The impact of phrase reading on reading comprehension of non english major students at thu duc college of technology

The result proved that applying phrase reading improves students’ reading comprehension and the students of the experiment group had positive attitudes towards phrase reading.. Statement

- -HUYNH DOAN PHUONG DUNG

THE IMPACT OF PHRASE READING

ON READING COMPREHENSION

OF NON-ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS

AT THU DUC COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE GEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS (TESOL)

Ho Chi Minh City, August 2019

i

- -HUYNH DOAN PHUONG DUNG

THE IMPACT OF PHRASE READING

ON READING COMPREHENSION

OF NON-ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS

AT THU DUC COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY

1 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP

I declare this thesis entitled “THE IMPACT OF PHRASE READING ON

READING COMPREHENSION OF NON-ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT THU DUC COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY” is the result of my own work except

as cited in the reference

The thesis has not been accepted for any degree and it is not currently submitted

in candidature of any other degree

Ho Chi Minh, 2019

Huynh Doan Phuong Dung

2 ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

This thesis would not have been possible without the kind support and help

of many individuals and organization I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all of them

I am highly indebted to my thesis supervisor, Dr Bui Thi Thuc Quyen for her guidance and constant supervision as well as for her immense knowledge regarding the study Her guidance help me in all the time of research and writing of this thesis I could not have imagined having a better advisor and mentor for my M.A thesis

I also fell thankful for my colleagues and students at Thu Duc College of Technology who facilitated my data collection, so I could successfully collect the data

Finally, I would like to dedicate this thesis to my family for giving me the

greatest care, support, and love throughout writing this thesis and my life in general

3 ABSTRACT

The purpose of the study was to examine the impacts of using phrase reading on student reading comprehension at Thu Duc College of Technology (TDC) This study also explored how phrase reading influences the students’ attitudes To achieve this, an experimental research was employed This project was done in four months with two-group design of 60 students from TDC A set of questionnaire, a pre-test and a post-test were used as the main method for data collection The result proved that applying phrase reading improves students’ reading comprehension and the students of the experiment group had positive attitudes towards phrase reading This study also suggested that phrase reading should be introduced to language classes in order to help students read more effectively

5 LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1: Personal Information………18

Table 3.2 Summary of the questionnaire……… 23

Table 3.3 Summary of teaching procedure………24

Table 3.4 Teaching procedures for the experimental group in the treatment stage……25

Table 4.2 Table of grouping scores of pretest………30

Table 4.3 Group Statistics for pre-test results……… 31

Table 4.4 Independent Samples Test for pre-test results……… 32

Table 4.5 Table of grouping scores of posttest……….33

Table 4.6 Comparison of the experimental group’s performance on the pretest and posttest………34

Table 4.7 Group Statistics for post-test results……… 35

Table 4.8 Independent Samples Test for post-test results……….36

Table 4.9 Reliability statistics……… 38

Table 4.10 Frequency and percentage of the participants’ problems in Phrase reading………38

Table 4.11 Means and modes of students’ attitudes towards phrase reading…………39

Table 4.12 Frequency, percentage of the students’ attitude towards phrase reading….40 Table 4.13 Means and modes of students’ attitudes towards phrase reading……… 40

Table 4.14 Frequency, percentage of conditions to make phrase reading successful…41 Table 4.15 Frequency, mean, mode and percentage of students’ attitude on the creation of phrase reading’s motivation………42

8 TABLE OF CONTENTS

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP i

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS iv

LIST OF TABLES v

LIST OF FIGURES vi

LIST OF CHARTS vi

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Background of the study 1

1.2 Statement of the problem 2

1.3 Aim of the study 3

1.4 Research questions 3

1.5 Significance of the study 3

1.6 Organization of the study 3

1.7 Summary 4

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

2.1 Theoretical framework 5

2.1.1 Definition of reading 5

2.1.2 Reading process 6

2.1.3 Purpose of reading 10

2.1.4 Phrase reading 11

2.1.5 Reading comprehension 13

2.1.6 Factors in reading comprehension 14

2.2 Empirical studies 16

2.3 Summary 17

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 18

3.1 Research site 18

3.2 Participants 18

3.3 Research design 20

3.4 Instruments 21

3.4.1 Pretest and Posttest 21

3.4.2 Questionnaire 23

3.5 Teaching procedures 24

3.6 Methods of data analysis 28

3.6.1 Analysis of the questionnaire 29

3.6.2 Analysis of pre- and post-tests 29

3.7 Summary 29

CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS 30

4.1 Test of normality of the data 30

4.2 Results from pre-test and post-test 33

4.2.1 Pre-test results 33

4.3 Post-test results 36

4.4 Results of the questionnaire 40

4.4.1 Reliability of the questionnaire 40

4.4.2 Validity of the questionnaire 41

4.4.3 Analysis of the questionnaire 41

4.5 Discussion of the findings 47

4.5.1 Students’ performance on reading comprehension 48

4.5.2 Students’ attitude towards phrase reading 49

4.6 Summary 49

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS 50

5.1 Conclusion 50

5.2 Implications 51

5.3 Limitations 52

5.4 Recommendations for further studies 53

5.5 Chapter summary 53

REFERENCES 54

APPENDIX A 60

APPENDIX B 71

APPENDIX C 81

APPENDIX D 83

APPENDIX D 85

APPENDIX C 88

1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides a background of the research which includes the research problem, aim of the study, research questions, thesis hypotheses and significance of the study, and working definition of key terms of this study Finally, the structure of this thesis is provided in this chapter

