Developing ESP supplementary reading exercises for second year students at faculty of nursing, phu tho medical college

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIESPHAN THỊ THU HÀ DEVELOPING ESP SUPPLEMENTARY READING EXERCISES FOR SE

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

PHAN THỊ THU HÀ

DEVELOPING ESP SUPPLEMENTARY READING

EXERCISES FOR SECOND-YEAR STUDENTS AT FACULTY

OF NURSING, PHU THO MEDICAL COLLEGE

XÂY DỰNG CÁC BÀI TẬP ĐỌC BỔ TRỢ TIẾNG ANH CHUYÊN NGÀNH CHO SINH VIÊN NĂM THỨ HAI TẠI KHOA ĐIỀU DƯỠNG, TRƯỜNG

CAO ĐẲNG Y TẾ PHÚ THỌ

MINOR PROGRAM THESIS

Field: English Teaching Methodology

Code: 601410

HANOI, 09-2012

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

PHAN THỊ THU HÀ

DEVELOPING ESP SUPPLEMENTARY READING

EXERCISES FOR SECOND-YEAR STUDENTS AT FACULTY

OF NURSING, PHU THO MEDICAL COLLEGE

XÂY DỰNG CÁC BÀI TẬP ĐỌC BỔ TRỢ TIẾNG ANH CHUYÊN NGÀNH CHO SINH VIÊN NĂM THỨ HAI TẠI KHOA ĐIỀU DƯỠNG, TRƯỜNG

CAO ĐẲNG Y TẾ PHÚ THỌ

MINOR PROGRAM THESIS

Field: English Teaching Methodology

Code: 601410 Supervisor: Dr Dương Thị Nụ

HANOI, 09-2012

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Table 4: Teachers and students’ perception of students’ difficulties in terms of reading exercises.

Table 5: Teachers and students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of using

supplementary exercises in reading lessons

Table 6: Teachers and students’ perceptions of exercise types to be included in the ESP supplementary reading exercises

Table 7: The proposed supplementary reading exercises

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Teachers and students’ perceptions of the reading exercises in the

currently used teaching coursebook

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………

ASTRACT ………

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ………

LIST OF TABLES ………

LIST OF FIGURES ………

Page i ii iii iv v vi PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale of the study ……… 1

2 Objectives of the study……… 2

3 Research questions……… 2

4 Scope of the study……… 2

5 Research Methodology……… 2

6 Significance of the study ……… 3

7 Design of the study……… 3

PART B : DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1.1 An overview of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Medical Purposes (EMP) ……… 4

1.1.1 ESP ……… 4

1.1.2 EMP ……… 6

1.2 An overview of materials development in language teaching 7

1.2.1 Materials and materials development……… 7

1.2.1.1 Definition of materials……… 7

1.2.1.2 Materials development ……… 7

1.2.2 Materials evaluation and its criteria ……… 7

1.2.3 Supplementary materials ……… 9

1.3 An overview of reading comprehension in teaching ESP 9

1.3.1 Definitions of reading and reading comprehension……… 9

1.3.1.1 What is reading? 9

1.3.1.2 What is reading comprehension? 10

1.3.2 Types of ESP reading exercises……… ……… 11

1.4 Summary 13

CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY 2.1 Settings 14

2.2 The study 15

2.2.1 The subjects 15

2.2.2 Instruments for collecting the data 15

2.2.3 Data collection procedures 16

2.2.4 Data analysis and major findings 17

2.2.4.1 An overview of the currently used teaching textbook 17

2.2.4.2 Class observation 19

2.2.4.3 Data from survey questionnaires 20

2.2.4.4 Major findings 31

2.3 Summary 33

CHAPTER 3: RECOMMENDATIONS 3.1 Suggested exercises for the ESP supplementary reading 34

