income sharingamong the poor is accounted for.” (Todaro, 2005 as cited by Wang & Fan, 2014).Each part is divided by commas and presents different components, mainly asadverbial, of a whole sentence Although the sentence is long with several parts, it

is still understandable That is to say, it is complicated in form but simple incontent

(3) Figures and Tables

As economics texts always concerns about inflation rates, economicgrowth, interest rates, economic growth, calculating, etc which deal with plenty ofconcrete figures (Huang, 2009 as cited by Wang & Fan, 2014), figures and tablesare used popularly in economics texts Figures refer to graphs, flow charts, maps,drawings, photos, etc Tables refer to numerical values or text displayed in orderlycolumns or rows By using figures and tables, authors of economics texts candescribe economic principles with least length and make complex theory orphenomenon become more simple and explicit

1.2 The Nature of Reading Comprehension

1.2.1 Definitions of Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is the ability to read text, process it and understand its meaning.

Smith (1985) admitted that reading comprehension involves bringing aprior knowledge that readers already have in their heads interacted with what theyare reading, so that they can achieve comprehension

According to Snow (2002) reading comprehension is: “the process ofsimultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction, andinvolvement with written language It consists of three elements: the reader, thetext and the activity or purpose for reading.”

Comprehension is a process in which readers filter understanding throughthe lens of their motivation, knowledge, cognitive abilities and experiences.Effective readers have a purpose for reading, and use their background knowledgeand experiences to relate to the text: readers don’t comprehend unless they drawconnections between what they read and their background knowledge Tankersley(2003) Furthermore, Pang et al (2003) described reading comprehension as anactive process a reader made to construct meaning from a text This process whichconsists of using an interaction between a prior knowledge, and drawing inferencesfrom the different words and expressions the writer uses, in order to comprehendinformation, ideas and viewpoints

1.2.2 Reading Comprehension Strategies

1.2.2.1 Definition of Reading Comprehension Strategy

According to Block (1986), reading strategies indicate how readersconceive a task, what textual cues they attend to, how they make sense of whatthey read, and what they do when they do not understand a particular text Readingstrategies can also be understood as “the special thoughts or behaviors thatindividual use” to help learners to comprehend, learn and retain new informationfrom the reading text (O’Malley and Chamot, 1990) Also, Oxford

and Cohen (1992) proved the necessity of teaching learners more effectivemethods or strategies so that they may be able to read more effectively Therefore,teachers should cater students with active and selective use of strategies to helpthem fully comprehend reading texts.

Reading comprehension strategy can be defined as “a cognitive orbehavioral action that is enacted under particular contextual conditions with thegoal of improving some aspects of comprehension” (Graesser, A C., 2007) In thissense, the appropriate implementation of comprehension skills and strategies isone of critical components of reading comprehension success

1.2.2.2 Classification of Reading Comprehension Strategies

Reading comprehension strategies have been classified differently bydifferent authors In his study, Rubin (1981) proposed six general readingstrategies namely clarification, guessing, deductive reasoning, practice,memorization, and monitoring These strategies might contribute directly tolanguage learning Oxford’s (1990) classification is another taxonomy of learningstrategies that is used popularly in many language learning researches She dividedlearning strategies into six types They are memory strategies, cognitive strategies,compensation strategies, metacognitive strategies, affective strategies, and socialstrategies

In the scheme of O’Malley and Chamot (1990), there are three majorcategories of reading strategies; cognitive, meta-cognitive and social/affective.There are subcategories under each main category Within the scope of this study,just cognitive and metacognitive strategies are focused on Cognitive strategiesinvolve manipulation or transformation of the material to be learned;metacognitive strategies involve thinking about learning process, planning forlearning, monitoring of learning and self-evaluation of learning; and socioaffective strategies have to do with social-mediating activity and transacting withothers (Brown, 1994)

To sum up, reading comprehension is the act of understanding what you arereading It is an active process readers made by connecting their known knowledgeand a particular piece of writing to comprehend the author’s messages.Importantly, to become successful readers, it is necessary for L2 learners to beactive and selective in using strategies applying to fully comprehend reading texts.