1.1 Background of the study

Vietnam is opened to cooperate with a lot of countries in many fields such as economy, politics, culture, science, and technology With many co-operations, exchanging information and communication are essential Therefore, English has been becoming a must in working and studying environment Moreover, in 2008, Vietnamese Prime Minister issued a project named “Teaching and Learning Foreign Languages in the National Education System period 2008-2020” The aim of the project is that by the year 2020, most of the Vietnamese youth whoever graduates from vocational schools, colleges, and universities can use foreign languages independently, especially English This goal also makes using foreign languages become an advantage for Vietnamese people in the industrialization and modernization era (Government, 2008) Therefore, students at vocational schools, colleges, and universities are required to gain the certain level of English proficiency with four skills It is also the condition for students if they want to graduate

Among four skills, reading has been the most emphasized skill in teaching English (Susser & Robb, 1989) because of its benefits for the development of learners’ language proficiency Reading is a good way to develop other skills such as writing and speaking According to Harmer (1999), reading texts give students a good model for their writing Students can learn grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, and how to build up sentences for the writing from reading texts Moreover, reading texts can introduce students interesting topics and excite imaginative responses, so they can help students

speak and write well Regarding to this point, Soliman (2012) also agrees on the importance of reading and says that reading is a source of learning English and through

it, students can learn a lot of information Conley (1992) also insists the importance and necessity of reading in learning a foreign language He points out that our world is reading world, whether in schools, in business or daily life, we are required to have effective reading skills to live in this modern world

We learn how to read when we were a little child by reading children’s books When we go to school or universities, we learn to read reference books to support for studying In daily life, we have a tendency to read newspaper and magazines Therefore, reading has been becoming an essential part in every field in our life

The importance of reading has been recognized by many researchers Alderson (2000) stated that the ability to read academic texts is considered one of the most important skills that university students of EFL/ESL need to acquire Indeed, reading comprehension skill has come to be the “essence of reading” (Durkin, 1993), essential not only to academic learning in all subject areas but also to professional success and lifelong learning However, according to Grabe (2002), reading is one of the most difficult skills to develop a high level of proficiency because of the complexity inherent

in the reading process Many students have difficulty in understanding what they read, particularly, in comprehending academic texts

1.2 Statement of the problem

In Thu Duc College of Technology (TDC), all TDC students have to study all four skills including listening, speaking, reading and writing They have two reading periods every week Moreover, in a reading lesson, most of the teachers apply the Grammar Translation method for reading Teachers ask students to read the text and do the tasks without instructing any strategy for students As the results, students tend to read word by word and do the tasks It is not sufficient for them to improve their reading

ability Therefore, they usually read very slowly and do not feel confident in reading This is not good for them to gain their reading comprehension From these points, this study will be conducted with a hope to find out if phrase reading can make up for the disadvantages of the current circumstance at TDC.

1.3 Aim of the study

The present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of phrase-reading strategy

on TDC non-English major students’ reading comprehension performance Also, the study tries to explore students’ attitudes towards the benefits of phrase-reading Finally, this thesis aims at suggesting applications of phrase reading for TDC teachers to teach reading more effectively

1.4 Research questions

The thesis seeks the answers to the following questions:

1 To what extents do students in the group treated with phrase-reading strategy enhance their reading comprehension measured by the KET reading test?

2 What are students’ attitudes towards phrase- reading instructions?

1.5 Significance of the study

This thesis is significant in the way it contributes to the improvement of students

at Thu Duc College of Technology reading ability in learning English in general and reading comprehension in particular Also, the teaching implications and suggestions of this study will enable the teachers to conduct reading strategy training in classrooms to help students improve their reading skills and read English effectively

1.6 Organization of the study

The structure of the study consists of five chapters

Chapter 1 provides background information and existing problems of teaching reading comprehension and reading strategies at Thu Duc College of Technology It also presents the aims of the study, the research questions, the significance and the organization of the study

Chapter 2 presents an overview of the theoretical background of the research including (1) reading processes; (2) phrase reading; (3) reading comprehension and (4) previous studies

Chapter 3 focuses on the methodology employed in the study, including its research design, subjects and instruments, data collection and data analysis procedures

Chapter 4 analyzes and interprets the data collected from the questionnaire and the reading test It then discusses the results and draws out some major findings of the research

Chapter 5 summarizes the key findings and gives recommendations for English language teachers at Thu Duc College of Technology to improve student’s reading comprehension and proposes topics for further research

1.7 Summary

In chapter I, the researcher has given a description of the background of the study The statement of the problem, the research purpose and questions and the significance

of the study were briefly discussed An outline of this study was given in the final part

of the chapter In the next chapter, a review of the theories and research on effect of phrase reading on reading comprehension