3.2 Guidance for the teachers and students 36

3.2.1 Guidance for the teachers 36

3.2.2 Guidance for the students 37

3.3 Summary 37

PART C: CONCLUSION Recapitulation 38

Conclusions 38

Limitations of the study 39

Suggestions for further study 40

REFERENCES I

APPENDICES III

APPENDIX 1 III APPENDIX 2 VI

APPENDIX 3 X

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale of the study

It is undeniable that English now is one of the most commonly usedlanguages throughout the world In Vietnam, with the changes and the development

of the economy and society, as well as the implementation of the open-door policy,English has been used more and more widely Importantly, it has influenced on oureducation curriculum as a compulsory subject In recent years, there has been aglobal increase in the number of language teachers who are required to teachEnglish to students from various fields such as engineering, information science,medicine, accounting, etc to enable them to cope with their academic work Thistype of English is called English for Specific Purpose (ESP) Since ESP wasintroduced, it has attracted the attention of many language instructors Furthermore,the idea of ESP has been welcomed by staffs of universities who have seen the greatbenefits of learning ESP In addition, it is to meet the learners’ needs for betterreading of specialized books in English and for more successful job performance inthe future

The English language program at Phu Tho Medical College (PTMC) isdesigned to be composed of two major stages The first stage is called English forGeneral Purposes, focusing on developing students’ ability to communicate inEnglish at a very simple level The second stage is ESP, emphasizing thedevelopment of students’ linguistic skills that are linked to their future occupationalpurposes After having taught English at PTMC for 3 years, the researcher finds thatalthough the currently used teaching coursebook for ESP has shown a great deal ofimprovement, it still has some problems with reading exercises Some are too easyfor students whereas some make students bored Therefore, it does not help studentsimprove their reading skill much In this case, the main task for the teachers isdeveloping teaching materials to improve students’ reading skill In order to do this,the teachers need to evaluate every unit to see what the problems are and then, try tothink of the ways to improve them There are many things that the teachers can do

to improve the units They can be looking for supplementary materials fromdifferent sources, changing the procedures of teaching, designing activities tomotivate the students, etc One of the effective ways is developing supplementarymaterials The above mentioned reasons lead me to my choice of the study:

Developing ESP Supplementary Reading Exercises for second-year students at Faculty of Nursing, Phu Tho Medical College.

2 Objectives of the study The study aims to:

supplementary reading exercises for second-year students of nursing, PTMC

PTMC to serve as a practical base for developing ESP supplementary reading exercises

of Nursing, PTMC, which can meet both teachers and students’ needs

3 Research questions

On carrying out the research, the following research questions are to be answered:

Faculty of Nursing, PTMC?

4 Scope of the study

As the current coursebook is compulsory, this study is intended to focus onsupplement only In the scope of this study, only ESP supplementary readingexercises, which are suitable for the local situation of PTMC, are proposed.Moreover, they are intended for only the second-year students of nursing

5 Research Methodology

The study is based on a survey research, which involves a combination ofquantitative and qualitative methods to obtain its objectives To begin with, an

extensive of theoretical background is conducted, defining the notions of ESP ingeneral and medical English in particular, some important aspects of materialsdevelopment in language teaching and reading comprehension in teaching ESP.Then, the major methods used in the study are the quantitative and qualitativemethods To collect data, survey questionnaires to the second-year students ofnursing and ESP teachers are in favour The results from the survey questionnairesare combined with coursebook evaluation, class observation to propose ESPsupplementary reading exercises for the second-year students at Faculty of Nursing,PTMC, which can meet both teachers and students’ needs.

