Based on the data collected from the questionnaires for teachers and students, the author emphasizes the following questions to discuss the reality of teaching and learning English reading skills to NEMs at VU.
The first question is teachers and students‟ kills preferred to teach and to learn among the four skills: Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing in EFL classrooms for NEMs at VU.
Chart 4.1: Teachers’ preference of skill to teach in EFL classrooms at VU
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Listening Speaking Reading Writing
Chart 4.2. NEMs’ skills preferred to learn in EFL classrooms at VU
The charts 4.1 and 4.2 show that most of the teachers and NEMs prefer to teach and to learn Speaking skill rather than the other ones: 45% teachers like to teach Speaking skill the most and 41% NEMs love to learn this skill in comparison to the other ones. They like to teach and to learn Speaking skill because of two major reasons. The first one is that classes for speaking are always interesting and exciting for students and it is easy for teachers to organise activities in speaking classes. Only 25% of the teachers like teaching reading and 22% of the students enjoy reading class.
The second question is about teachers and students‟ attitudes toward reading skill in teaching and learning EFL for NEMs at VU. The charts below show the data collected from the question in the questionnaire.
Chart 4.3: The teachers’ attitude toward the role of Reading Comprehension Skill in teaching EFL
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41%
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Listening Speaking Reading Writing
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Very important Important Not very
important
Not important at all
Chart 4.4: The students’ attitude toward the role of Reading Comprehension Skill in learning EFL
As can be seen from the charts above, a significant number of the teachers (60%) and students (55%) considered reading skill very important. A proportion of 30% of the teachers and 24% of the students thought that reading was as important as the other skills when learning English. None of the teachers agreed that reading was not important.
The data collected indicates that the majority of the teachers and students are aware of the significant role of reading skill in teaching and learning English language because this would have influence on students‟ jobs in the future.
In addition, when interviewed, both of the teachers claimed that reading exercises in Soars, John and Liz (2007) were repeated, which made students feel bored, thus have bad effect on their learning.
Another question is about the students‟ opinions about their reading lessons. As can be seen in the Chart 4.7, among the 100 students surveyed, only 33% of them found their reading lessons interesting whereas 67% claimed that their reading lessons were not interesting.
Chart 4.7: Students’
evaluation of reading lessons
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important
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100 students
Interesting Not interesting
Then, as can be seen in the Chart 4.8, when asked about the elements which could make the reading lessons interesting, the students thought that interesting activities (35%), more chances to communicate in English and to participate in activities in their reading classes (42%) and various types of exercises (35%) could make them excited in learning process. On the other hand, the students who evaluated reading class not interesting had their own opinions about it. While 52% of the students claimed that dealing with only doing exercises made reading lesson boring, 32% of the students found reading lesson not interesting because of the fact that they learn and do exercises lonely, without peer interaction. Long and difficult reading texts made 38%
of the students surveyed feel bored in reading lessons while repeated and boring exercises is the reason why 35% of them found reading lessons not interesting. More different reading activities besides the exercises in the textbook are advisable in reading classes.
Chart 4.8: The students’ reasons for their evaluation of reading class
The next question is about the activities students usually do in English reading class. The aim of this question is to see the way the teachers gives the reading lesson to them and their attitude of having the reading lesson. The chosen items, the number of the students choosing each item and the percentage are in the following pie-chart.
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35% 42%
35% 35% 32% 38%
Not interesting 52%
Interesting
Chart 4.9: The activities students usually do in English reading class
The bar chart 4.9 shows the fact that nearly half of the students (48%) are in the habitof listening to the teacher attentively followed by serious note-taking, which throw themselves into passively waiting for the ready-made answers in English reading classes. 20% of the students completely depend on other classmates and offten listen to their peers‟ answers. Though a number of the students are willing to participate in various discussions about the reading topic, they may show a slow and inactive reaction to the questions without an appropriate guiding activity.
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20% 21%
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Listening to the teacher and taking notes
Listening to others' statement or speech
Answering many questions raised by
teacher
Discussing the reading text with the other
group members
The next question is about the type of classroom activities often used during reading lessons.
Chart 4.10: The classroom interaction used in a reading lesson
The information of the chart 4.10 above indicates that individual and whole class are predominant types of classroom interaction in a reading lesson among the four types chosen by the informants (individual, pair work, group work and the whole class). All of them agreed that group work and pair work were not often used in reading classes.
In addition, when interviewed, teacher A said, “I often focus on individual work because students don‟t have the habit of working in group. It would take them a lot of time to finish the assigned task if they worked in groups”. Similarly, teacher B commented that the students preferred working individually to working in pairs or small groups when engaged in reading tasks. Their shyness and fear of making mistakes often prevented them from sharing their opinion with other students.