2 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

As stated in chapter 1, this thesis seeks to investigate the effects of phrase reading

on non-English major students’ reading comprehension The present chapter will serve

as a theoretical framework for the study In this chapter, the nature of reading processes and their three fundamental models (bottom – up, top – down and interactive) will be discussed This chapter also states the definition of phrase reading and comprehension

as well as factors in comprehension The chapter ends with the reviews of prior studies

on the impacts of phrase reading on reading comprehension

2.1 Theoretical framework

2.1.1 Definition of reading

Reading is a skill that students have to master because reading is part of the learning process In the course of reading, students may acquire some information or knowledge from a variety of sources, such as books, magazines, novels and others Reading is also an important part of academic success Students will have better opportunities to study if they have good reading skills On the opposite, students have difficulties in completing their studies if they have poor reading skills In order for students to improve their reading skills, students have to practice reading more and more

Many experts have identified precisely what reading means River (1968) argued that reading is not only a source of information in any activities of learning, but also a way of broadening, consolidating the concept and knowledge of language According to Nunan (2003), reading is a fluent process of combining text-based information and background knowledge to build meaning Reading can be defined as a combination of reader, text, and strategy The combination of the reader and the text can be extracted from the connection between the background knowledge of the reader and the text Meanwhile, when readers face reading challenges, a strategy can be decided to reach a reading purpose

According to Grellet (1981), reading is an active process for obtaining information It involves predicting, guessing, checking, and asking oneself questions According to Kelly (2007), reading is an active process in which readers engage with the text in order to construct the author's messages Cahyono (2011) stated reading is transferring knowledge between the author and the reader Literally, reading an activity

to understand the massage from the author's message

From the definition above, it can be inferred that reading is a system in which the reader constructs the messages of the author from the text

2.1.2 Reading process

According to Kirby (2007), reading comprehension is the “ability to understand written text It involves interpreting meaning from text by decoding words, understanding vocabulary, and creating connections between these and the reader’s prior knowledge and experience” (p.1) This author presents two levels of processing

in reading comprehension (see Figure 2.1)

Figure 2.1 Level of processing in reading comprehension (from Kirby, 2007)

The figure above demonstrates two types of processing: “bottom –up” and down” In bottom-up processing, words are formed into phrases, and phrases are formed into ideas Then, comprehension at the phrase or idea level results in understanding of what the text stated directly Top-down processing occurs when higher-level information, just as knowledge of the general topic of the text, helps the reader identify lower-level information Both bottom-up and top-down processing often occur in reading comprehension (Kirby, 2007) This is called interactive processing

“top-The word reading can be described in distinct ways based on distinct notions of the reading process According to William (1989), reading is a method by which one looks at and recognizes what has been written Goodman (1996) & Rumelhart (1977) states that reading is defined in a number of complex ways, but it is best described as a process involving the reader, the text and the interaction between the text and the reader

In addition, according to Nunan (1999), reading should be an interactive process in which the reader constantly shuttles between bottom - up, top – down and interactive processes

2.1.2.1 The bottom – up model

Bottom – up is described as “reading from discrete, visual units such as graphemes, morphemes and words at the bottom stage of the text structure” (Hedgecock

& Ferris, 2009, p 17) or as “serial designs where the reader starts with the printed word, recognizes graphic stimuli, decodes them to sound, acknowledges words and decodes meanings” (Alderson, 2000, p 16) According to McCormick (1988), in order to decode meaning from printed page with a sequence of written symbols, the reader first recognizes a multiplicity of linguistic signals (letters, morphemes, syllables, words, phrases, grammatical cues and discourse markers) In addition, bottom – up is also referred to as text-based or data-driven processes (Alderson, 1999) This text-based or data-driven processing, according to Fries (1962), needs advanced knowledge of the

language itself With the identification abilities of the lower level, the reader attempts to get the message expressed by the writer from a text by decoding speech written down from graphic symbols to reach meaning, using contextual data that impacts interpretation The reader must learn to react to the visual patterns automatically Then the cumulative understanding of the signed meanings allows the reader to provide those parts of the signals that are not in the graphic representatives themselves Moreover, Gough (1972) asserted that bottom – up working serially or linearly The linearly here

is both linguistic and spatial Spatially, readers process information from left to right in languages such as English It implies that readers do not manage texts in a jumbled manner in an organized and guided way Linguistically, when reading a text, readers move from smaller to bigger units through paradigms First they record graphemes, phonemes, words, and then they take into consideration other sentential units such as phrases, clauses, sentences, and finally sentential elements

LaBerge (1974) insisted that bottom-up skills must be extremely automated or highly automatically executed Bottom – up tasks such as word recognition, phrase reading should be carried out in such a manner that readers are hardly conscious that these processes are taking place within their brains

Ending the debate on the bottom – up with a comment by Hudson (2007, p.37) that the bottom – up is adequate, primarily tap on "how a reader reads rather than what the reader understands."