6 Significance of the study

Due to the lack of ESP supplementary reading exercises that are suitable forthe local situation, this study is hoped to provide useful and interesting exercisesbased on reading texts in the currently used teaching coursebook for the second-yearstudents at Faculty of Nursing, PTMC

Hopefully, the supplementary reading exercises will be developed intosupplementary materials and will be used as the basis to construct othersupplementary reading exercises

7 Design of the study

This study consists of three parts:

Part A: Introduction: presents the rationale, objectives, research questions, scope,methodology, significance, and the design of the study

Part B: Development: constitutes the body of the study It consists of three chapters:

Part C: Conclusion: concludes recapitulation, conclusions, limitations of the study and suggestions for further study

PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

This chapter presents a theoretical background for the study It is presented inthree sections The first section discusses English for Specific Purposes (ESP) ingeneral and English for Medical Purposes (EMP) in particular The second sectionlooks at materials development in language teaching The last section discussesreading comprehension in teaching ESP

1.1 An overview of ESP and EMP

1.1.1 ESP

“ESP” stands for English for Specific Purposes Different authors havedefined this term in different ways According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987:

19), ESP is “an approach to language teaching in which all decisions as to content

and method are based on the learners’ reason for learning” For Hutchinson and

Waters, the starting point in determining appropriate input for ESP course isidentifying learners’ needs

Likewise, Strevens (1988) defined ESP by identifying its absolute andvariable characteristics His definition of ESP makes a distinction between fourabsolute and two variable characteristics:

4 absolute characteristics:

ESP consists of English language teaching which is:

occupations and activities;

semantics and so on, and analysis of this discourse;

2 variable characteristics:

ESP may be, but is not necessarily:

- restricted as to the language skills to be learned (for example reading only);

- not taught according to any pre-ordained methodology

Ten years later, theorists Dudley-Evans and St John (1998) modifiedStrevens’ original definition of ESP to give an extended definition as follows:

Absolute characteristics:

serves;

genres appropriate to these activities

Variable characteristics

general English;

or in a professional work situation It could, however, be for learners at secondary schoollevel;

courses assume some basic knowledge of the language system, but it can be used

with beginners

Clearly, the definition of Dudley-Evans and St John was influenced by that

of Strevens (1988) although they improved it substantially by removing the absolutecharacteristic that “ESP is in contrast with General English” and revised andincreased a number of variable characteristics They asserted that ESP can be but isnot necessarily related to a specific discipline, nor does it have to be aimed at acertain age group or ability range Furthermore, ESP is likely to be used with adultlearners although it could be used with young adults in a secondary school setting

It is obvious that although the above definitions stem at different periods oftime by different authors, all of them reveal that ESP should be seen simply as an

“approach” to teaching, or what Dudley-Evans (1998) described as an “attitude ofmind” and any ESP course must be based on learners’ needs.

1.1.2 EMP

It can be noticed that the attention to learners’ needs is a key element in anyabove definitions of ESP So, EMP is intended to help the medical students who areplanning to study medicine in English The term “English for Medical Purposes”refers to “the teaching of English for doctors, nurses, and other personnel in themedical professions.” It involves the teaching/ learning of English for a utilitarianpurpose, an identifiable goal - typically, the successful performance of work or theoptimum effectiveness of medical training In general terms, EMP (a) is designed tomeet the specific English language needs of the medical learners (e.g nurses,dentists, etc.); (b) focuses on themes and topics specific to the medical field; (c)focuses on a restricted range of skills which may be required by the medical learners(e.g for writing a medical paper, preparing a talk for medical meeting, etc)

EMP can be considered as a sub-branch of ESP What distinguishes EMPfrom other ESP sub-branches is that EMP has its own set of medical discourse.Gylys and Wedding (1983) argued that medical discourse is a particularterminology employed to effectively and accurately achieve a communicativepurpose in health care settings such as diagnosis According to Yang (2005), EMPterminology mostly consists of prefixes and affixes, which should be carefully notedwhen designing an EMP course

Moreover, medical language can be the language employed by the doctorsand the nurses in writing medical records and communicating with each other Infact, medical students and nursing students have various reasons for learningmedical English The doctors need to learn to read and write medical terminology inL2 to complete hospital admission notes, diagnosis, and orders, which, later on, thenurses must read, follow in order to carry out nursing interventions and take care oftheir patients For these medical and nursing professionals, their first step to accessmedical language is to learn medical words Besides, they also need to read journals

and books in medical genres to speak to colleagues on professional visits, to makeuse of the expanding and increasingly important database available through theinternet, to participate in international conferences, to write up research for journalpublication, etc.