1.3 Guessing/ Inferencing Strategies

1.3.1 Definitions of strategy

In the setting of foreign language learning, to become successful, studentswill need to learn to use different strategies to overcome obstacles they encounter

in their learning process

Strategy is defined in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary as “a plan

that is intended to achieve a particular purpose” (Oxford 2005)

Cohen (2000) stated that the term “strategies” has, in fact, been used torefer both to general approaches and to specific actions or techniques used to learn

a second language

In a study examining the use of strategies and knowledge sources in L2lexical inferencing and their relationship with inferential success, Nassaji (2003)clarified strategies as “conscious cognitive or metacognitive activities that thelearner uses to gain control over or understand the problem without any explicitappeal to any knowledge source as assistance” These activities include "repeating",

"verifying", "self inquiry", "analyzing", "monitoring", and "analogy"

Brown (2007) defined strategies as the "specific methods of approaching aproblem or task, modes of operation for achieving a particular end, planneddesigns for controlling and manipulating certain information." He distinguishesbetween strategies and styles Styles are “consistent and rather enduring tendenciesand preferences within an individual" Strategies on the other hand,

vary within individuals from moment to moment as the specific problems andcontexts change.

1.3.2 Guessing/ Inferencing Strategy

Guessing intelligently in reading, sometimes called "inferencing", involvesusing a wide variety of linguistic and nonlinguistic clues to guess the meaningwhen the learner does not know all the words (Oxford, 1990) Though the term

“guessing” is more widely accepted and less awkward (Clark & Nation, 1981),

these two terms, guessing and inferencing, will be used interchangeably in this

study

Haastrup (1991) claimed that guessing is a cognitive strategy sincecognitive strategies are the steps or operations used in learning or problem solvingthat require direct analysis, transformation or synthesis of learning materials and itdoes not automatically lead to learning, although it has the potential for doing so

Carter (1987) (cited in Lawson & Hogben, 1996) stated that the moreadvanced learners are “the more likely they are to benefit from learning words incontext” He emphasized that learners vary in their way to make inferences and intheir ability to make valid, rational and reasonable inferences

1.3.3 Classification Type of Guessing/ Inferrencing Strategies

Numerous researchers (Roskams 2005; Kaivanpanah and Alavi, 2008 andHuaiyong Gao, 2012) have investigated the classifications of inferencingstrategies

Kaivanpanah and Alavi (2008), from a study on the role of linguisticknowledge, identify seven different inferencing strategies The first strategy islooking for relationships between words to determine the meaning of unknownword It belongs to sentence level grammatical knowledge The second one isdeconstructing word parts and examining the meaning of each part, which lies inthe level of word morphology and class membership The third one is analyzingthe compound words into their constituents This strategy is similar to the second

in that it involves deconstructing words and examining the meaning of each part.The next strategy they find is sentence level semantic clues This strategy seems to

be more sophisticated and shows deeper word knowledge than the previouslymentioned strategies The next strategy involving discourse/text, by which learnersattempts to look beyond the word, or even the sentence, level for clues todetermine the meaning And homonym/ phonetic similarity and collocation are thelast two strategies The former compares words that sound similar in the secondlanguage and the latter uses knowledge of how words are usually paired together

to infer meaning

Huaiyong Gao (2012), based on Palmberg’s (1987) understanding of thecharacteristics of the unknown words and the context clues where those unknownwords occurred, from a new perspective classified these strategies systematicallyinto five types, namely: (1) Paraphrasing Devices, which consisted of definition,exemplification, and restatement (2) Logical Clues, which included comparisonand contrast, causal clues, parallel, or parataxis, and collocation (3) BackgroundClues, which were composed of scene, common knowledge, and experience (4)Morphological Clues and (5) Monitoring Devices He adds that these strategiesthough classified separately, it does not mean that they work in isolation Readersmight employ more than one strategy in facilitating their understanding of the text

in reading

Taxonomy of inferencing strategies is built by Roskams (2005) (cited inQiaoying Wang (2011)) The taxonomy including seven different guessingstrategies as follows:

Guess using extra textual (thematic or world) knowledge

Guess using discourse context i.e outside the sentence in which the word occurred (using forward or backward context)

Guess using syntactic knowledge

Guess using visual forms (similarity or morphological understanding) Guess using phonological similarity

Guess using local (sentence level) context

Guess using association or collocation knowledge (i.e a clue word)