2.1.2.2 The top – down model

Top-down reading models indicate that the processing of a text starts with meaning-driven processes in the readers ' minds, or an assumption about the text's meaning Readers recognize letters and phrases, according to Dechant (1991), only to verify their assumptions about the meaning of the text Nuttall (1982) indicated that we rely on our own intelligence and experience the forecast we can create in top-down

processing, depending on the schemata we have obtained to comprehend the text Smith (1971), addressed the contribution of a reader to a text is termed background knowledge informally and schemata officially.In other words, this strategy requires readers to use the background "true world" knowledge structure to interpret the text's difficulty, predict the information they will discover in the text, and confirm it by linking it to their previous language knowledge experiences The understanding can be the familiarity of the readers with the subject of the text, the cultural subject in which the text is written and textual and linguistic features of that text When schemata are enabled, they decide and have a huge effect on how readers recognize, understand and store fresh data discovered in a text, according to Alderson (2000) To sum up, a top-down reading model is a reading model that emphasizes what the reader brings to the text says reading is driven by meaning and proceeds from the whole part

2.1.2.3 The interactive model

An interactive reading model tries to combine bottom-up and top-down models with valid ideas It tries to bring the strengths of the bottom-up and top-down models into consideration, making it one of today's most successful solutions to reading theory (McCormick, 1988) An interactive model is one that utilizes print as input and has meaning as output, according to Goodman (1981) But the reader also provides input, and the reader, interacting with the text, is selective in using just as few of the text-based indications as necessary to build meaning Interactive model learning, by using the data supplied concurrently from several distinct sources and by drawing on understanding at the other (higher or lower) levels, readers can compensate for deficiencies at the same stage These sources include phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic syntactic class of

a given word or semantic knowledge Or they can easily identify the phrases on the page and depend on the bottom-up method if they have understanding about the texts In brief, readers must depend on more advanced sources of information Psychological and

linguistic factors must be taken into in accounting how people read The link between our knowledge of linguistic forms and our knowledge of the world is very close In fact,

it is very difficult, sometimes impossible to successfully read a text where our own schemata cannot be utilized The more predictable a sequence of linguistic elements is, the more readily a text will be processed Our understanding of language forms is very closely related to our knowledge of the world Indeed, reading a text where our own schemata cannot be utilized is hard or sometimes impossible The better a sequence of linguistic components can be predicted, the easier a text is processed The content familiarity is significant for compensating limited linguistic knowledge Reading is the interactive process between what a reader already knows about a given topic and what the writer writes Therefore, when we put two views together, the result is called an

“interactive” meaning gathering activities Full understanding only comes if bottom-up processing is combined with the knowledge of top-down processing They are both needed, and sometimes one predominates the other We adopt top-down approaches to predict the probable meaning then move to the bottom-up approach to check whether that is really what the writer says

2.1.3 Purpose of reading

Reading is a purposeful activity Grabe and Stoller (2002) say that reading is not only aimed at the reading readers, but also in the sense that a number of individual purposes or tasks, both internally and externally, activate the motivations of the readers

to read a certain text The following four primary reading aims, according to Grabe and Stoller (2002, p.11) are as follows:

1) Reading to get general comprehension which is the most basic purpose for reading;

2) Reading to search for information when a reader scans the text for some specific information and skims for a general idea;

3) Reading to learn when a reader needs to learn a considerable amount of information from a text; and

4) Reading to integrate information when a reader responses, evaluates, composes, selects and critiques information being read

Different purposes for reading determine that one text may be read in a variety of styles Researchers would agree that the major purpose of reading should be the construction of meaning – generally comprehending and actively responding to what is read

2.1.4 Phrase reading

According to Smith (1978), phrase reading is the practice of chunking individual words into meaningful word groups in order to facilitate better comprehension Henk (1986, as cited in Nichols et al., 2009) states that phrase reading is a wonderful strategy for promoting students’ ability to read in appropriate and meaningful idea units or phrases to understand what they read and enhance comprehension (Ellis, 1996; Tsuchiya, 2002; Ushiro, 2002) Sharing with Smith’s idea, Rasinki (2003) argues that phrase reading can also help readers gain the better reading achievement When students read

in phrases, students can guess the meaning of this phrase based on the previous phrase Moreover, students can understand better because the context and the meaning of sentences can be easily understood when they read words in phrases (Sutz, 2009) Phrase reading as a part of English language teaching is receiving increasing interest and attention The practice and research of phrase reading is now very common A number

of previously conducted studies determined the role of phrase reading in reading comprehension The benefits of phrase reading in reading comprehension are: increased processing speed (Ellis, 2003; Kameyama, 1993; Komaba, 1992; Newell, 1990; Nishida, 2009; Ohtagaki & Ohmori, 1991; Yubune, 2012) and improving reading comprehension (Ellis, 1996, 2001; Tuchiya, 2002; Ushiro, 2002) According to Amble and Muehl

(1996), when readers read a chunked text, they display higher levels of text comprehension Also, Amble and Kelly (1970) presented the benefits of this strategy Stevens (1981) indicated that readers presented with phrase reading strategy scored better than those that did not use phrase reading In other studies, Brozo (1983) showed the effects of employing chunking in reading comprehension Thus, the experimental studies also clearly displayed that chunking works is an efficient reading strategy Moreover, Cwach and Gravely (1997) proved that reading in phrases contributes significantly in developing reading skill Forgarty (1999) shared the same idea with Cwach and Gravely Chunking is an important strategy in increasing the achievements scores of learners