Furthermore, as can be seen in the chart 4.11, the data of surveyed questions shows that most teachers focus only on while-reading stage. At the pre-reading stage, 65% of the surveyed teachers said that they usually gave a brief introduction to the text
Students Teachers 0%
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Individual
Pair work
Group work
Whole class 34%
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Students Teachers
while75% of them admitted that the activity they did quite often was presenting new words and grammar structures as required in the material. Perhaps, these activities, which do not take much time and effort, are quite easy to carry out since there are guiding questions for discussion at pre-reading stage in the material. Half of the informants preferred giving students some more guiding questions while only 20% of the surveyed teachers ticked the choice of giving students a short discussion on the topic of the text.
Chart 4.11:Activities teachers often use at pre-reading stage
Besides, when responding to the question: “What do you most frequently ask your students to do in after-reading stage?” all of the teachers said that they often did as it was required in the material. 80% of them said that they often asked their students to summarize the text. 75% of the teachers admitted that they usually asked their students to translate into Vietnamese to make sure that they had understood well the reading text. Only 20% of the informants said that they asked their students to discuss the reading text or to write a short paragraph related to the topic of the text.
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Give brief introduction to the
text
Give guiding questions for students to answer
Give students a short discussion on
the topic of the texts
Present new words and grammar
structures
Chart 4.12: Tasks often assigned by teachers in Post-reading stage From the data collected, it can be concluded that teachers preferred Grammar Translation method at the beginning and the end of the reading lessons. Moreover, in the while-reading stage, not many of the informants teach their students skills such as skimming, scanning, and predicting, inferring and guessing the meaning of new words from the context (approximately30%). Most of them chose to ask their learners to answer comprehension questions and providing more exercises (70%).This would cause difficulties for students in comprehending the reading texts.
Chart 4.13: Skills teachers often teach their students in While-reading stage
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Summarize the
text Translate into
Vietnamese Discuss the text
Write a short paragraph related to the
topic of the reading text 80%
75%
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Skimming to get the main ideas
Scanning to get specific information
Predicting Guessing the meaning of new words from the
context
Inferring Answering comprehension
questions and providing more
exercises
Another question is “What are the difficulties in teaching and learning reading skills for teachers and NEMs at VU?” Obviously, there exist certain difficulties in teaching and learning reading skills to NEMs at Vinh University. The charts below present the data collected from the answers of both teachers and students.
Chart 4.14: Difficulties faced by teachers and students in teaching and learning reading
As shown in the bar chart 4.14, 40%of the teachers claimed that students' limited vocabulary caused difficulties in their EFL reading classes. 30% of them said that their students had grammar problems and limited background knowledge, which influenced their reading ability. 35% of the teachers admitted that they did not have enough time to help enhance their students' reading ability. 45% of the teachers surveyed said that students‟ lack of reading strategies had worse effect on their work.
Finally yet importantly, many teachers thought that large size class was one of the factors that made their reading lessons less effective.
It seems that the students have more difficulties than their teachers do. 45% of the students thought that their reading ability was hampered by their limited vocabulary. Nearly half of the surveyed students (with 47% and 40% respectively) also
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Students' limited vocabulary
Students' grammar problems
Students' lack of background
knowledge
Limited time to read the
texts
Students' lack of reading strategies
Large size class
Students Teachers
chose the lack of reading strategies and grammar problems as their difficulties. 40% of the students surveyed said that they did not have enough time in reading comprehension because the reading texts were too difficult for them.
Brief, the students‟ weak ability of reading and level of background knowledge seem to make the quality of teaching and learning reading ineffective as expected.
When interviewed, the students claimed that they are lack of appropriate techniques or strategies and do not know how to deal with different types of reading texts. They sometimes got stuck when encountering new vocabularies or structures because they just looked at every single word when they read. It was difficult for them to recognize unimportant words in reading texts to ignore. Understanding every detail was necessary for them. These problems clearly prevented the students from improving their reading abilities because they spent too much time on unimportant information.
Besides, the researcher also spent time observing some reading lessons at VU, which reveals that current teaching reading to NEMs at VU is not as efficient as it should be. While teaching reading skills, the teachers who spent most of the time on vocabulary and structures did not pay much attention to comprehension. The teachers did most of the activities without teaching the students the most effective ways to successfully exploit the reading text by themselves. Thus, the teacher, not the students, was the center of the class. The students had few chances to practise language skills.
Sometimes they were asked to work in pairs or in groups for practicing in a limited amount of time. Little help from the teachers was given during these activities. The students only listened to the teacher's explanation and did what they were asked to do.
Consequently, they became passive and dependent on their teachers.
To sum up, the classroom observation confirms the fact that the Grammar - Translation and "teacher-centered" methods were frequently used in most of the reading lessons. Therefore, it can be concluded that the teaching and learning reading skill to students at Vinh University are not as efficiently carried out as expected.
The next question is about teacher perception of Cooperative Learning.
Definition of Cooperative Learning Teacher (N=20)
Percentage (%) 1. Cooperative Learning means having students work in
groups/pairs in a class of language.