With the advantage of having been designed with students as the primarygoal the above discussed strategies are relatively simple and easy for students tofollow and to remember They are valuable resources for teachers use to improvetheir students’ comprehension skills Each strategy brings inside its ownadvantages, one that suggested by Roskams (2005) seems to be the clearest and themost suitable for students

1.4 College Students’ Characteristics

1.4.1 Definitions of Student

Being considered to be one of the most important factors in the educationsector, students with their own characteristics have been the subject of variousinvestigations Accordingly, some definitions of the term “student” were given

According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2005) student is defined as

“a person who is studying at a university or college” Another definition of thisterm was found in Encyclopedia Dictionary – English: “student” is a word derivedfrom Latin root “student” which means a person who studies a particular academicsubject In normal sense, students are people who are learning to acquireknowledge, skills, professional skills in colleges and universities

1.4.2 Characteristics of College Students in General

Each different age has its own characteristics influenced by mainstreamactivity Here, we are interested in students who are learning to acquire knowledge,skills, and professional skills in colleges

According to To (2011), one of the most important characteristics ofstudents is that they are self-conscious development Thanks to the self-consciousdevelopment, students have the knowledge, attitude, able to assess themselves toadjust the proactive personal development in line with the trend of society Shealso adds that students are the future intellectuals, in their early emerging needs,desires success Studying in college is a great opportunity for students to

experience themselves, so students are interested in exploring new things, and theylove to express their own strengths, eager to learn, cultivation, and dare to face thechallenge to assert themselves One more prominent characteristic of this age isthat they are energetic class, rich dreams and ambitions Besides the above-mentioned positive aspects, although there are certain qualifications, studentscannot avoid the general limitations of teenagers It is immature in thought, action,particularly in the absorption and learning new things.

Age students with psychological traits typically, this is their strengthcompared with other age groups, such as self-aware and have feelings career,capable of intellectual and emotional development (thirst to find new ones, like toexplore, discover), demand, desire to achieve, much like dreams and experiences,

to face the challenge However, due to the limited life experience, students alsohave limitations in selecting, acquiring new ones The psychological factors aredominant impact of learning activities, training of students and strive

1.4.3 Characteristics of Economics Students

“The students of the various fields can be characterized by specific andvarying types and impact of social desirability depending on their professionalcareer.” (J Richter et al, 2011, p 250)

Beyond the characteristics of a student, as mentioned above, studentsmajoring in economics have some distinguished ones which were found by J.Richter et al (2011, p.250) in a longitudinal investigation about differences incharacteristics of students of economics, medicine and verbal communicationsciences By employing the Temperament and Character Inventory and a life eventlist to measure based on Cloninger’s unified biosocial theory of personality, thestudy found that compared with the other two groups, economics studentsdescribed themselves as more reserved, controlled and restrained, forward,outgoing and rather practical, tough minded, as well as more practical, cold,withdrawn, detached, and independent Furthermore, the authors of this

study investigated that students of economics are more resourceful, effective,productive, competent, innovative, and tended to look at difficult situations rather

as challenges or opportunities, with a higher self-discipline, more rarely confusingtheir priorities and feeling, more often safe and self-trusting They also describedthemselves as more mature, strong, responsible, goal-oriented, reliable, andconstructive On the other hand, economics students were found moreopportunistic with a tendency to treat people unfairly in a self-serving manner.1.5 Summary

This chapter presents the key issues related to the study including theoverview of ESP, the nature of reading comprehension, guessing/ inferencingstrategies and characteristics of college students From the review of literature theprobable clues and sources of linguistic knowledge, linguistic strategies that L2readers may employ when making inferences are presented clearly andsystematically With this theoretical background, it is hope that the study wouldyield satisfactory result

CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGYThis chapter deals with information of the research context, participants,research questions, data collection instruments, data collection procedures, anddata analysis procedures.