1.2 An overview of materials development in language teaching

1.2.1 Materials and materials development

1.2.1.1 Definition of materials

Tomlinson (1998) had the idea that materials can be anything that isdeliberately used to increase the learner’s knowledge and/ or experience of thelanguage Therefore, materials can be cassettes, video, CD-rooms, dictionaries,grammar books, newspapers, food packages, photographs, even pencils, chairs or abad (realia), etc However, the focus here is the text materials Such materialsinclude those that have been either specifically designed for language learning andteaching (textbooks, worksheets, computer software); authentic materials (off-airrecordings, newspaper articles) that have been specially selected and exploited forteaching purposes by the classroom teacher; teacher-written materials and learners-generated materials

1.2.1.2 Materials development

According to Tomlinson (1998: 2), “Materials development refers to

anything which is done by writers, teachers or learners to provide sources of language input and to exploit those sources in ways which maximize the likelihood

of intake: in other words the supplying of information about and/ or experience of the language in ways designed to promote language learning”.

Materials developers may do many things as writing textbooks, tellingstories, bringing advertisements into the classroom, etc., whatever they do toprovide input in principled ways related to what they know about how the languagecan be effectively learned

1.2.2 Materials evaluation and its criteria

It is believed that evaluation of materials is a crucial task for language

teachers That means besides the job of teaching, EFL teachers need the ability toevaluate teaching materials effectively.

Materials evaluation is defined differently by different authors Brown

(1995: 218) states “Evaluation is the systematic collection and analysis of all

relevant information necessary to promote the improvement of a curriculum, and assess its effectiveness and efficiency, as well as the participants’ attitudes within the context of the particular institutions involved”.

Materials evaluation is based on different criteria Cunningsworth (1984:

many teachers and students in a great variety of teaching and learning contexts

- Relate the teaching materials to your aims and objectives

- Be aware of what language is for and select teaching materials, which help equip your students to use language effectively for their own purposes

- Keep your students’ learning needs in mind

- Consider the relationship between language, the learning process and the learner

However, the main concern of the study is reading materials; therefore, a

checklist for evaluation of reading texts will be specifically given as follows: -

Offer exercises for understanding of plain sense and implied meaning

- Relate reading passages to the learners’ background

- Select passages reflecting a variety of styles of contemporary English (Williams, 1983)

In short, the teacher should take over where the coursebook leaves off, and

he or she must be able to assess its strengths and weaknesses It is necessary forEFL teachers to be acquainted with the principles of coursebook evaluation Theycan be given practice in analyzing coursebooks in order to find out whether theorganization of materials is consistent with the objectives of the curriculum Whenteachers examine the selection of items of speech, grammar, or vocabulary in acoursebook, they are improving their competence in the language and at the same

time sharpening their teaching skills.

1.2.3 Supplementary materials

“Supplementary materials” is one of the basic terms in a glossary proposed

by Tomlinson (1998) in materials development in language teaching In his

opinion, supplementary materials are defined as “materials designed to be used in

addition to the core materials of a course They are usually related to the development of skills of reading, writing, listening or speaking rather than to the learning of language items” (Tomlinson, 1998: xiii)

Actually, most language-teaching coursebooks probably need supplementing

to some extent, if only in order to tailor them to the needs of a particular class or to

offer richer options According to Ur (1991), there are “package” of supplementary

materials such as computers, simplified readers, overhead projectors, posters,pictures, or games Each type, obviously, has certain contribution to languageteaching and its own good points as well as drawbacks

1.3 An overview of reading comprehension in teaching ESP

1.3.1 Definitions of reading and reading comprehension

1.3.1.1 What is reading?

Reading is a completely individual activity that takes place in all differentways from newspapers, magazines, written texts, telephone directory, labels onmedicine bottles, notices, etc The ability to read is such a natural part of humanbeings that they seldom try to define reading However, there are still differentpoints of view on the definition of reading

