VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES ********************* ĐẶNG THU HƯƠNG A STUDY ON THE IMPROVEMENTS IN READING OUTCOME OF EFL LEARNERS TAKING THE INTENSIVE IELTS EXAM PREPARATION COURSE AT AMES ENGLISH LANGUAGE CENTER Nghiên cứu về mức độ tiến bộ với kỹ năng Đọc của học viên sau khi tham gia khóa học luyện thi chứng chỉ IELTS tại Học viện Anh ngữ AMES M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 8140231.01 Hanoi, 2018 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES ********************* ĐẶNG THU HƯƠNG A STUDY ON THE IMPROVEMENTS IN READING OUTCOME OF EFL LEARNERS TAKING THE INTENSIVE IELTS EXAM PREPARATION COURSE AT AMES ENGLISH LANGUAGE CENTER Nghiên cứu về mức độ tiến bộ với kỹ năng Đọc của học viên sau khi tham gia khóa học luyện thi chứng chỉ IELTS tại Học viện Anh ngữ AMES M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 8140231. Nguyễn Hoà Hanoi, 2018 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to my respectable supervisor, Prof. Nguyen Hoa for his restless and sympathetic encouragement, valuable advice and patient guidance until the completion of this study. My sincere thanks also go to my dear colleagues at AMES Language Center for all their help, support and encouragement when I encountered difficulties.
I wish to acknowledge my thankfulness to the two IELTS preparation classes for their enthusiastic participation in the project. Finally, I am deeply indebted to my beloved parents, my daughter, my siblings, and my post-graduate friends for their sacrifice, encouragement and care. i TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ABSTRACT In recent time, there has been an increasing number of those who want to sit an IELTS test to get a desirable score for their academic, recruitment or admission purposes. This has resulted in the fact that many private English language schools in Vietnam have included IELTS preparation courses in their training program.
These schools usually state strongly about the effectiveness of their IELTS preparation classes; however, there has been little investigation on this so far. This study is intended to explore the improvements made by IELTS learners in terms of (1) their reading comprehension & test-taking strategies, and (2) their IELTS Reading band scores. The participants selected for the study included 30 learners from two IELTS reading preparation classes at AMES English language center in Hanoi. Through the instruments of pre-and post-tests, survey questionnaires and interviews for learners, the study discovered that after taking a 42-hour preparation course, the learners have well mastered the IELTS reading strategies, which have resulted in their significant improvement in IELTS Reading band scores.
In addition, regarding the explicit strategy instruction given, the students felt welcome as they could see that the improvements they achieved are mainly attributed by the teacher‘s careful modeling and instruction for each type of questions in the IELTS Reading Test. ii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .ii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iii LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES. vi PART A: INTRODUCTION.
Rationale for the Study. Aims and Objectives of the Study. Methodology of the Study. Scope of the study.
Significance of the study. Organization of the study. 6 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW. Reading and reading comprehension.
Strategy use and reading results. Strategy instruction in previous literature. Strategy instruction procedures. The roles of modelling and scaffolding in strategy instruction.
Contextualization and explicitness in strategy instruction. 14 iii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. The IELTS Reading Test. What is IELTS?.
IELTS Academic Reading. IELTS Reading strategies. Definition of test preparation. Types of test preparation.
Previous studies on improvements of learners at test preparation language courses. Review of previous studies on reading comprehension strategies among Vietnamese learners. Context of the study. Setting of the study.
The IELTS Intensive Reading Course. Procedures of data analysis. 31 CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS. Results addressing research question 1: Improvements on IELTS reading strategies.
Reading strategies with highest and lowest ratings before and after the course. Reading strategies with highest and lowest gains and gains in groups of strategies36 III. Results from the open-ended questions. Results addressing research question 2: Improvements on IELTS band scores.
Results addressing research question 3: Learners‘ attitudes towards the explicit reading strategy instruction. 42 iv TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Results from open-ended questions in questionnaires. Results from qualitative data – Interview with high-score and low-score achieving students.
Implications of the study. Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further study. 54 v TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.center LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES Table 1.
How IELTS Academic Reading module is scored. IELTS Reading Course with explicit strategy instruction. Occupation and exposure to English of learners. Reasons for taking IELTS Test of the learners.
Comparison of reading strategies used by learners before and after the Reading Intensive Course. The highest rated reading strategies before and after the course. The lowest rated reading strategies before and after the course. Reading strategies with highest and lowest gains after the course.
Average of mean and gain of reading strategies in groups. IELTS reading pre- and post-test scores. Learner strategies training cycle. The IELTS Academic Procedures and Components.
Students' biggest problem with IELTS Reading Test before the course. Students' biggest improvements in reading after the course. Number of students with different gains in the IELTS Reading Test .center TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.center PART A: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale for the Study On the global basis, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) is generally recognized as an international benchmark of proficiency in English.