2.1 Research Context

2.1.1 An overview of Phuc Yen College of Industry

Phuc Yen College of Industry is located in Vinh Phuc province It is apublic school under the administration of the Ministry of Industry and Trade Thecollege has been in function for 52 years At the starting point, it was a vocationalschool with the duty of training geological and mining skilled workers for thewhole country English at this time was not listed as a compulsory subject Since

1995, this school was upgraded to become a college New branches such asEconomics, Information Technology, Construction and Automobile have beenopened to meet the requirement of society Accordingly, English has become amajor subject English education then has since been divided into two phases; onebeing devoted to the general education of English knowledge and the cultivation ofEnglish skills, the other being devoted to English education for specific purposes(ESP) Dealing well with these two phrases helps students get more opportunities

to get good jobs since the need of employee’s mastering a foreign languageespecially English would be in the list of requirements of almost employers today

At PCI, there are seven offices, three centers and nine faculties Faculty ofEnglish was separated from Informatics and Foreign Languages Center in 2013.The mission of this faculty is teaching English to non-English major students of allother faculties at the college

2.1.2 Students’ Background

Students of PCI come from different parts of Vinh Phuc province andsurrounding areas Before enrolling into this college, most of them studied English

at different secondary and high schools, some of these students even had chances

to access this subject when they still were at their primary schools That explainswhy they achieved different levels of English proficiency Though different in thelevel of proficiency, they have common in being familiar with traditionalgrammar-translation learning method in which one of two main goals is to developstudents’ reading ability to a level where they can read literature in the targetlanguage Therefore, in comparison with other three language learning skills(listening, speaking and writing skills), reading comprehension skills attracted theattention of most of students However, there is a fact that, their Englishproficiency in general is not very high The reason for this condition is due to theunbalance in their time allocation for each subject They commonly spent theirtime studying the subjects of the natural sciences such as: mathematics, physics,biology and chemistry, time for English subject accordingly is very limited

2.1.3 Teachers and Teaching Methods

The teaching staff includes 14 teachers of English Their ages vary from 30

to 40 Among them, three teachers have more than 10 years and the rest have morethan 5 years of teaching experience Nine of them took full-time courses in Englishlanguage in different universities in Vietnam and the others jointed in-servicetraining courses There are four teachers given M.A degree, five teachers are doingthe master course in English and the rest given B.A degree

All the teachers have been in charge of the teaching of both General Englishand ESP They are all willing to implement ESP teaching although none of themhas been trained in teaching ESP Hence, they have to deal with

considerable problems: the lack of professional knowledge and the way to choose

an appropriate methodology of teaching

Regarding to methodology, the teachers in our college usually employ thetraditional teaching methods especially Grammar-translation one They mainlyanalyze the grammar rules, not on the acquisition of language skills They employthis method of teaching for both General English and ESP courses Though withthe features and content of the writing book, ESP courses are needed to beeducated mainly studying expertise to all learners, ESP instructors at PCI spendmost of the class room time describing new terms, examining sentence structurecomponents and converting written messages into Vietnamese As a result,students often pay attention and take notices passively This outcomes in lowmotivation in students and creates very few opportunities for them to improve theircommunicative expertise, especially in their major

2.1.4 Course Book for Teaching ESP

Materials selection, adaptation, or writing is an important area in ESPteaching, representing a practical result of effective course development andproviding students with materials that will equip them with the knowledge theywill need in their future business life With the hope of finding a suitable coursebook for students majoring in economics at PCI, we carefully considered andreviewed several ones And now the material “English in Economics andBusiness” by Sarah Bales, Do Thi Nu, Ha Kim Anh (1998) – EducationPublication is used This book consists of fourteen units Each unit is divided intofour parts The first and also the most important part is the reading text withcomprehension questions The second part deals with the language focus This partexplains grammatical points in the reading text Exercises about related content arealso designed for students to practice The third part is word-study with vocabularyexercises in the forms of gap-filling and matching are designed for students topractice the new terminologies in the reading text At the end of

each unit are some new words or terminologies extracted from the reading textwith the Vietnamese equivalences.