1 5%
2. Cooperative Learning means having students work in groups/pairs in which students feel sink-or-swim together, share task, work in harmony, support each other, and interact with each other in a class of language.
19 95%
3. Cooperative Learning means having students work in groups/pairs in which one student does all the work or students do their work individually in a class of language.
0 0%
4. Cooperative Learning means a student achieve his or her goal and has no bearing on whether other students achieve their goals in a class of language.
0 0%
5. Cooperative Learning means when one student obtains his or her goal, all the other students with whom he or she is competitively linked fail to obtain their goals.
0 0%
Table 4.1: Teachers’ perception of cooperative learning
As shown in Table 4.1, nearly all of the teachers (95%) had the right understanding of the concept “Cooperative Learning”. According to them CL meant having students work in groups/pairs in which students felt sink-or-swim together, shared task, worked in harmony, supported each other, and interacted with each other in a class of language. Only one teacher (5%) said that CL meant having students work in groups/pairs in a class of language. None of them chose the three last answers.
However, when asked “Do you often apply communicative methods such as CL (Cooperative Learning) in teaching reading for your students?”, or “Have you ever conducted reading activities in your classes of English with group work (or CL method)?” the answers were not optimist as expected. The pie chart 4.15 below indicates that 17 teachers (85%) do not apply CL in teaching reading. Only three of the teachers surveyed applied CL in reading classrooms
When answering the question “How often do you conduct your reading class with group work activities, among those teachers above, none of them chose “very often” or “often”, only two of them said that they sometimes applied this kind of activities in their classrooms and one of those three teachers stated that she rarely or never applied in her classes of English in general and in reading classes in particular.
The following bar chart will clarify this point.
Chart 4.16: Frequency of applying CL in EFL reading classes
The table 4.2 below explains why the teachers found Communicative Approach or CL method challenging.
15%
85%
Chart 4.15: The frequency of organizing reading activities with Communicative Methods in English
reading classes
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Factors Teachers (N=20)
Percentage (%) A: It is challenging to teach EFL in classes with multi-
leveled students.
17 85
B: It requires a lot of time to prepare compared with the traditional methods.
13 65
C: Teacher has psychological burden. 9 45
D: It takes a great amount of effort to deal with big class. 10 50 E. Teachers do not have enough time to organize
communicative activities in classes.
12 60
Table 4.2: Factors that made application of communicative methods a challenge in English reading lessons
For the teachers, there are a number of challenging factors when applying communicative methods in their reading classes. 85% of the teachers thought that the most challenging factor for them is classes of mixed ability. Because many students started learning English when they entered university while other students had studied English for about ten years before university, there was a big gap in the students‟ level of English. Therefore, how to narrow this gap and encourage students to take part in tasks is a big question, and it requires much time and efforts from teachers. Besides, 13 teachers (65%) claimed that much time consumption in preparing reading tasks compared with the traditional method was another challenge. 60% of the teachers said that they do not have enough time in classes to organize communicative activities like Cooperative Learning ones in their reading classes. 10 surveyed teachers (50%) claimed that they had to spend a great amount of effort dealing with large size classes.
In fact, when interviewing, the two teachers assumed that there were so many students with different attitudes and levels of English in all classes at VU. The classes for
NEMs usually consisted of over 50 students. Last but not least, nearly half of the teachers (45%) said that CL was challenging in their classes because of their psychological burden when teaching reading tasks and speaking English all the time.
Moreover, the two teachers interviewed also pointed out the same difficulties as those listed in the survey. All of the interviewed teachers agreed that applying the traditional teaching methods resulted in these difficulties. Additionally, teacher A complained that his students had problems to communicate in the English language because of their lack of language proficiency. Besides, the results from the interview revealed that large size classes were also a big problem that all the teachers faced up with. The teachers thought that it was very difficult to manage when applying communicative method like CL with large-size classes because they were afraid of one of disadvantages of CL: the noise from students during class activities. In addition, it was not possible for the teacher to give each of them individual attention and to be sure that they were doing the task(s) assigned. As a result, the teachers lost interest in introducing CL in their classes because they were not able to control class activities.
The last question of the two surveys was designed in the hope that the teachers and the students would make useful suggestions for the improvement of the quality in teaching and learning reading skill for NEMs at VU.
Chart 4.17. Suggestions by teachers and students for improvement of reading lessons
As can be seen from the chart 4.17, improving teachers' methodology, increasing student confidence in communicating in English and classifying students‟
level of English were suggested by most of the informants when asked about what should be done to make the reading lesson more exciting. That careful preparation of both teachers and students would improve reading ability were chosen by 70% of the teachers and 65% of the students. Therefore, it can be concluded that the students have desire for improving communication competence though they may be unaware of communicative approach.
With the other choices, the teachers and the students had different opinions. The number of the surveyed students choosing more group work activities and more teacher guidance of effective reading skills by teacher is 35% and 65% respectively. On the
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TEACHER SUGGESTIONS STUDENTS SUGGESTIONS