Rasinski (1989) emphasized that measuring student’s chunking ability is essential for providing effective teaching of chunking Chunking is usually measured by chunking accuracy and the size of chunks Rasinski also indicated that students have problems with identifying where a phrase starts and ends Reports show that when learners read English texts, they identify long phrases because they do not know to chunk into a meaningful phrases (Kadota, 1982; Kadota, 1992; Nishida, 2009) Smith (1978) also suggested that readers need to chunk words into meaningful units in order to facilitate better comprehension Nichols at al (2009) argued that “phrase reading is helpful in reducing word-by-word reading, which is a major barrier to successful reading for higher-level comprehension” (p.7) When students read in phrases, they do not process

a text word by word Students can comprehend the text as well as do the tasks of that text easily because students will expand their eyes on the phrase that they need Students expand the fixation zone, their eyes fix on multiple words and their brain makes sense

of that phrase

Reading in phrases is similar to reading in chunks While chunking segments a sentence into a sequence of syntactic constituents, the phrase is one of the syntactic

constituents of a sentence The person who read in phrases is one who chunks the text into meaningful syntactical phrases

2.1.5 Reading comprehension

Reading English as a foreign language is becoming more popular and taking place

in different forms, such as reading articles on newspapers or magazines, advertisements

on the street, news on television, and messages or mails in a mail box According to Nuttall (1996, p.3), to comprehend the meaning of the texts or to get the messages implicated by the writer is the common and final goal of reading This purpose is also presented by Grabe (2009), who states that “comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading process since the purpose of all types of reading is to obtain the meaning from printed materials” (p 20) Reading comprehension has long been investigated by many researchers and psychologists, who tried to give a conceptual point of view about the notion of reading comprehension According to Snow (2007, p.7), reading comprehension is

the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning

through interaction, and involvement with written language It

consists of three elements: the reader, the text and the activity or

purpose for reading

Grellet (1981) describes that understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it He considers reading to be an active skill that constantly involves guessing, predicting, checking and asking oneself questions Moreover, Snow and Strickland (2002) state that reading comprehension is made up of nine cognitive components: fluency, vocabulary, world knowledge, discourse knowledge, linguistics knowledge, motivation, purposes and goals, cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies, and integrating non-print information with text They are used when a reader aims to create comprehension of the text In other words, reading means different things to different

people, for some it is recognizing written words, while for others it is an opportunity to teach pronunciation and practice speaking The writer creates a text to communicate a message, and the reader’s task is to comprehend that message

In short, reading comprehension is the process in which the reader interacts with the printed text in order to extract both explicit and implicit information that the writer expresses

2.1.6 Factors in reading comprehension

According to Hammadou (1991), L2 reading comprehension is a complex process that not only entails understanding texts but also entails “building a model within the mind of the comprehender” (p.27) The mental process behind reading comprehension

is an important aspect to teaching usable strategies to students because it allows the instructor to analyze which techniques will be most beneficial to learners

Paul and Kathleen (2000) noted that at each point during reading, the reader attempts to make sense of the information explicitly stated in the current sentence by connecting it to two other sources of information: associated concepts in background knowledge and a subset of concepts from preceding sentences When the reader is satisfied with the attained level of comprehension, he or she proceeds to the next sentence and the process repeats itself (p.7)

At its core, reading for general comprehension is “an interactive process involving the reader, the text, and the context” (Block, 2002) Comprehension is a complex process that involves three factors as follows and can succeed or break down based on the reader’s own skills

2.1.6.1 Reader factors in comprehension

The reader factors influence comprehension ability These characteristics include the attention of the reader, the short-term memory, the capacity to focus, motivation, the understanding of methods for understanding, reasoning, decoding and grammatical

abilities and previous understanding Further, the learners ' capacity to decode phrases

to comprehend the objective of the data needs to be constructed by the student "in the mental' image' of the text involving the learner’s ability to decode words in order to understand the purpose of the information With proficiency and perseverance in these skills, students can magnify their success with reading comprehension and reach their goals of learning and understanding

Van and Kremer (2000) report that content and structure are two characteristics that influence the level of understanding of a reader They pointed out that the reader is distracted and confused with what he read if a text's content consists of uncertain or foreign data Likewise, the structure of a text is also a key factor in understanding the reader Grammar and organization can readily expand the capacity of a reader to understand When the structure is wrong or disorganized, the student decodes individual words for most of his energy and time, instead of seeing the text as a cohesive whole Generally, text’s content and structure equally cooperate to create the mental picture in the student’s mind and can make or break the reader’s comprehension abilities

