Khó khăn trong việc đọc hiểu tài liệu khóa học tiếng anh chuyên ngành của nhóm sinh viên năm ba khoa tài chính ngân hàng đại học kinh tế quốc dân

In this study, the researcher aimed to investigate the difficulties in reading comprehension faced by junior students majoring in Banking and Finance at National Economics University NEU

ĐẠI HỌC QUỐC GIA HÀ NỘI

TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ KHOA SƯ PHẠM TIẾNG ANH

KHÓA LUẬN TỐT NGHIỆP

KHÓ KHĂN TRONG VIỆC ĐỌC HIỂU TÀI LIỆU KHÓA HỌC TIẾNG ANH CHUYÊN NGÀNH CỦA NHÓM SINH VIÊN NĂM BA KHOA TÀI CHÍNH NGÂN HÀNG, ĐẠI HỌC KINH TẾ QUỐC DÂN

Giáo viên hướng dẫn : Thạc sĩ Nguyễn Thanh Thủy

ACCEPTANCE

I hereby state that I: Nguyễn Đức Trung, QH16E1, being a candidate for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (TEFL) accept the requirements of the university relating to the retention and use of Bachelor’s graduation paper deposited in the library

In terms of these conditions, I agree that the origin of my paper deposited

in the library should be accessible for the purposes of study and research,

in accordance with the normal conditions established by the librarian for care, loan or reproduction of the paper

Signature

May 11th 2020

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In completion of this study, first of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Ms Nguyen Thanh Thuy Without her, this thesis would not have been completed Ms Thuy did not only give me valuable and professional suggestions, but she also showed endless mental support to help me accomplish this thesis I will appreciate this invaluable opportunity of working with her forever

My sincere appreciation also goes to all the staff, teachers at the Faculty of English Language Teacher Education, University of Languages and International Studies for their fast updates and professional services

I also want to acknowledge the enthusiastic participation of the students and the lecturers Despite this pandemic, they were still willing

to spend their time sharing their invaluable perceptions

Last but not least, I am immensely grateful to receive so much warming support from my family, friends and classmates of 16E1, which motivated me to persist doing this thesis

heart-ABSTRACT

In Vietnam, reading comprehension in ESP in tertiary education is still a newly investigated field in the big scheme of ELT In this study, the researcher aimed to investigate the difficulties in reading comprehension faced by junior students majoring in Banking and Finance at National Economics University (NEU), identify the causes and suggest practical solutions, based on the perspectives of the students who have finished this course recently and the lecturers in charge of teaching this course

To achieve these objectives, the researcher used a combination of two data collection instruments, namely questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with the focus on the interviews The researcher received the responses from 35 voluntary students and successfully conducted interviews with five students and three lecturers The findings show that during the ESP course, the top five common difficulties belonged to the areas of vocabulary and motivation Moreover, the majority of the participating students did not struggle in the area

of grammar and materials Causes of the common difficulties suggested strategies and solutions were offered and discussed to facilitate the students‟ ESP reading

TABLE OF CONTENT

ACCEPTANCE i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

LIST OF FIGURES vi

LIST OF TABLES vi

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vii

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1

I Statement of the problem and rationale of the study 1

II Aims and research questions of the study 2

III Scope of the study 3

IV.Significance of the study 3

V Methodology of the study 4

VI Organization of the paper 4

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 6

I Key concepts 6

1 English for Specific Purposes 6

1.1 History of ESP 6

1.2 Classification of ESP 7

2 Reading and reading comprehension in ESP 10

2.1 Reading 10

2.2 Reading comprehension process 11

2.3 Models of Reading comprehension 13

2.4 Factors contributing to the development of reading comprehension 15

II Related studies 16

1 Review of related studies on elicitation 16

2 Review of related studies in Vietnam 17

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY 20

I Research setting 20

II Participants 22

III Data collection instruments 23

1 Questionnaire 23

1.1 Reasons for choosing questionnaire 23

1.2 Format and content 23

1.3 Procedure 25

2 Interview 25

2.1 Reasons for choosing interview 25

2.2 Format and content 26

2.3 Procedure 27

IV Data collection procedure 27

V Data analysis procedure 29

VI Ethical consideration 29

CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 30

I Research question 1: What are the difficulties in comprehending the reading materials in the ESP course as perceived by the students? 30

II Research question 2: What are the difficulties in comprehending the reading materials in the ESP course as perceived by the course lecturers? 39

III Research question 3: What are the causes of difficulties in reading comprehension encountered by students in the ESP course? 41

IV Research question 4: What are the suggested solutions to such difficulties as proposed by the students and the course lecturers to improve reading comprehension of the reading materials in the ESP course? 42

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION 44

I Major findings of the study 44

II Pedagogical implications 46

III Contributions of the study 46

IV Limitations of the study 47

V Suggestions for further studies 48

REFERENCES viii

APPENDICES xiii

APPENDIX 1 ESP course book‟s table of content xiii

APPENDIX 2 Questionnaire for Students xvii

APPENDIX 3 Interview questions for students xxvii

APPENDIX 4 Interview questions for teachers xxix

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 ESP Classification by experience 8