Goodman (1971: 135) terms reading as “a psycholinguistic process by which

the reader, a language user, reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been decoded by a writer as a graphic display” He views this act of reconstruction

as “a cyclical process of sampling, predicting, testing and conforming” According

to this point of view, efficient readers develop predictions about the content of apassage Along with textual clues, knowledge and experience help the readersdevelop expectations about what they will read The efficient reader then reads

rapidly to confirm or refute these predictions If hypotheses are confirmed, thereader continues with an increasing store of information on the topic If they are notconfirmed, the reader returns and rereads more carefully.

Taking the same view, Nuttal (1982: 4) asserted that reading involves the

recognition of written words “to get meaning from a text” Rejecting the views in which reading is regarded as a rather passive and receptive skill she says, “The

meaning is not lying in the text waiting to be passively absorbed On the contrary, the reader is actively involved and often has to work to get the meaning out”.

One conclusion drawn from the definition of reading above is that reading isnot simple nor is it a single skill It is a complex process involving an active searchfor information and interaction with the text; it requires the constant constructiveinvolvement of the reader in what he is doing; and it demands the use of highermental abilities The mental activities used for constructing meaning from the textare generally referred to reading strategies or reading skills

1.3.1.2 What is reading comprehension?

In many parts of the world, reading has traditionally been the skill that is themost emphasized in foreign language teaching and learning Today this is still truedespite the current emphasis on other skills like speaking and listening So what isreading comprehension? In fact, there have been numerous attempts to define it, andeach of the definitions reflects what reading is to the scholar presenting that view

Grellet (1981: 3) states: “reading comprehension or understanding a written

text means extracting the required information from it as effectively as possible” In

this sense, reading comprehension simply means reading and understanding Itshould be noted that reading comprehension is composed of two equally importantcomponents Decoding - the ability to translate text into speech - is only part of theprocess reading comprehension The other part is language comprehension- theability to understand spoken language The readers, as they read, receiveinformation from the writer via words, sentences and paragraphs and so on, andmake an attempt to understand his/ her feelings

According to Harris and Hodges (1995: 39), “reading comprehension is the

construction of the meaning of a written communication through a reciprocal, holistic interchange of ideas between the interpreter and the message” In this case,

reading comprehension requires an action on the part of the reader That actioninvolves the use of the existing knowledge that the reader has on the topic of thetext as well as the text itself in order to create meaning

From the ideas above, it can be concluded that there is no consensus of whatreading comprehension is as each writer comprehends and gives its differentdefinitions through his own point of view However, they share some certaincharacteristics Reading comprehension not only includes linguistic recognition andcognitive understanding but also tends to be affected the reader’s appreciation.When reading, readers need to understand, analyze, and response to what is written

in order to comprehend the content of the text and apply it in their own life aseffectively as possible

1.3.2 Types of ESP reading exercises

Grellet (1981) stated that there are a number of exercise types focusing onthe normal organization and the contents of the text to develop reading skill Theyare classified into four main types named: reading techniques, the form analysis ofthe text, the understanding of the meaning in the text, and the assessment of the text.Among various exercises proposed by Grellet (1981: 4-5), those listed in thefollowing table are believed to be used more often in ESP reading

Reading Form analysis of Understanding of the Assessment of

reference, link document (a table,

- Multiple choices

- True/ False

- Completing asummary

- Completingsentences

Table 2: Exercise types in ESP reading skills (Kenedy & Bolitho, 1991: 74-84)

The above exercise types are viewed as a guide for ESP reading materialsdesigners to make their materials varied, technically distinguishing and appropriate

to the teaching and learning of ESP

1.4 Summary

This chapter provides a theoretical background related to all essential aspectsfor developing ESP supplementary reading exercises which is the goal of this study.The researcher hopes that in the light of this background, appropriate ESPsupplementary reading exercises would be developed

CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY

This chapter deals with the settings of the study Then, the subjects of thestudy, instruments for collecting the data and data collection procedures arepresented Finally, data are analysed and major findings are concluded

2.1 Settings

ESP has been recently introduced in the training curriculum at PTMC asrecognition of the increasing importance of the language as a tool that helps thestudents to access information and medical advancements of the world One of theprograms offered by the college is to develop the nursing students having the skill inaccessing, analyzing and critically evaluating the information available for theircareer purposes Reading comprehension is therefore considered a vital linguisticskill that every student must master if he/ she wishes to advance further in his/ herfuture career

In 2009, under the college’s decision to develop the students’ ability of usingEnglish effectively for their academic study and future profession, an ESP course ofreading comprehension was designed for both academic and professional purpose.However, the reading exercises in the coursebook have revealed some majordrawbacks, one of which is ignorance of the students’ varied needs in differentspecific disciplines Therefore, it is clear that the reading exercises have to berevised or even redeveloped to be more relevant and appropriate for ESP students ofnursing

The college now has eleven English teachers aged between 26 and 36 Apartfrom one teacher who is studying Ph.D degree in Germany, none of them has everbeen abroad to study and they do not have chances to communicate with Englishnative speakers frequently However, all of English teachers at PTMC are young Ingeneral, most of them are well qualified in terms of their proficiency in English andknowledge

ESP students of nursing at PTMC are those who have completed ESP courseoffered by the college as defined in the curriculum They come from various areas

in Viet Nam By that, the researcher means their background is varied in terms oftheir previous educational environment, socio-economic status For those students,learning ESP is supposed to be beneficial from the basic knowledge of GE learning.

At the same time, the students who have been exposed to good English instruction

at their secondary school can suffer from the drag of no further language teaching inclass So, their level of proficiency may be deterred affecting their motivation inlearning ESP The mixed ability of the students in term of their English proficiency

is obviously an obstacle to the effort

2.2 The study

2.2.1 The subjects

The subjects of the study w er e t h e second-year students of Faculty ofNursing taking ESP subject in the academic year of 2011-2012, PTMC The studywas conducted 150 students from three randomly chosen classes, who took Englishfor Medical Purposes class related for their own field Students’ age ranged from 19

to 21 years with an average age 19.5 Most of them have been learning English for 7years The students of nursing get an ESP course for 1 semester (30 hours)

Besides, the subjects of the study were also 6 ESP teachers They are allyoung teachers The oldest teacher has been teaching English for 12 years and theyoungest teacher has been teaching English for 4 years All of them have beenteaching ESP for 3 years

2.2.2 Instruments for collecting the data

Hutchinson and Waters (1987: 59) suggested that there are a large number ofways in which information can be gathered about target needs such as interview,observation, questionnaires, etc Since any source of information is likely to beincomplete or partial, a triangular approach (i.e collecting information from two ormore sources) should be advisable Thus, information in this study is collected from

a wide variety of sources: coursebook evaluation, class observation and thequestionnaires

Questionnaires were used as one of the main tools to collect the data in mystudy Survey questionnaire was chosen as a quantitative approach because there are

a large number of students whom the researcher would like to get information from.Survey questionnaire with its advantage of collecting data with a large number ofparticipants in a short period is highly suitable for my study

In order to have the data for my study, two survey questionnaires weredesigned, one for the students and one for the teachers Both of them consisted of 8questions pertaining: a) Difficulties in terms of reading skill, b) Opinions ondeveloping ESP supplementary reading exercises for the second-year students, c)Exercises types to be included in the ESP supplementary reading exercises Theywere chosen as a method employing the quantitative approach The questionnaireswere not distributed to respondents to complete on their own but with theresearcher’s presence so that clarification and disambiguation could be made timely.The questionnaires were designed to investigate the needs of ESP students ofnursing and ESP teachers, PTMC to serve a practical base for developing ESPsupplementary reading exercises