2.1.6.2 Instructional factors in comprehension

The reading context can also influence the ability of the student to understand Van and Kremer (1999) list instructional factors in comprehension, including the presence of distracters, the teacher’s explicit or implicit instructions, the teacher’s expectations, and educational goals As learners become more willing to read, they can disregard distractions, but early and struggling readers must read in environments that minimize disruption Another key to unlocking the reading ability of a student is the explicit instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them” (p 53) ⠀Clearly explaining and instructing reading comprehension strategies are critical teacher activities that prepare students for reading success Teachers can affect learners to actively implement understanding tactics

to improve their knowledge of the reading content through the explanation and modelling

of the proper use of understanding strategies Likewise, expectations and objectives of teachers can affect understanding reading If a teacher expects the student to be too low

or too high, students cannot take lecture tasks seriously or be so overwhelmed that they are preparing to fail

to identify each chunk unit Students of experimental group 1 were asked to translate each chunk to demonstrate their understanding Then students practiced inserting the slashes into the new passage For experimental group 2, students did not have the opportunity to practice how to chunk the passage They just translated chunks given in the reading passages The students of three groups were asked to complete two kinds of tests: chunking test and reading test which included three reading passages The result indicated that the teaching or learning of chunking is effective in improving learners’ reading comprehension

Casteel (1990) conducted a study to examine whether reading materials presented

in chunks or phrases would improve the reading comprehension 50 eighth grade students from a public middle school in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, as a representative sample of L1 readers, were arranged into 2 level groups of high and low-ability Test results revealed that low-ability group was significantly affected by “chunked” materials

On the contrary, the high-ability group showed that students just had little influence or

no gain on test scores The results of this study indicated “chunked” materials helped low-ability students in their reading comprehension

In the 1960s, Amble and his colleagues examined if phrase reading training with fourth graders would significantly enhance reading comprehension (Amble, 1966; Amble and Muehl, 1966) They provided two sets of phrase reading films with systematic exposure of many phrases (Amble and Muehl, 1966) The purpose was to provide practice in rapid reading of meaningful phrases and to increase reading rate and comprehension The findings of the phrase reading training studies revealed that students

in the experimental group made greater reading progress than the control group in reading rate and reading comprehension

In the Vietnamese context of teaching, Le (2012) carried out another experiment

at Ben Tre College with 44 English- majored students The results suggested that the use

of phrase reading had a positive relationship to the reading test performance Pre-test and post-test measurements demonstrated a great improvement in the reading comprehension among participants in the experimental group Also, the participants in the experimental groups reflected positive attitudes on phrase reading

In summary, the results of the prior literature show a promising possibility of phrase reading on reading comprehension

2.3 Summary

The chapter begins with the theoretical concepts related to the present study In this section, the definition of reading and reading comprehension, reading process and factors on reading are mentioned Next, it continues with some previous studies related

to the employment of teaching phrase reading to reading comprehension The following chapter will present the methodology employed to carry out the study

3 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

This chapter describes the research methodology used in the study It provides the research site, participants, data types and methods of their collection, analytical framework It also deals with the issues of reliability and validity

3.1 Research site

The study was carried out at Thu Duc College of Technology, located in Thu Duc district in Ho Chi Minh City This college have courses for English majored students and non- English majored students This year, the college has about eight hundred students

at all levels Students whose majors are not English have to study English 1, English 2, and English 3 Non-English majored students use Breakthrough of Macmillan Publisher (2013) by Miles Craven Based on the decision of the school, English was a major subject emphasizing in its curriculum which offered students 135 periods of English equally incorporated into three English courses, equivalent to 9 learning credits during the whole training program The first two English courses aimed to review and gain the general English knowledge corresponding to A1 and A2 level before moving to the last course These courses were assigned to teach general English in order to help students build up English skills for listening, speaking, reading and writing After three compulsory courses, students are required to reach a minimum score of 400 TOEIC

3.2 Participants

The participants in this study were students at Thu Duc College of Technology in Thu Duc district The number of the participants was 60 from two English 2 classes In English 2 course, students passed the English 1 course In other words, students met basic requirements of CEFR for level A1 They continued studying for A2 level with general English The participants were not randomly selected because the researcher was

in charge and did not have the authority to choose other classes The researcher could

only have a small number of participants due to the limited number of each class at TDC These students were divided into 2 groups – the control group consisting around 30 students, and the experimental group containing around 30 students The researcher flipped a coin to choose which class was the control group and the other was be the experimental group The number of students of these classes was not fixed throughout the whole course Some of them just attended the first day of the course while some did not appear from the beginning of the course Therefore, in the process of analyzing the data, the researcher only focused on 60 subjects who finished the pre-test and post-test, and attended at least 80% of class meetings (10/12 meetings) All of them share the same language background, which is all of them are native speakers of Vietnamese and their academic proficiency is assumed to be at the same level because in order that these students can attend English 2 course, they have to finish and pass the final test of English

1 course In order to have basic information about students in both groups, at the beginning of the course, the researcher asked the students to fill out the handout

“Personal Information” The personal information of 2 groups in terms of number, age, gender, and years of English learning experience is presented in the table 3.1 below

Table 3.1: Personal Information

As shown in the table above, the number of participants in both groups were equal The total amount of participants was 60, so there were 30 participants in each group

Number Percent Number Percent

English learning experience 7,5 years 30 100.0% 30 100.0%

Control Group Experimental Group

Gender

Age

Furthermore, the number of males and females are almost the same The control group consisted of 19 males (63.3%) and 11 females (36.7%) while the experimental group had

17 males (56.7%) and 13 females (43.3%) Regarding the age range, the majority of the students were 19 years old (29 students – (96.7%) for the experimental group and 28 students – (93.3%) for the control group) With respect to studying English at school, all

of them began studying English in grade six, so they had 7.5 years of experience in English learning