Figure 2 Types of ESP (Hutchinson, 1987, p.16) 9

Figure 3 ESP Classification by professional areas 9

Figure 4 A Heursitic for conceptualizing about reading comprehension 12

Figure 5 Expanded Reader-Text-Activity-Context model 13

Figure 6 Level of processing in reading comprehension 14

Figure 7 Sources of reading comprehension 16

Figure 8 Six areas of reading comprehension (Tran and Duong, 2017) 19

Figure 9 Difficulties in the area of vocabulary 30

Figure 10 Difficulties in the area of text coverage 32

Figure 11 Difficulties in the area of background knowledge 32

Figure 12 Difficulties in the area of text structure 33

Figure 13 Difficulties in the area of grammar 34

Figure 14 Difficulties in the area of motivation 35

Figure 15 Difficulties in the area of timing 36

Figure 16 Difficulties in the area of materials 37

Figure 17 Top five most common difficulties in ESP reading comprehension 38

Figure 18 Top five least common difficulties in ESP reading comprehension 39

LIST OF TABLES Table 1 Table of content of Part 2 in the course book 21

Table 2 Content of the survey 25

Table 3 Timeline for data collection procedure Error! Bookmark not defined

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

EAP English for Academic Purposes

EBE English for Business and Economics

EFL English as Foreign Language

ESP English for Special/ Specific Purposes

EOP English for Occupational Purposes

NEU National Economics University

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

This initial chapter describes the research problem rationale for the study followed by the research objectives, scope and significance of the paper Specifically, four research questions are identified as the guideline for the whole study The chapter concludes with an overview of the paper’s organization

I Statement of the problem and rationale of the study

Globalization has made an impact on every aspect of contemporary society, creating the pressing need for a common language of communication

to eliminate the interlingua and intercultural barriers among nations Undoubtedly, English has become such language or the "lingua franca" of global communications in all fields (Lehtonen, 2004) Acknowledging the ongoing process of globalization, thousands of multinational corporations are expanding their influence and presence in developing countries and creating more job opportunities Consequently, more working situations require the use

of English in various domains, especially economics In an attempt to tackle the problem of language barriers, ESP courses have been designed to satisfy the needs of learning English for such occupational situations and also to the continually changing requirements of the labour market Moreover, ESP courses aim to fulfil learners‟ ever-changing needs and the working requirements of their professions and academics environments (Basturkmen, 2010)

In the context of Viet Nam, ESP courses have become in high demand, and one of the pioneers in teaching ESP is National Economics University (NEU) At NEU, a variety of ESP courses are offered for students from different domains, namely business, accounting, finance, and banking Among all the ESP courses in NEU, English for Banking and Finance course is a mandatory course as well as the only ESP course that all students majoring in English for Banking and Finance have to enrol before starting their internship

in their senior year This ESP course is expected to equip students with essential aspects of Banking and in English, with the hope to prepare for their internship as well as their career Understanding the importance of this ESP course, the research was curious about the perspectives of students who have just finished their semesters in the first semester of the school year 2019-2020

As believed by a lot of researchers, reading is the most important skill of all four skills (Carrel, Devine, & Eskey, 1998; Richards and Renandya, 2002) To facilitate this skill, like any other ESP course, the “English for Banking and Finance” course provides many academic reading texts with a variety of topics related to Banking and Finance with a view to helping students gain a broader range of knowledge about their major, in the global English language However, several students whom the researcher interacted with confessed that they found it very daunting to fully understand the reading texts in their ESP coursebook despite various efforts In other words, they struggled in comprehending the ESP texts in the coursebook, which hindered them from successfully achieving the learning goal of the course Besides, in terms of research, few attempts have been made to address the difficulties in reading comprehension of students in ESP courses in tertiary education in Viet Nam, especially at NEU Recent ESP studies that have been conducted in NEU mainly focus on different aspects of an ESP course such as course evaluation rather than reading comprehension (Chu, 2018) All the conditions, henceforth,

have offered the researcher a chance to conduct the study on the “difficulties in reading comprehension in ESP course of a group of third-year students

majoring in Finance and Banking in National Economics University.”

II Aims and research questions of the study

First of all, the study aims to investigate the difficulties faced by a group of third-year students in their English for Banking and Finance course at National Economics University Moreover, through the findings revealing the challenges students experienced in terms of comprehending reading materials, the study hopes to propose some recommendations for

the betterment of students who will take this course in the future as well

as the senior students who have finished this course

In order to achieve these objectives, the researcher needs to address four research questions as followed

i What are the difficulties in comprehending the reading materials in the ESP course as perceived by the students?

ii What are the difficulties in comprehending the reading materials in the ESP course as perceived by the course lecturers?

iii What are the causes of difficulties in reading comprehensions encountered by the students in the ESP course?

iv What are the suggested solutions to such difficulties as proposed by the students and the course lecturers to improve reading comprehension of the reading materials in the ESP course?

III Scope of the study

From February to March in the year of 2020, the study was conducted at National Economics University (NEU) The study was limited to the area of comprehending learning materials in the English for Banking and Finance course, faced by a group of 35 third-year students majoring in Finance and Banking at NEU The problems were explored based on the participating students and teachers‟ background knowledge and the sole reading materials utilized in the ESP course

IV Significance of the study

The researcher hopes that this study can contribute as a reference to the future studies in the field of ESP education, reading comprehension in particular The more attention is drawn towards difficulties that Banking and Finance students faced when comprehending reading materials in their ESP course, the more researchers, course designers and material developers will be aware of the importance of adjusting the reading materials as well as the methods of teaching reading strategies Moreover, the result of the study will motivate lecturers to gather data from students‟ feedback after each English for Finance and Banking course and consider learners‟ feedback thoroughly in

order to adjust the reading materials and apply appropriate teaching strategies

in the future courses at their disposal Once completed, the research with its findings is hoped to serve as the reference for lecturers at School of Banking and Finance (SBF) in NEU in revising and improving their reading materials and the English for Banking and Finance course in general

