VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY-HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** Dao thi hoa Using Supplementary Reading Materials with the Course book Business Basics to Improve the Efficiency of reading teaching and learning for Second-year Students at Bac Ha College of Technology Sö dông tµi liÖu ®äc bæ trî cho gi¸o tr×nh Business Basics nh»m n©ng cao hiÖu qu¶ cña viÖc d¹y vµ häc kü n¨ng ®äc cho sinh viªn n¨m thø hai tr-êng Cao ®¼ng C«ng nghÖ B¾c Hµ m.a minor thesis Field: Methodology Code: 60 14 10 Supervisor: Phan Thi Van Quyen Hanoi - 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Table of contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………… i Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………. ii List of tables and charts…………………………………………………………………. iii Table of contents…………………………………………………………………………. iv Part a: Introduction 1.
Aims of the study………………………………………………………………………. Significance of the study………………………………………………………………. Design of the study……………………………………………………………………… 3 Part B: development Chapter 1: Literature review 1. An overview of reading……………………………………………………………….
Definitions of reading comprehension…………………………………………. Models of reading. Reading skills and types of reading skills……………………………………… 5 1. Definition of reading skills……………………………………………….
Types of reading skills…………………………………………………. Materials development in language teaching…………………………………………. Definition of language teaching materials……………………………………… 7 1. Processes in materials development…………………………………………….
Types of materials evaluation……………………………………………. Criteria for materials evaluation…………………………………………. Supplementary materials in teaching reading skills…………………………. Definition of supplementary materials………………………………….
Criteria for selecting supplementary materials…………………………. How to use supplementary materials……………………………………. 11 Summary 5 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Chapter 2: Methodology 2. Background to the study…………………………………………………………….
The textbook Business Basics………………………………………………. Instrument for data collection………………………………………………………. The questionnaire for teachers………………………………………………. The questionnaire for students……………………………………………….
Data collection procedure……………………………………………………………. 17 Chapter 3: Data analysis, findings and discussion 3. Findings and discussion……………………………………………………………… 27 3. The teachers’ and the students’ evaluations of the current textbook Business Basics……………………………………………………………………… 27 3.
The teachers’ and the students’ expectations of supplementary reading materials……………………………………………………………………. Suggestions for selecting supplementary materials…………………………………. Designing tasks and activities for reading passages…………………………………. Sample supplementary readings……….
Conclusion of the study………………………………………………………………. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further study…………………………….3 9 Appendices Appendix 1: Questionnaire for teachers Appendix 2: Questionnaire for students 6 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Lists of tables and charts Tables Table 1: The teachers’and students’ evaluations on level of difficulty, content and length of reading texts in the textbook Table 2: The teachers’ opinions on reading exercises in the textbook Business Basics Table 3: The students’ opinions on reading exercises in the textbook Business Basics Table 4: Topics in the textbook need supplementary reading Table 5: Teachers’ expectations of the supplementary reading materials Charts Chart 1: The teachers’ purpose of using supplementary materials in teaching reading lessons Chart 2: The teachers’ suggestions on the types of exercises to be used in the supplementary materials Chart 3: Teachers’ sources to get supplementary reading 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Part a: introduction 1. Rationale Nowadays, in the time of globalization, English plays an essential role in the increasing development of science, technology, politics, economics, tourism, culture and so on. English language is not only considered as a means of communication but also a key to access the important achievements of science and technology.
Therefore, learners of English should acquire this language and teaching and learning English become popular in our country. Among four language skills, reading is very important in learning a foreign language as reading helps students to widen their knowledge and understand different academic materials written in English. Carrel (1981: 1) also emphasizes “for many students, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in a second language, particularly in English as a second or foreign language”. It is necessary for the second year students at Bac Ha College of Technology to develop reading ability effectively because reading provides a lot of useful information as well as enrich their language vocabulary and structures.
Reading will be an effective way to help students enhance their English proficiency especially their reading skills. Nevertheless, despite the teachers‟ and students‟ efforts, the students at Bac Ha College of Technology have a poor reading result that makes them uninterested in learning English in general and in learning reading skill in particular. The students‟ English proficiency at Bac Ha College of Technology is not the same. It is due to the fact that they come from different places.
Most of them come from the countryside so they can not have preferable English learning condition. The others come from towns and cities where they have more convenient condition of learning English. This results in low English proficiency of the students because of their limited vocabulary and grammar. In addition, they do not have appropriate reading strategies and background knowledge.
Therefore, students face a lot of difficulties in reading and understanding the long texts especially the texts relating to economic fields which they are studying. As a result, they find it hard to be successful in their reading and they are not interested in reading. 7 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com With the purpose of improving their English knowledge, it is very important for the teachers to provide them as many opportunities to read as possible. Nuttall in the book “Teaching reading skills in a foreign language” (1982) states that “reading as a purposeful activity, we can make teaching more purposeful and classes livelier, even in the difficult circumstances”.