3.3 Research design

As the aim of the research is to find the impacts of phrase reading on reading comprehension and students’ attitudes toward phrase reading, an experimental design is suitable to achieve it This study applied the convenient sampling without random assignment of the students into two groups Therefore, it can be said that this study will follow a quasi-experimental design because Kidder (1980, as cited in Tran, 2008, p.18) states that even without participants’ random assignment, casual relationship can be analyzed Generally, the research design in this study was associated with the quantitative paradigm because data collected from instruments including the pre-test, post-test and questionnaire are quantifiable There were approximately thirty students in each class The two selected classes were learning at the same time of the school-year

In the study, the experimental group and control one participated in ten-week research study They studied three periods a week with a short break among breaks Both groups took the pretest before conducting the experiment The control group was taught normally, which means they read the text and try to finish the tasks During the experiment, both experimental group and control group had many things in common such as curriculum, course-book and facilities The only difference between the two groups is that phrase reading technique was applied in experimental group After the experiment, both groups took the posttest which was as difficult as the pretest in order

to measure the differences between the results of two groups The questionnaire was used to investigate students’ attitudes towards phrase reading

3.4 Instruments

3.4.1 Pretest and Posttest

For the measurement of reading comprehension, the Reading Component of the Key English Test (KET) was used as a reading comprehension test The pretest was a 60-minute in-class assignment It was administered on the second day of each group to test students’ reading ability before conducting the experiment Moreover, the pretest also helped the researcher reconfirm whether the experimental group and the control group are at the same level The pretest in this study was extract from test 2 of the Cambridge Key English Test 1 (see Appendix A) The posttest in this study was taken from test 1 of the Cambridge Key English Test 1 (see Appendix B) The pre-test and posttest have the same format and the same level

Reading KET test used in this study totally had eight parts with 55 questions Part 1 contained 5 matching questions In this part, students were required to match five sentences to the appropriate sign or notice To answer these questions, students had to read for the main idea

Part 2 included 5 three-option multiple choice sentences Students were asked to choose one option to fill the gap in each of five sentences The five sentences are linked

by a simple story line The aim of this part was to test students’ knowledge of vocabulary

Part 3 consisted of 5 multiple choice and 5 matching questions In this part, students were tested on their ability to understand the language of the routine transactions

of daily life For the multiple choice questions, students were asked to complete five line conversational exchanges For the matching questions, students had to choose from

2-a list of eight options to complete 2-a longer di2-alogue

Part 4 contained 7 multiple choice questions Students had to read a text from authentic source, but this text was adapted to make it accessible to students This part aimed to test students’ ability to understand the main ideas and some details of longer texts

Part 5 included 8 multiple choice cloze questions In this part, students were tested

on their knowledge of grammatical points such as verb forms, determiners, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions in the context of a reading text Words were deleted from the text and students were asked to complete the text by choosing the appropriate word from three options

In part 6, students were asked to produce five items of vocabulary The five items

of vocabulary all belonged to the same lexical field For each word they had to write, students were give a definition, followed by the first letter of the required word and a set

of dashes to represent the number of the remaining letter

Part 7 consisted of 10 open cloze questions Students had to complete a gapped text which was short and simple This part aimed to read and identify the appropriate word with focus on structure and lexis

In part 8, students are asked to complete a simple information transfer task with

5 spaces Students had to use the information in one or two short texts (note and email)

to complete a note The purpose of this part was to read and write down appropriate words or numbers with focus on content and accuracy

To the researcher’s viewpoints, there were there reasons for the choice of the KET

as an instrument in this study Firstly, the researcher chose KET because it was internationally recognized by thousands of educational organizations throughout the world in about 100 countries (UCLES, 2007) Secondly, KET was a valid measure because it was carefully designed with detailed specifications (UCLES, 2007) Furthermore, KET was piloted and revised several times before its operational use to ensure the reliability (UCLES, 2007) Finally, the KET was chosen as testing instrument

in this study because it was believed to be appropriate with students’ elementary English level

3.4.2 Questionnaire

In this study, the questionnaire was used as a research tool to access the experimental group’s opinions as well as their attitudes towards the application of phrase reading to their improvement of reading comprehension According to Tuckman (1999), this research instrument helps researchers convert into data the information that they receive directly from research subjects by asking them rather than by observing and sampling them The questionnaire used in this study included two parts The first part asked students about their personal information such as name, age, and gender The second part had 5 questions to collect information on the categories They are (1) problems students have with phrase reading, (2) their attitudes towards phrase reading and (3) how to make phrase reading successful The questionnaire contained both closed-ended items and open-ended items for each issue The questionnaire was written in both English and Vietnamese (see Appendix C & D) However, the researcher only delivered the experimental group the questionnaire in Vietnamese version so that they could understand the questions and express their points of view Most of the questions were five-point Likert-type rating scale from strongly disagreement to strongly agreement The Vietnamese version of the questionnaire was checked for its wording and semantic validity In order to see the translated items was worded clearly, two English teachers from English Department were invited to read both the English and Vietnamese versions Based on their feedbacks, the researcher reworded some items to make them more understandable for her student