V Methodology of the study

The study was designed to mainly follow the qualitative method to answer the research questions and fulfil the research objectives In terms of data collection instruments, questionnaire and informal interviews were fully exploited with the main focus on the interviews to collect detailed information

on difficulties and strategies they applied to overcome the challenges in comprehending the reading texts in the coursebook of their ESP course The questionnaire was sent to a group of 35 voluntary students to collect data about the challenges they encountered in comprehending reading materials of their ESP course Concerning the interviews, the researcher conducted semi-structured one-on-one interviews with three lecturers and five students to elaborate more on the obscure points that emerged in the responses of the questionnaire The information collected from questionnaire for students and interviews with students and lecturers served as the primary source of data for the current research with content analysis as the general approach utilized

VI Organization of the paper

The research content consists of five chapters in the main text.

Chapter 1: An introduction to the study, including the research problem

and rationale, research questions, scope, significance and methods

Chapter 2: Literature Review, explores relevant literature about reading

comprehension and reading strategies in ESP, as well as provides background information about the English for Banking and Finance course at NEU, the context of this study

Chapter 3: Methodology, justifies the research methods used for the

study and demonstrate the procedures of selecting samples, collecting and analyzing data

Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion, focuses on analyzing the collected

date, reports data analysis results and further discusses the research questions alongside the literature from Chapter 2

Chapter 5: Conclusion, summarizes the major findings and identifies

limitations of the research, as well as practical implications for further studies Following this chapter are the References and Appendices

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter reviews some author’s viewpoints concerning some key concepts of ESP, reading, reading comprehension and reading strategies in order to build up the theoretical background for the study

Dudley-Evans and St John (1998) characterize ESP as a methodological approach that focuses on students need As suggested by Dudley-Evans and St John (1998), ESP consists of the following key characteristics:

Absolute Characteristics:

1 ESP is defined to meet the specific needs of the learners;

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

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

genre-Variable Characteristics:

1 ESP may be related to or designed for specific disciplines;

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

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

4 ESP is generally designed for intermediate or advanced students Most ESP courses assume some basic knowledge of the language systems, but it can be used with beginners

(Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, p.4-5)

Despite apparent differences in various periods of time, these definitions mentioned above intersect at the fact that ESP is a teaching approach in which students' learning needs are the central focus

1.2 Classification of ESP

According to when the ESP courses take place, ESP can be classified into two major groups: English for Academic Purposed (EAP) and English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) Kennedy and Bolitho (1984) define these two types of ESP as follow:

English for Occupation Purposes (EOP) is taught in a situation in which learners need to use English as a part of their work or profession Meanwhile, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is taught generally within education institutions to students needing English in their studies

Kennedy and Bolitho (1984) The following tree diagram of Robinson (1991) shows differences between these two areas of ESP

Figure 1 ESP Classification by experience

(Robinson, 1991, taken from Dudley-Evans and St John, 1998)

The diagram above shows that the specific ESP course will highly depend

on whether it is categorized as EAP or EOP According to Dudley-Evans and

St John (1998), the categorizing of ESP into EAP and EOP is significant because “they will affect the degree of specificity that is appropriate to the course” However, Hutchinson and Waters (1987) said that there is “not a clear-cut distinction” between EAP and EOP because there are people who work and pursue his/her studies at the same time They elaborate more by stating “it is also likely that many cases the language learnt for immediate use

in a study environment will be used later when the student takes up or returns

to a job”

In “the tree of ESP” (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987), ESP is categorized into three types namely English for Science and Technology (EST), English for Business and Economics (EBE), and English for Social Studies (ESS) Each of these branches is further divided into two sub-branches: English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Occupational Purposes (EOP)

Figure 2 Types of ESP (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987, p.16)

Another division of ESP into EAP and EOP, which is based on discipline and professional area, is illustrated in the following tree graph:

Figure 3 ESP Classification by professional areas

(Robinson, 1991, taken from Dudley-Evans and St John, 1998)

From the information on the graph, the research can identify the type of the ESP course which is taught to students of Banking and Finance major in NEU In particular, this course belongs to the branch of English for Management, Finance and Economics, which is a type of English for Academic Purposes Therefore, the ESP course for third-year students of Banking and Finance at NEU should have the following characteristics:

1) Designed to meet specific needs of the learner in the field of Banking and Finance;

2) Related in content (that is in themes and topic) to Banking and Finance disciplines, occupations and activities;

3) Centered on language appropriate to Finance and Banking activities in syntax, lexis discourse, semantics and so on, and analysis of the discourse;

(Nguyen, 2011)

2 Reading and reading comprehension in ESP

There is no doubt that reading has been of interest among researchers with

a considerable number of studies investigating reading, reading comprehension and strategies to improve learners‟ reading comprehension in a variety of contexts

2.1 Reading

Scholars have offered multiple perspectives which lead to varying conceptualizations of reading Goodman (1971) defines reading “a psycholinguistic process by which the reader, language user, reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display” (p.135) Having a similar opinion with Goodman, Chastain (1988) & Brozo (1990) believe that reading is a receptive skill in which the reader receives a message from the writer According to Brozo (1990), over the process of reading, there exist two parallel activities: looking and understanding Despite sharing a common viewpoint about the definition of reading with authors as mentioned above, Falk (1987) has a slightly different conceptualization of the interaction between the reader and the writer of the reading text during the reading process He elaborates this interaction in which there are three levels: “visual processing, linguistic processing and content processing” (p 387) The definition offered by Harmer (1983) is also worth mentioning He gives a more refreshing and broader explanation, stating that