All the above reasons have inspired me to carry out the study on “Using Supplementary Reading Materials with the Course book Business Basics to Improve the Efficiency of Reading Teaching and Learning for Second-year Students at Bac Ha College of Technology”, with a hope to improve the teaching and learning English as well as the teaching and learning reading comprehension. Aims of the study The purpose of the study is to find ways of developing the effective reading materials so as to improve the teaching reading skill of the teachers as well as to enhance the students‟ learning reading. The specific aims of this research are as follows: - To find out some different evaluations made by teachers and students towards the textbook Business Basics, which is currently used by the second year students at Bac Ha College of Technology. - To examine the teachers‟ and the students‟ expectations of supplementary reading materials.
- To give recommendations for selecting supplementary materials to improve teaching reading of the teachers as well as learning reading of the students. Significance of the study This study is of great importance to the author herself as well as to all teachers of English. It helps to reinforce students‟ English proficiency and suggests ways to improve the teaching of English in general and reading in particular at Bac Ha College of Technology and most schools and universities that share the same mandate. Research questions On the basis of the problems, the following research questions were formulated to conduct this study.
What are the teachers‟ and the students‟ evaluations of the textbook Business Basics? 8 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. What are the teachers‟ and the students‟ expectations of supplementary reading materials? 5. Methodology The methods used in the study is quantitative and qualitative. A questionnaire is used as a main instrument for data collection.
Two sets of questionnaires were designed and delivered to the teachers and the second-year students at Bac Ha College of Technology in order to find out answers to the research questions. The data were collected, synthesized and analyzed from the survey questionnaires for both teachers and students on their evaluations of the current textbook and their expectations of supplementary reading materials. Design of the study This study is divided into three parts. Part A is the introduction in which the rationale, aims of the study, significance, research questions, methodology and design of the study are stated.
Part B is the development, the main part of the study. In this part, there are four chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the literature concerning an overview of reading, reading comprehension with models of reading process, the theory of materials development and supplementary materials in teaching reading skills. Chapter 2 presents methodology of the study consisting of the background to the study.
It covers the setting, the textbook Business Basics, the participants, the instrument as well as data collection procedure. Chapter 3 goes into details of the data analysis, findings and discussion. Chapter 4 briefly deals with recommendations of the study. Part C comes up with the summary of the study in which limitations of the study and suggestions for further research are also presented.
9 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Part B: Development Chapter 1: Literature review 1. An overview of reading 1. Definitions of reading comprehension Reading comprehension plays an important role in teaching and learning a foreign language. It has the nature of communication, in which reading activity acts as a means of communication between the writer and the reader.
Reading comprehension can be affected by world knowledge, with many demonstrations that readers who possesses rich knowledge about the topic of a reading usually understand the reading better than classmates with lower knowledge. Roe, Stood and Burns (1987: 2) indicate “Reading comprehension is reconstruction, interpretation and evaluation of what author of written content means by using knowledge gained from life experience”. Sharing the same point of view, Grellet (1981: 3) consider “reading comprehension or understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it as effectively as possible”. In his definition, reading comprehension simply means reading and understanding.
Reading comprehension is not merely decoding-translating written symbols into corresponding sounds. Though these definitions are not exactly the same, what comes up a common point is that reading comprehension is the process in which the readers, as they read, can recognize the graphic forms of the reading text and what is implied behind these forms. While reading, learners of language need to have critical thinking to understand and analyze what is written. Then readers can learn both grammar and vocabulary after reading.
From that, they will easily understand the content of the reading. Models of reading In terms of the reading process, many language researchers (Nuttall, 1996; Ur, 1991; Alderson, 2000, etc) share the same viewpoint that there are three different ways of processing a text namely the bottom-up, the top-down and interactive models. The bottom-up models: The basis of bottom up models is linguistics knowledge of the reader. In these models, the reader starts with the written text (the bottom), and constructs meaning from the letters, words, phrases and sentences found within and then 10 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com processes the text in a linear fashion.
The bottom-up models analyze reading as a process in which small chunks of text are absorbed, analyzed, and gradually added to the next chunk until they become meaningful. The top- down models: The top- down process moves from the top, the higher - level mental stages, down to the text itself. In these models, the reading process is driven by the reader‟s mind at work on the text (reader- driven models). The reader rather than the text is at the heart of the reading process.
Interactive models of the reading process are proposed in the light of the perceived deficiencies of both bottom- up and top- down models. Like top- down models, they are reader- driven. This means the reader uses his or her previous understanding to guess about text content and as in bottom- up models, the reader is dependent upon what is in the text. Hayes (1991) supposes that “Interactive models are more than a compromise between bottom- up and top- down theories.
In interactive models, different processes are thought to be responsible for providing information that is shared with other processes. The information obtained from each type of processing is combined to determine the most appropriate interpretation of the printed page”.