2.2.3 Data collection procedures

, 2012 The questionnaire for theteachers was given to 6 teachers of English on the Faculty’s weekly meeting Theresearcher was always ready to answer any questions raised by the teachers Afterthe teachers freely completed the questionnaire, they were returned to the researcherimmediately

Unlike the case of the teachers, steps to conduct the survey questionnaire forthe students were as follows: First, the purpose of the questionnaire was stated sothat all participants understood what they were going to join in Second, the subjectswere required to read the instructions and asked for clarification where the meaningwas not clear enough Third, one hundred and fifty – page questionnaires wereadministered to 150 nursing students The subjects worked independently on theirpapers and gave their opinions freely about issues raised in the questionnaire No

discussions or verbal exchanges were made except for personal explanations aboutsome points unclear between an individual participant and the researcher Finally,when completing the questionnaires, the students handed over the completedquestionnaires to the researcher.

As mentioned above, the data for this study were gathered from threesources: documentary analysis, class observation and survey questionnaire So, itrequires both analytical and statistical analysis

2.2.4 Data analysis and major findings

2.2.4.1 An overview of the currently used teaching coursebook

The ESP material for nursing was designed by a group of teachers of English

at PTMC There are six units in the coursebook organized around the reading skill.Each unit is taught in five forty-five-minute class hours Students have 30 periods tolearn the texts in the coursebook All the texts are about medical topics providingthe students with general knowledge about some important systems in the humanbody

The titles of six units in this coursebook are as follows:

Unit 1: Human anatomy – parts of the body

Unit 2: The respiratory system

Unit 3: The cardiovascular system

Unit 4: The digestive system

Unit 5: The skeletal – muscular system

Unit 6: The nervous system

The objectives of all the lessons are the same They are: to know and usesome anatomical vocabularies on human body/ the respiratory system/ thecardiovascular system/ the digestive system/ the skeletal – muscular system/ thenervous system and to understand and translate the reading texts into Vietnamese Itcan be seen that the objectives of the lesson reveal problems They do not aim tohelp students acquire an accurate understanding of what it means to read in English

All lessons were designed with two main parts: a text and a readingcomprehension following The exercises in the coursebook are shown in the tablebelow:

Unit Number of exercises Types of reading exercises

- Skim the text (identify the main ideas of thereading text)

- True – false

Table 3: Types of reading exercises in each unit in the

currently used teaching coursebook

The table above shows that there are only seven types of reading exercises

helping the students practice reading skills in the coursebook They are “skim the

text (identify the main ideas of the reading text), answer questions, multiple choice answers, true – false, grammar exercise, vocabulary exercise and translation”.

Some exercises are sometimes used such as skim the text and grammar exercise(one time), vocabulary exercise (2 times) but some exercises are frequently used(Answer questions and true – false: 6 times, multiple choice answers andtranslation: 5 times) So, it can be seen that the exercises in the currently usedteaching coursebook are not various and these exercises aim at practising students’reading skills This is the good point of the coursebook However, it should besupplemented with other exercises to make the effectiveness of the coursebookbetter and better and help the students improve their reading skills

2.2.4.2 Class observation

As the researcher observed, traditional approaches including translation arethe major existing EFL approaches when teaching reading skill at PTMC, aiming atlanguage use Both the teachers and the students use Vietnamese as the spokeninteraction in English classes The student read, listen, speak, and write in Englishsolely for the sake of learning English as a linguistic “code”

Furthermore, all lessons are taught in the same procedure:

Vietnamese

Actually, in all stages of the lesson, the teachers remain the centre of the class As the matter of fact, the teachers do not have any creativeness or make a

choice of using appropriate activities/ exercises that motivate students’ attention andlistening improvement.