“reading is an exercise dominated by the eyes and the brain The eyes receive messages, and the brain then has to work out the significance of these messages” (p.153)

In conclusion, it can be seen that there are many definitions of reading because each scholar makes has their own approach of giving people a better

understanding of this skill by using their own words and expressions However, all the mentioned conceptualizations of reading focus on two main activities: the looking of the eyes and the understanding of the brain The later activity is emphasized more and explained more thoroughly by scholars in the field of teaching language More importantly, the interaction between the readers and the writers is always highlighted when it comes to defining reading

2.2 Reading comprehension process

Grellet (1981) describes reading comprehension as the process of efficiently extracting the information of a written text Meanwhile, Kirby (2007) has a more general conceptualization of reading comprehension, which

is “the process by which we understand the texts we read” He also adds that

“reading comprehension is the application of a skill that evolved for other purposes (listening or oral comprehension) to a new form of input (text)” Another very popular theory that is used to explain the process of reading comprehension in both first and second language is the schema theory According to Brown (2001), the hallmark of the schema theory is that a text does not carry meanings by itself Instead, while reading a text, the readers refer to their personal information, knowledge, emotions, experiences and culture to make the text meaningful Al-Issa (2006) adds his opinion about this theory, stating that a reader‟s understanding of a text relies on how related his/her schemata is with the schemata of the write

As a consequence, “readers, natives and non-natives, failure or confusion

to make sense of a text are caused by their lack of appropriate schemata that can easily fit with the content of the text” (p 42) Brown (2001) divides the schemata that the reader may lack into two types: content and formal schemata Content schemata include readers‟ understanding of people, the world, the culture and the universe, while formal schemata refer to what we know about discourse structure Addition to that, between these two types schemata Al-Issa (2006) asserts, content or topical schemata posts an immediate threat to students So, the teacher needs to acknowledge his/her students‟ schemata in

order to identify possible difficulties of reading comprehension and choose the appropriate teaching methods and strategies for students

Figure 4 A Heursitic for conceptualizing about reading comprehension

RAND (2002), a reading study group, shares a common perspective with the other scholars Still, they give a more detailed description of reading comprehension, stating that reading comprehension is “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language” They also claim that the process of reading comprehension keeps changing as the readers become more mature and cognitively developed Besides, that process can also change due to continually gained experience, challenging texts and the beneficial instructions that the readers receive (RAND, 2002) However, despite the constant change of the reading process, they claim that the process remains three core elements (figure 4) including the reader, who is in charge of comprehending, the text, which is comprehended and the activity in which comprehension is a part All the elements are interrelated under the influence of social-cultural context The complexity of this dynamic relationship is further illustrated in the Expanded Reader-Text-Activity-Context model (figure 5) of Alvermann and Moje (2013), a modified version of the original one (figure 4)

Figure 5 Expanded Reader-Text-Activity-Context model

(Alvermann and Moje, 2013)

In summary, it can be seen that reading comprehension is a component process, and each component interrelates with each other With the model of RAND (2002) and the extended version proposed by Alvermann and Moje (2013), the research has a better understanding of nature of the reading process, which is vital in designing the suitable survey questionnaire and interview questions

multi-2.3 Models of Reading comprehension

For decades, there have been lots of studies investigating models of reading comprehension that readers use in EFL Among those approaches, the most frequently named ones are "bottom-up", "top-down" and "interactive" approaches as suggested by Brown (2001)

Accordingly, bottom-up processing requires readers to use their own

"data-processing mechanisms" to recognize, order and create meaningful messages of different "linguistic signals" In other words, bottom-up means decoding elements of the text from the letters to words, phrases and then

sentences The meaning of the text will then be derived in "a linear manner" (Nguyen, 2017) The bottom-up approach is pointed out to be a passive process

in which the reader relies too much on the specific elements of the text to get its meaning (Marianne & Elite, 2000; Teun & Walter, 1983)

In top-down processing, readers resort to their intelligence and experience

to understand a text In light of this classification of two reading comprehension models, Nuttall (1996) gives a comparison between top-down and bottom-up He describes the bottom-up process with the image of "a scientist with a magnifying glass or microscope examining all the minute details of some phenomenon" (pp 16-17) On the other hand, top-down processing is described as "an eagle-eye view of a landscape below"

However, in real reading activities, many studies stress the importance of combining top-down and bottom-up processing for successful reading comprehension This combination is called "interactive reading model" (Alderson, 2000; Brown, 2001) Following this model, readers use knowledge

of word structures and background knowledge to build the meaning of the reading texts

For the sake of clarity and consistency, the bottom-up and top-down and interactive approaches are used in this study to investigate the difficulties of ESP learners in comprehending reading materials in the ESP course at NEU

Figure 6 Level of processing in reading comprehension (Brown, 2001)