Though this course book was being carefully selected, there are still somepoints that should be taken into consideration Firstly, this course book wasdesigned in the form of a content-based book It means that teaching approach ofthis book focuses on learning language through learning about things related toeconomics field This can confuse learners and may give them the impression thatthey are not actually learning language Secondly, method for teaching andlearning of this course book is grammar-translation with vocabulary explanations

By this method, translation and grammar study are used as the main teaching andlearning activities Learners mainly focus on grammatical rules, the memorization

of vocabulary, translations of texts and doing written exercises, there is almost nointeraction between learners and learners This self-study method seems to be moresuitable for researchers not for ESL learners Consequently, students tend to dealwith vocabulary problems by trying to learn by heart as many words as possibleinstead of trying to use strategies to guess the meaning of unknown words inreading economics texts in English or in some cases they are not fully aware ofwhat strategies they are using

2.2 Research Questions

To achieve the aims of the study: (1) examine the general strategies used bythe students to deal with unknown words while reading English, (2) discover theguessing strategies which are used by the students to work out the meaning ofunknown words when reading economics texts in reading lessons and (3) analyzethe difficulties the students experience in using strategies to make the guess, threefollowing research questions were addressed:

(1) What general strategies do the students often use to deal with unknown words while reading English economics texts in the reading lessons?

(2) What guessing strategies do the students use to work out the meaning of unknown words while reading comprehension economics texts in the reading

2.4 Data Collection Instruments

In order to answer the research questions, the writer employs two datacollection instruments as follow

2.4.1 Survey questionnaire

To examine the general strategies and guessing strategies used by thestudents to deal with unknown words in English reading comprehension lessons, asurvey questionnaire adapted from Yin (2011) is employed by the author

(details of the questionnaire are given in Appendix B) This questionnaire is

divided into two parts with their own purposes:

deal with unknown words during reading English texts This part is adapted fromQian’s (2004) questionnaire with eight ways of dealing with a new word and oneopen question for other possible ways of dealing with unknown words

respondents use and later cross–check the results conducted by the researcherthrough tasks carried out in the research Besides, the questionnaire alsostrengthens the researcher’s conclusion about difficulties the students often face to

taxonomy of Roskam’s (2005) taxonomy

The questionnaire provides four choices for respondents to indicate how

often they use these strategies The frequency choices are: Often, Sometimes,

Rarely and Never In order to safeguard the validity of this research and elicit

genuine data, the instruction of the questionnaire makes it clear that what theresearcher wants to know is what they normally do, and not what they aresupposed to do All together, 72 copies of the questionnaire were issued and all ofthem were received

2.4.2 Task sheets

To find out what guessing strategies the students often employ to work outthe meaning of unknown vocabulary while reading economics texts in readinglessons the author utilizes a task sheets as one of two main research methods andafter the tasks, the researcher will analyze the students’ difficulties while usingthese guessing strategies The task sheets (for more details see Appendix A)contain three reading passages and a post quiz The reading passages are extracted

from the English in Economics and Business course book In each reading passage,

twelve words are underlined by the researcher for the purpose of examining theguessing strategies used by the participants for the unknown

words The reading passages are chosen as outlined by the following criteria

(Nassaji, 2003): (1) Student factors - The texts matches up the comprehension ability of the target participants because these texts are extracted from English in

Economics and Business – the course book which has been used for third year

students majoring in economics at PCI for their ESP course for nearly ten yearsand all the underlined words in these passages are listed as new words by the

authors of this book; (2) Text factor – The texts tightly relate to students’ studying major; (3) Context factors – Thirty six words are identified and underlined based

on different context clues which help students infer the meaning of unknownwords

The post quiz consists of two parts The first part is a vocabulary task Withthis task, the students are required to choose the best definition of the underlinedwords from four given choices The data collected from the incorrect items arefurther analyzed to examine the factors which might cause wrong guessing or thestudents’ difficulties in using strategies to make the guess The second part isdesigned to examine the strategies that the target students used to guess theunknown words while reading the texts In this part, the students are requested tochoose the strategies they employ and they also welcome to provide someinformation about the other strategies they employ when reading the texts

2.5 Data Collection Procedures

There are two stages for the data collection procedures Firstly, students are

presented with the task sheets (as shown in 2.4.1) Then, students immediately

respond to a survey questionnaire (as shown in 2.4.2) by indicating how often theyuse the general strategies for unknown words and the strategies for guessing themeaning of unknown words when reading comprehension English texts in readinglessons

2.6 Data Analysis Procedures

The data collected from survey questionnaire are entered into statisticalsoftware SPSS 22 first and then are analyzed quantitatively Firstly, descriptive

analysis is carried out to explore how general strategies and guessing strategies areused by the students to deal with unknown words when reading comprehensioneconomics texts in reading class Then the options of ‗Often, ‗Sometimes,