As mentioned above, the context of PTMC reveals a situation whereby thestudents are required to learn English, but the English they have learned intraditional language classes may not be used effectively in real life It is apparentthat student-centered approach has not been widely used in teaching English atPTMC The teachers still take the key role in classroom activities So, it is necessary

to develop more reading exercises to improve the situation of teaching reading atPTMC

Learning to read well in English means learning to think in English,however, many students are used to translating as they read and have great difficulty

in thinking in another language If the students want to read well in English, theymust think in English when they read Understanding the words and grammar is notenough; they need to be able to follow the ideas in English The supplementaryexercises are designed to help students develop their ability to follow ideas andthinking in English

2.2.4.3 Data from survey questionnaires

Since collected in both quantitative and qualitative method in this research,the data; therefore, needed to be processed in different ways to yield the mostaccurate results

As for the quantitative approach, the analysis approach was applied, in whichthe researcher followed the statistical procedure from coding questionnaire data tosummarize and reporting the data in a reader-friendly way The analyzed data werepresented with tables and figures with an aim to make the information clear to befollowed Class observation and evaluating the currently used teaching coursebookwere used to support and to give further explanation to some aspects covered in thequestionnaires

Before the data of the study were analyzed, the researcher tabulated thefrequency of responses to each option of every item given by the respondents

After tabulating the frequency of responses to each option of every item, thepercentages of responses were counted by dividing the number of responses to eachoption in every item by the total number of the respondents who responded theitem The next task was classifying a group of items that belong to a certaincategory The data of the present study were analyzed by means of both quantitativeand qualitative statistics to reduce potential limitations of relying on a singleapproach and enhance confidence in the data.

All the data collected from the questionnaires were grouped under three mainareas: a) Difficulties in terms of reading skills, b) Opinions on developing ESPsupplementary reading exercises for second-year students, c) Exercises types to beincluded in the ESP supplementary reading exercises The followings will be thediscussions on the results obtained through surveys with 6 teachers and 150students In the following discussion, the following abbreviations are used:

- T: Teachers

- S: Students

- N: number of the teachers/ students

- P: percentage of the teachers/ students (%)

a Difficulties in terms of reading skills

Question 1: Teachers and students’ perceptions of students’ difficulties in

terms of reading exercises

Identify the

paragraphs or inreading texts

is not explicitly

4) 7) 6)stated in the text

Fill in the table

6 text from the reading 4) 6)

Table 4: Teachers and students’ perceptions of the students’

difficulties in terms of reading exercises

The results gained from table 4 show a high consensus of the teachers andthe students in terms of reading exercises It can be realized from the table that the

skill “Inferring” was considered the most difficult one by 100% of the teachers and

94.7% of the students (for the two last items: “difficult” and “very difficult”) Only

a few of students (5.3%) found it normal Both of them also found “identify the

main ideas within paragraphs or in reading texts, choose and put the phrases/

sentences to where they fits in the text, long answer questions and summarize the

text” difficult only after the aforementioned skill “Short answer questions, fill in

the table with the information from the reading text and true or false” were found

easy However, there was a different view between teachers and students on reading

exercise “Scan the text for specific information” 83.3% of the teachers found it

“normal” and 16.7% found it “difficult” In contrast, only 28% of the students had

the same idea with the teachers that it was “normal” but up to 48.7 saw it “difficult”

No reading exercises were supposed to be “very easy” and “not applicable” by both

the teachers and the students In short, skills in the currently used teaching

coursebook seemed easy for the students, whereas those causing the students many

problems were not found in the coursebook Hence, it is necessary to supplement

them with more reading exercises in order to help the students develop their reading

skills

b Opinions on developing ESP supplementary reading exercises for

second-year students

Question 2: Teachers and students’ perceptions of the reading exercises in the

currently used teaching coursebook

Figure 1: Teachers and students’ perceptions of the reading exercises

in the currently used teaching coursebook

As can be seen from figure 1, the teachers and the students generally shared

the same points of view of the reading exercises in the currently used teaching

coursebook This statement was supported by a considerable number of the teachers

(33.4%) and the students (32.7%) who thought that the reading exercises were not