2.4 Factors contributing to the development of reading comprehension

To identify the difficulties that NEU third-year students majoring in Banking and Finance encountered in reading comprehension in their ESP course, the researcher needs to seek for an in-depth understanding of the sources that contribute to the development of reading comprehension To begin with, according to “the simple view of reading” by Gougeh and Tunmer (1986), reading comprehension is the product of decoding and listening comprehension Meanwhile, the classification provided by Kirby (2007) in figure 7 illustrates a different picture It shows four key sources leading to the enhancement of reading comprehension

First of all, listening comprehension is claimed to be a significant factor

in the development of reading comprehension by Kirby (2007) As stated in his study, listening comprehension represents verbal ability, which is a crucial component of intelligence and includes knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, and the skills to make inferences As regards the decoding ability, its effectiveness is shown in the study of Johnson and Kirby (2006), in which they concluded that the ability of decoding words plays an essential role in skilled reading To be more specific, they asserted that people with low decoding skills and little oral comprehension skills are slow at reading comprehension (Johnston & Kirby, 2006) Kirby (2007) considers decoding or word reading as the “bottleneck that prevents readers from attaining higher or adequate text comprehension,” which means that one of the common problems in comprehending texts is related to readers‟ ability to decode the words Another factor to investigate is fluency, which concerns the speed of word recognition According to Kuhn and Stahl (2003), fluency is needed for reading comprehension because of readers‟ memory limitations If the process of word recognition is slow, “the previous words may be faded from working memories before later words are recognized, and the joint meaning will not be able to be processed” (Kirby, 2007)

Last but not least, strategies also contribute to the development of reading comprehension Kirby (1988) defines strategies as “conscious and goal-

oriented plans that call on tactics which can vary from underline long words to create a mental simulation to see if the author is right.” Moreover, strategies for reading comprehension depend on the learners‟ prior knowledge and intentions (Kirby, 2007)

Figure 7 Sources of reading comprehension (Kirby, 2007)

In conclusion, the success of reading comprehension comes from a variety of sources illustrated in figure 7 However, Kirby (2007) assert that if there is no interest and motivation of the readers at the beginning, none of these factors will have much influence on the outcomes of the reading process which

is interpreting the meanings of the reading texts

II Related studies

1 Review of related studies on elicitation

As mentioned above, reading comprehension is a complicated process (RAND, 2002) involving different factors that contribute to the development of learners‟ reading comprehension (Kirby, 2007) Consequently, many causes lead to potential comprehension failure, depending on the skill levels and ages

of the readers (Keenan, Betjemann & Olson 2008; RAND, 2002) With regard

to reading comprehension in ESP, there have been some studies investigating problems that learners face up to when processing reading materials in their

ESP course The survey of Rosyidah (2013) was conducted to investigate students‟ difficulties in reading comprehension in an ESP course and their

eff orts to solve those problems at the University of Muhammadiyah Malang The results show that students mainly encountered language and metalinguistic problems, phonological processing problems, word recognizing problems, text-processing problems, and other minor problems Ali (2012) also had a study on finding difficulties faced by engineering students in reading and comprehending ESP texts The study found that the tested engineering students had numerous challenges in reading comprehension because they failed in the reading test with the content related to their occupation The difficulties, according to Ali (2012), could be caused by students‟ unfamiliarity with the words and context of their major in English The study‟s result also showed that students had difficulties in comprehending the complex-structured sentences in the reading test The lack of knowledge about reading strategies is considered one of the problems leading to comprehension failure of engineering students when reading major-related texts

Sheorey, Kamimura, and Freiermuth (2008) investigated the reading strategies of 237 Japanese Students studying technical English (ESP) at a Japanese University In the study, students are divided into low and high groups, based on self-rating of their reading ability on a scale from one to six The result shows that there are some striking differences between the high and low groups, based on nine individual strategies Additionally, the high groups used more strategies than the low group Another study of Malcolm (2009) focused on investigating reading strategy use of 160 first-year and fourth-year medical students with different English proficiency levels and years of education in Bahrain It was found that first-year students, most of whom had low English proficiency, reported using translation strategies from L2 to L1 more than the upper-level ones

2 Review of related studies in Vietnam

In the context of Viet Nam, there are several studies conducted in universities to investigate the difficulties that students faced when

comprehending the reading texts of their ESP courses and the reading strategies for ESP students In the study of Tran and Duong (2017), they investigate six areas of difficulties in ESP reading comprehension (figure 8) With the data collected from 80 students, they concluded that most problems students confronted were mainly about technical vocabulary, background knowledge, type of ESP reading materials, and timing in reading ESP texts Another study

to mention is the study of Nghia and Phuong (2018) They investigated 200 ESP nursing students‟ problems in reading medical academic texts, based on five areas of difficulties, namely linguistic knowledge, prior knowledge, reading strategies, materials, and reading motivation The results show that most students had problems comprehending academic text because of the lack

of linguistic expertise and prior knowledge However, their target research populations were English-majored and nursing-majored students It means that those ESP courses belong to the EOP branch so the difficulties that students faced may not bear much resemblance to those of Banking and Finance-majored students, who are the target participants of the present study Besides, there is no study investigating reading comprehension problems of students in ESP courses in NEU, let alone in the particular course of English for Banking and Finance course All the above research gaps are a great source of motivation for the researcher to conduct this study

Figure 8 Six areas of reading comprehension (Tran and Duong, 2017)

Reading comprehension difficulties

Unknown words Text

coverage

Background knowledge Organization

structure

Grammar (Tenses,

linking words, pronounces)

Others

(Motivation, timing, materials)

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY

This chapter discusses the research methodology adopted in the current study In particular, the research setting, sampling method, data collection instruments, data collection procedure and data analysis procedure are elaborated