Scores on IELTS are widely used as a part of recruitment or admission procedures set by educational institutions, employers, professional registration bodies and government immigration agencies. IELTS candidature, in particular, has witnessed a rapid growth in recent years with over 1.5 million test-takers every year including thousands of Vietnamese candidates. To meet the demands of the IELTS preparation market and help more and more candidates succeed in the IELTS test, private language schools in big cities like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City which offer corresponding IELTS preparation courses are developing at an accelerating rate. The IELTS test consists of two modules: the Academic and General training modules.
As the Academic module is designed for those seeking admission to undergraduate and postgraduate courses like all the participants involved in this essay, this study focuses on the Academic reading module. From personal observation, the researcher realized that many Vietnamese learners of English, in general, and pre-intermediate students at American English School (AMES), a private English language school in Hanoi, Vietnam, in particular, after several years of learning English, turn out to be word-by-word readers. That is to say, students construct the meaning of the text by decoding at word and sentence levels. When encountering long and complicated reading passages of the IELTS Academic reading module, students are confused about the way to achieve understanding and gain information from the text.
They tend to read very slowly making an attempt to understand the meaning of every single word, or they hardly show any effort to guess meanings of unknown lexis from reading context. In addition, they frequently try to translate the reading passages into Vietnamese. As a result, many of them fail to finish the test under the constraint of time. In other 1 (LUAN.center TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.center cases, students lose marks for not paying attention to the number of words required for the reading task.
One possible explanation for the above-mentioned problems is that they are not equipped with adequate and efficient reading strategies even though students have already acquired a range of vocabulary and grammar after years of learning English. Teaching and learning to read effectively under the test condition is a central issue in most IELTS reading preparation courses in language schools. However, there is a dearth of studies analyzing the progress of these EFL learners after taking such courses in Vietnam. As a result, this study is an attempt to investigate whether the intensive reading preparation course can be effective in raising the learners‘ awareness, encouraging their use of the strategies and improving their IELTS band scores of the Academic Reading module.
This will hopefully give an insight into the potential of explicit strategy instruction in extending the range of reading strategies that learners can employ in the domain of IELTS reading and it can also assist teachers and educators in reviewing IELTS teaching methodology and EFL teaching in general. Aims and Objectives of the Study This research is carried out with the aim of assessing the level of learners‘ improvements on academic reading performance in the IELTS test after taking the intensive preparation course at American English School (AMES). In other words, by comparing the input and output of one learner and comparing the outputs among learners, the research will evaluate the effectiveness of the IELTS reading course at AMES which is based on explicit reading comprehension strategies and test-taking strategies; whether it could offer candidates an efficient preparation and improve chances for learners to gain high scores in the real test. Conjugant with the above-mentioned aim, there are a number of research objectives required to work on.
They are presented as follows: - Define reading comprehension, reading strategies, reading strategy instruction, describe their characteristics, and present several models of classification.center TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.center - Indicate the purpose, format and components of the IELTS test with their highlights. - Investigate factors related to the Academic Reading Module involved in the IELTS test with the necessary reading strategies to achieve higher band score in this module. - Apply and analyze the process of teaching IELTS reading strategies to improve learners‘ reading performance. - Explore the learners‘ attitudes towards IELTS reading strategy instruction.
- Give recommendations to other teachers of English on how to teach students to employ IELTS reading strategies efficiently to improve their scores in the IELTS Academic Reading Module. Research Questions In accordance with the aforementioned objectives, the study seeks to answer these following research questions: 1. To what extent does the explicit reading comprehension strategy instruction help to improve learners’ use of strategies under the test condition? 2. To what extent do learners improve their IELTS band scores of Academic Reading module after completing the test preparation course with explicit reading strategy instruction at AMES English Language Center? 3.
What are students’ attitudes towards the explicit strategy instruction in IELTS Reading preparation course? 4. Methodology of the Study It has been decided that the study will make use of both quantitative and qualitative data. This is to serve the ultimate goal of identifying the level of improvements the students acquire after taking the reading course with explicit strategy instruction at AMES. Quantitative data are to be collected with the medium of two questionnaires supplying the researchers with figures to analyze learners‘ thoughts and approaches.
In addition, the reading scores of the pre-tests and post- tests were also utilized as they provided a quick and easy way of looking at their 3 (LUAN.center TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.center improvements made by IELTS learners. Meanwhile, qualitative data will be obtained through the means of an interview after the post-test. The detail of the methodology applied in the study is discussed in Chapter 2 of Part B. Scope of the study American English School (AMES) takes pride in many years of experience in training high quality English according to international standards.
AMES provides English language training for all school & university students, working people and large enterprises in Vietnam.