In brief, the construct of the questionnaire is describe in the table 3.2 below

Table 3.2 Summary of the questionnaire

I Getting participants’ information 1, 2, 3

II Investigating participants’ problems with phrase reading 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d,

1f

Inquiring participants’ attitudes towards phrase reading 2a, 2b, 2c, 2d,

2e

Examining how to make phrase reading successful 3a, 3b, 3c

Investigating students’ attitude on creation of phrase

General program training for the experimental group and control group

The experiment was conducted within 12 weeks and was consisted of three stages, among which the treatment stage lasted over 10 weeks Each week, the participants met once for English 2 class which lasted 3 hours In each meeting, the teacher covered 4 skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) Participants had 45 minutes for reading period

In the first week of the course, the teacher conducted the pretest of reading comprehension for CG and EG The time allotted for this test was 55 minutes

During the ten-week training session, the CG received no special treatment The student in CG were asked to read the text first and do the task by guided instructions in the textbook For the EG, phrase reading instruction was introduced to students in the experimental group In the reading period, the researcher delivered a lesson of

grammatical phrases to students in the experimental group for ten minutes In the first week of the treatment stage, the experimental students received the knowledge of noun phrases in ten minutes before the while-reading stage The teacher gave students examples by chunking some given sentences After that, the students were required to read and chunk a passage into phrases After getting the knowledge of noun phrases, the students were asked to apply it into the reading activities The steps of teaching and applying prepositional phrases, infinitive phrases, adjective phrases, verb phrases and adverb phrases were conducted from the second week to the sixth week in the treatment stage When students had the knowledge of all phrases above, they were asked to use phrase reading strategy to read all the text in the remaining time in the treatment stage After ten weeks treatment ended, on the last day of the course, students in both groups completed the post-tests and the questionnaire was distributed to the experimental group to get their feedbacks

About the reading comprehension (RC) pretest and posttest, there are totally 55 items, and the maximum score was 10, so the score was subjected to this formula

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑚𝑠

55 × 10 = RC score

The table below summarizes how the students were taught

Table 3.3 Summary of teaching procedure

- Read the text )

- Read the guided instruction of the tasks

Teaching procedures for the experimental group were outlined and carried out as follows:

Table 3.4 Teaching procedures for the experimental group in the treatment stage

Week Contents for the experimental group

1 Lesson on noun phrases and application of the targeted

techniques to reading activities

2 Lesson on prepositional phrases and application of the

targeted techniques to reading activities

3 Lesson on infinitive phrases and application of the

targeted techniques to reading activities

4 Lesson on adjective phrases and application of the

targeted techniques to reading activities

5 Lesson on verb phrases and application of the targeted

techniques to reading activities

6 Lesson on adverb phrases and application of the targeted

techniques to reading activities

7-10 Revision and application of all techniques train from week

1 to 6

Description of the textbook

The main material for this course is Breakthrough Plus 1 The book is labeled A2 level of the CEFR framework The book was composed by Miles Craven by

Macmillan Education in 2013 This textbook comprises of four parts: listening,

speaking, reading and writing The researcher covered four skills in this book There are in total 10 units in the course, which covers various topics and reading tasks The contents of the book and topics of reading texts are presented in the Table 3.5 below

Table 3.5 The contents of the textbook and topics of the reading texts

Unit 1: Introductions Personal profiles on a student website Unit 2: What a life! A magazine article about students life in

Canada Unit 3: Free time Messages on a student bulletin board Unit 4: Places A tourist information leaflet

Unit 5: Getting around A letter giving directions to someone’s

home Unit 6: Shopping An Internet shopping website

Unit 7: What’s happening A letter from a student on an exchange

program Unit 8: People An e-mail to a new friend

Unit 9: Having fun E-mail invitations and replies

Unit 10: Vacation A travel blog from a student on vacation

3.6 Methods of data analysis

As there are two types of data, namely tests and questionnaire The quantitative analysis was used for the pre-test and posttest results gained from both groups The scores from the pre-test and posttest of each group and the data collected from the questionnaire were executed with the assistance of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22 The analytical techniques would be described in details as follows

3.6.1 Analysis of the questionnaire

In order to analyze data of the questionnaire, the researcher used frequencies and percentages Frequencies provided the researcher the information about how often phenomena occur and they are based on counting the number of occurrences

3.6.2 Analysis of pre- and post-tests

In this study, the two groups did pre-tests and posttests and their results of these test were compared, so one of the typical analysis techniques Shohamy, 1989, p 203)

According to Seliger (1989), for this research design was t-test (Seliger & t-test is a

parametric statistical test used to compare the means of two groups It helps the researcher determine the difference between the means of two groups would be

significant and it could be concluded that the treatment was effective The

Independent-Samples T-test would be employed to compare the means of the two group in order to

find of there was any statistical significant difference between them

3.7 Summary

This chapter has presented the methodology used to measure the impact of phrase reading on reading comprehension of non-English major students at Thu Duc College of Technology It described the research site of this study, the participants, the methods of data collections, and the analytical framework for the data collected from the tests and the questionnaire The next chapter will show the result of data analysis and discussion

of the findings