I Research setting

In each semester of a school year, there are about 10-15 classes of English for Banking and Finance for third-year students In the first semester of the school year 2019-2020, there were 15 classes of English for Banking and Finance being equivalent to 350 students registering and completing the course Fortunately, the researcher had the chance to talk with some students among those 350 people who were willing to share their coursebook and syllabus utilized for their ESP course With the materials provided, the researcher could get an initial understanding of the teaching and learning situation for students majoring in Finance and Banking in National Economics University (NEU) The research was conducted at National Economics University at the beginning of the second semester of the academic year 2019-2020 The study focuses on the course entitled English for Banking and Finance which is, in fact, the only ESP course that students majoring in Banking and Finance have

to take during their four academic years at NEU With regard to knowledge, this 15-week course aims to equip students with industrial experiences in international banking, forex, capital markets, commercial banking, securities, public finance and insurance for them to have exceptional English skills in the fast-paced, money-making world of finance, as English is the primary communication tool in the industry Moreover, the course is designed and delivered to train students to become a proficient communicator in English, by improving students‟ commands of specialist vocabulary and terminology commonly used in Banking and Finance

In this English for Banking and Finance course, the only official source of learning material is the coursebook entitled “English for Banking and Finance”

as the internal material The book was written by the eight lecturers of the school of Finance and Banking at NEU This book was then reviewed and edited by MSc Le Phong Chau and Dr Do Hoai Linh before being published

by National Economics University Press in 2018

Following the theme-based approach, the coursebook of English for Finance and Banking covers seven key themes in the field namely Financial market, Commercial banking, Corporate finance, International finance, Public finance, Securities and Insurance Each theme is divided into two or three units being equivalent to two to three sub-themes See appendix 1 for the course book‟s detailed table of content

Table 1 Table of content of Part 2 in the course book

As seen in the table 1, each unit in one theme consists of 5 sections as followed

1 Reading section provides a reading text with the same topic as the

unit Comprehension questions are provided at the end of the reading text to check students‟ understanding

2 Exercise section provides a variety of practices for students to use the

terminologies and recall knowledge of grammar

3 Translation section requires students to translate an extract from

English into Vietnamese

PART 2: COMMERCIAL BANKING

UNIT 1: AN OVERVIEW OF COMMERCIAL BANKING

4 Terminologies section provides thematic and occupation-related expression for students to take notes and use for the above sections

5 Reference section provides extra reading materials related to the topic of the units

II Participants

The researcher initially aimed to research all the third-year students of Banking and Finance in the 2019-2020 academic year at NEU However, provided the unprecedented pandemic of the novel covid-19 virus, it was daunting for the researcher to reach out and distribute survey papers to all the students of Banking and Finance in NEU due to the stay-at-home order Besides, carrying out an online survey on a large scale was not practical since,

in reality, it received only a small proportion of the needed responses Hence, the research came to the final decision of restricting the scope into a small group of students who were accessible by using convenience sampling method

to collect data needed for the analysis process According to Cohen et al (2007), “convenience sampling involves choosing the nearest individuals to serve as respondents and continuing that process until the required sample size has been obtained or those who happen to be available and accessible at the time” The sample size was then forced to scope down to 35 third-year students

of the mainstream program from the School of Banking and Finance at NEU Students and lecturers who volunteered to take part in the interviews would be contacted shortly after the survey questionnaire After that, the researcher made appointments for the interviews Overall, 35 responses from students for the survey were received, and the online interviews were successfully conducted with five students and three out of eight lecturers All these lecturers were the ones with a master degree in Finance and three to five years teaching the course English for Finance and Banking In other words, they had never undergone any courses in pedagogy or teaching methodology; therefore, lecturing was the major teaching method applied

III Data collection instruments

In order to address the proposed research questions, the researcher made a decision to conduct both survey questionnaire and in-depth interviews to gain insights into learners and lecturers‟ experiences and perceptions of learners‟ problems in reading comprehension of reading materials in English for Banking and Finance course However, in-depth interviews were mostly utilized to make the most out of available data

1 Questionnaire

1.1 Reasons for choosing questionnaire

The questionnaire was believed to be the practical instrument for this research because of the three reasons First and foremost, 35 respondents‟ opinions and assessments were collected since questionnaire could collect data from a relatively large group of participants (Mackey & Gass, 2005) Besides, since one objective of the research was to identify students‟ difficulties, questionnaire is considered as safe “assurance of anonymity” (Brown, 2001, p.7) that helps the researcher solve not only individuals‟ sensitive issues but also enhance the confidentiality for participants‟ opinions The third advantage

of exploiting questionnaire in this research was that questionnaire administration could be virtually conducted with soft-copy or personally with a hardcopy See appendix 2 for the survey for students

1.2 Format and content

With the aim of identifying students‟ difficulties in reading comprehension in an ESP course, the survey questionnaire was distributed to the target students to collect essential data for analysis The survey questionnaire is adapted from Tran and Duong (2018) with some adjustments

to be appropriate with the context and the characteristics of the survey participants The researcher chose to adapt the survey questionnaire of Tran and Duong (2018) because it comprehensively considers the potential problems

of reading comprehension Moreover, the questionnaire showed its validity and reliability in the results that they concluded in their study after collecting and analyzing the data from their questionnaire When the pilot version of the

survey was distributed to two voluntary students, the researcher realized that there were certain parts that were unnecessary and did not serve any purpose of addressing the research questions As a result, the researcher finalized the complete survey with some adjustments