‗Rarely, and ‗Never are treated as in a scale, and values are assigned to them Themean of all general strategies used for unknown words and guessing strategies forworking out the meaning of unfamiliar words are computed and ranked

To analyze the students’ difficulties in using word guessing strategies, the

analysis focuses on the items that are guessed incorrectly The difficulties each

student reveals are identified and interpreted based on the strategies involved ineach item

In the passage 1, items 1, 8 and 11 involve using discourse context; items

2, 3, 4, 5 and 12 involve using local context; items 6 require using knowledge ofvisual form; items 7 and 9 need using association or collocation knowledge; item

10 involves strategy of using extra textual knowledge

In the passage 2, item 3 involves using discourse context; items 1, 2, 5, 8,

9 and 11 involve using local context; items 6 and 7 require using knowledge ofvisual form; item 4 needs using association or collocation knowledge; item 12involves strategy of using extra textual knowledge

In the passage 3, items 1, 3 and 11 involve using discourse context; items

3, 4, 7, 8 and 9 involve using local context; items 2, 12, 5 require using association

or collocation knowledge; item 6 relates to using syntactic knowledge strategy;item 10 involves strategy of using extra textual knowledge The results areobtained by frequency counts and presented in percentage

2.7 Summary

This chapter presents information of the research context, participants,research questions, data collection instruments, data collection procedures, anddata analysis procedures In the next chapter, the author presents the main findingsand discussion on the strategies students use when encountering

unfamiliar words, student’s using of word guessing strategies in readingcomprehension and difficulties they encounter in using these guessing strategies tomake the guess work.

CHAPTER 3: DATA, DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

In this part, the results from the survey questionnaire and the wordinferencing test will be presented by means of tables and charts Each table andchart is followed by an analysis of the data and their discussion

3.1 Data analysis

3.1.1 The students’ general strategies used for unknown words

Data of altogether 72 valid responses of various general strategies used bythe students to deal with unknown words are illustrated by Table 1 As shown in

Table 1, guessing meaning from context is the most frequent and popular strategy

for unknown words from all responses About 56.9% of respondents report thatthey often guessed the meaning of unknown words from context Another 32% ofparticipants state that they sometimes guessed the meaning of unknown words

from context Table 1 shows that looking for a morphological clue is also a popular

strategy About 44.4% of respondents indicate that they often look formorphological clue when encountering unknown words in reading Another 43.1%indicate that they sometimes look for morphological clue to deal with unknownwords These two groups altogether account for over 87.5% of the total

respondents Another noteworthy strategy is consulting an English-Vietnamese

dictionary About 40.3% of respondents report that they often consulted an

English-Vietnamese dictionary to solve the problem of unknown words, and 36.1%

state that they sometimes did this Ignoring the word in reading is reported a popular strategy About 31.9% of respondents acknowledge that they often ignored

unknown words while reading, and as high as 41.7% report sometimes did so Asking a teacher is also a popular strategy About 30.6% of respondents report that

they often asked teachers and another 40.2% admit that they sometimes did this

The result also reveals three infrequently utilized strategies: asking a friend,

taking a note, and consulting an English-English dictionary Only about 12.5%

report that they often ask their friends, and 30.6% of the respondents

indicate that they sometimes did so As to consulting an English-English

dictionary, only 16.7% of respondents state that they often consulted an

English-English dictionary to handle unknown words, and 33.3% indicate they sometimesconsulted an English-English dictionary when facing with unfamiliar words Only15.3% of the samples indicate they often took notes or underlined whenencountering unknown words About 27.8% report they sometimes did so Thesethree operations, therefore, appear to be the most infrequently used strategies whenthe participants encounter unfamiliar words

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take notes, etc,)

Valid N (list wise)

Table 2: General strategies use for unknown words: Mean analysis

When a four-point scale is used to score the four frequency categories(often = 4, sometimes = 3, rarely = 2, and never = 1), a mean ranking of strategiesfor unknown words comes forth Table 2 presents the mean of strategies that thestudents would employed when encountering unknown words in English reading

According to Table 2, the most likely strategy is guessing meaning from context (mean=3.44) The next most likely strategy is looking for morphological clue (mean=3.31) The subsequent strategy is consulting an English-Vietnamese

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