Regarding the content of the questionnaire for 35 students, it began with a brief overview of the research title, the purpose of distributing the survey and a desire for cooperation from the respondents in order to get sincere opinions Then, the first part requires participants to provide some background information namely their email for further online interviews, their self-evaluated language proficiency and their approximate amount of time spent on reading ESP materials off class on a weekly basis The second part investigates students‟ difficulties in reading comprehension of the coursebook provided in their ESP course in seven different aspects which are vocabulary, text coverage, context, text‟s structure, grammar, motivation, timing and materials Part 3 of the survey addresses the strategies or solutions that the students have applied to overcome their difficulties in comprehending reading texts provided

in their ESP course At the end of the questionnaire is part 4, which is a shortened consent letter asking if the participants are willing to join the future interview with the researcher

As for the student questionnaire format, questions in parts 2 and 3 were designed in the form of Likert-like scale which is believed to be “effective for gathering respondents‟ opinions about various language-related issues” (Brown, 2001, p.41) and simple for the participants to choose the valid answers The type of scale based on the basic frequency (i.e never – rarely – sometimes – usually – always) was utilized in which each level was given a number from 1 to 5 for participants to choose the one that best described their experiences

Due to the language proficiency level of the participating students, the questionnaire was translated into Vietnamese so that the students did not have misunderstanding in processing the questionnaire See appendix 2 for the completed version of the survey questionnaire

P art 1 Introduction, Background information

Part 2 Students‟ difficulties in reading comprehension in the ESP

course

Part 3 Reading strategies for difficulties in reading comprehension in

the ESP course

Part 4 Ending (Letter of consent for a future interview)

Table 2 Content of the survey

1.3 Procedure

The questionnaire was distributed in two phases In phase 1, hard copies

of the pilot survey were distributed with two voluntary respondents with a view

to avoiding any misunderstanding; the result was afterwards taken into serious consideration for the formulation of the final version When the revised version

of the survey was completed, the researcher sent the URL link of the online survey to students, who had already agreed to participate in the research, at the beginning of the second semester By this time, respondents had just completed the ESP course taught in the first semester; consequently, the reliability of the survey‟s results was enhanced since respondents‟ hands-on experiences with the course were still vivid

After collecting all 35 responses from the voluntary participants, the data was analyzed to find the gaps that could be investigated further in the interviews

2 Interview

2.1 Reasons for choosing interview

Apart from the questionnaire, the researcher decided to exploit interviews

as the second data collection instrument to obtain in-depth information thanks

to its remarkable advantages According to Guilfoyle and Hill (2002), the limited number of interviewees is not a disadvantage because the aim of sampling is not to approach enough people, but to collect appropriate and sufficient data Moreover, this method is particularly useful for interpreting and providing insights into complex phenomena and allowing for flexibility when things go wrong (Dörnyei, 2007, p.39) or the provided information in the

survey was “vague, incomplete, off-topic or not specific enough” (Mackey & Gass, 2005, p.173) For those reasons, the interview method was chosen by the researcher in order to provide more insightful perspectives of 5 students and three lecturers on reading comprehension problems in ESP and reading strategies to overcome those problems

2.2 Format and content

Two separated interview schedules were utilized for five voluntary students and three willing lecturers (appendix 3) Unlike the questionnaire with mostly close-ended questions, all interviews were semi-structured with open-ended questions since this form of the interview was believed to provide the interviewer with plentiful flexibility At the same time, interviewees were encouraged to honestly share their experiences with adequate power to control the interview Furthermore, all interviews were conducted in Vietnamese to avoid any possible misunderstandings

To be specific, the interviews with five students aimed at providing an insight into the answers collected from the questionnaire In correspondence with the survey for students, the interview‟s questions were categorized into three main parts namely difficulties that the students encounter when processing ESP materials provided in the coursebook, the causes for those difficulties and strategies students had applied to overcome those difficulties in interpreting the meaning of those texts Besides, based on the answers of the interviewees for the main questions, the researcher also asked follow-up questions to clear the ambiguous points in the answers of the three main questions

With regards to lecturers, all lecturers who were in charge of teaching the ESP course for students of Banking and Finance at NEU were also contacted through emails to take part in the interview Among eight lecturers, the research received the agreement of three individuals The ultimate goal of the interview with lecturers was to investigate their perceptions of the utilized pedagogical skills in the ESP course, students‟ difficulties in comprehending the reading texts provided in the course materials as well as recommendations

for learning strategies to overcome those difficulties Therefore, the questions for lecturers were divided into four main parts, among which the first part asked for the lecturers‟ experiences in teaching English for Finance and Banking and the teaching skill exploited in guiding students processing the reading texts Questions 3, 4 and 5 required lecturers to subjectively identify students‟ difficulties in comprehending reading texts; meanwhile, their viewpoints in understanding the causes of students‟ difficulties were examined

in question 6 Finally, it was the lecturers‟ answers to the last question that would help answer the last research question about possible recommendations for students to improve their reading comprehension in the studied subject

2.3 Procedure

After receiving responses from 35 students, the researcher studied these answers carefully and designed a set of guiding questioned utilized

in the interviews with students, each of which lasted for 15 to 20 minutes

As mentioned above, after contacting eight lecturers from the beginning

of the second semester to ask for their permission to be interviewed, three out

of eight individuals agreed to schedule an online meeting with the researcher for their convenience Each of the interviews lasted for 25 to 30 minutes During the semi-structured interviews, based on the answers of the interviewed for the main questions, the researcher added 4 to 5 follow up questions

IV Data collection procedure

The procedure of collecting data consisted of three main phases, each of which was conducted according to a tentative timeline as followed

Table 3 Timeline for data collection procedure

As can be seen from the table, it took the researcher two weeks to prepare for the data collection instrument, including one survey questionnaire for students and piloting the first version of the questionnaire Logical order, wording and content were carefully revised by the researcher

Phase 2 entitled data collection involved delivering the final version of the questionnaire virtually to the students, and at the end of the second week,

35 responses were collected Additionally, after seriously studying the results

of the questionnaire, a set of guiding questions for the interview and the interview schedule were designed Follow up interviews with five students who gave special answers in their questionnaire were conducted soon after the fundamental results from the questionnaire were achieved Furthermore, all interviews were recorded with the permission of the interviewees with assistance for the data analysis procedure afterwards

V Data analysis procedure

In terms of analyzing data, descriptive statistics were analyzed and generated into tables and charts using Excel 2018 Any possibly interesting pattern arising was noted by the researcher to schedule follow-up interviews The results of the analysis process are illustrated in the forms of graphs and tables to make it easier for readers to follow Answers to open-ended questions were manually categorized, in which the interviewees proceeded to justify their

ambiguous responses

In the next stage, after all the interviews had been conducted, the data were analyzed using content analysis, which is a method of categorizing information in themes to be more structured to accomplish research objectives (Moore, McCabe, & Craig, 2012) Accordingly, recordings of the interviews were transcribed and coded into different themes The researcher then interpreted the data along with the themes, while simultaneously referring to the literature review and the previous responses from the survey

VI Ethical consideration

This study is subject to specific rules of ethics All of the participants must be fully aware of the research aims before giving consent to take part in the study The general information about the study was shared by the researcher when contacting the participants and was also printed at the beginning of the questionnaire The participants were also reassured that their participation in the research would be voluntary By completing the survey, it was understood that they had decided to be a part of this study It was also stated in the questionnaire that the participants‟ information and responses to the survey/interview would be treated as confidential and used for research purposes only As previously mentioned, the participants‟ identities remain anonymous and replaced with pseudonyms throughout the paper

Additionally, participants were not abused or forced by any means in the research process

CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND

DISCUSSION

This chapter includes analyzed data collected from the online questionnaire with 35 junior students of School of Banking and Finance and semi-structured interviews with 5 students and 3 lecturers of the course

“English for Finance and Banking” The analyzed data is used to answer the research questions and offer some suggestions to resolve the given difficulties

I Research question 1: What are the difficulties in comprehending the reading materials in the ESP course as perceived by the students?

In general, all 35 students participating in the questionnaire responded that they did have difficulties in comprehending the reading texts in their coursebook of English for Banking and Finance course to a certain extend However, in all eight areas of challenges in reading comprehension, as shown

in the questionnaire (included in appendix 2), there were both similar and distinctive responses

Figure 9 Difficulties in the area of vocabulary

As can be seen from the graph, the area of vocabulary appeared to the most significant difficulty when 33 out of 35 students answered that they encountered a significant number of strange or unfamiliar terminologies, which

hindered them from understanding the content of the reading text in their ESP coursebook, at different levels of frequency To be more specific, 18 students chose “sometimes”, 13 people chose “usually”, and 2 people claimed they

“always” experienced this problem, considering the frequency of experiencing this particular issue There were only two students who rarely or never encountered any strange terminologies in the reading texts of the coursebook Secondly, 83% of the students answered that they could not guess the meanings

of new words, phrases or terminologies in the reading texts of the ESP coursebook, which led to their failure to comprehend Among these group of students, 18 individuals usually had this problem and 11 other students encountered this situation less frequently Thirdly, the data showed about four-fifths of the participants did not have enough vocabularies or their vocabulary range was not broad enough for them to understand the reading texts This proportion was also similar to another vocabulary-related difficulty, which was that students did not know essential thematical words to translate the texts in their ESP coursebook In other words, 28 students shared the same idea that their lack of vocab related to the topics of Finance and Banking hindered them from successfully translating the English texts into Vietnamese, which was their strategy to understand the content of the texts In the interviews, when answering the researcher‟s question about difficulties in the area of vocabulary, three students agreed that among all the parts included in the coursebook (appendix 1) they lacked a considerable amount of vocabulary in two themes which were “international finance” and “public finance” Two other interviewed students believed that their weakness was the “insurance” part of the coursebook

Figure 10 Difficulties in the area of text coverage

With regards to difficulties in terms of text coverage (Figure 10), the participants did not confront as much trouble in this area, compared to the area

of vocabulary In specific, 21 people occasionally could not generalize the main ideas of one or two paragraphs in a text on average, and the remaining individuals rarely or never encountered this difficulty over their ESP course Besides, in the same area, about half of the participants could not generalize the main ideas of some ESP texts in the coursebook Student A further expressed her opinion about the connection between these two difficulties, stating that when she had problems understanding the main ideas of one paragraph in a text, she found it challenging to summarize the main idea of the whole text precisely

Figure 11 Difficulties in the area of background knowledge

I COULD NOT generalize the whole text

I COULD NOT generalize the main idea

of a paragraph

Difficulties in the area of text coverage (N = 35)