VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES # " NGUYEN THANH BINH APPLYING “SCHEMA-BUILDING” TO HELP STUDENTS IMPROVE THEIR READING SKILLS AT UNIVERSITY OF LAW, HO CHI MINH CITY submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (TESOL) Supervisor DOAN HUE DUNG, Ph. Ho Chi Minh City, February 2009 RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS 0 I hereby state that I, Nguyen Thanh Binh, being the candidate for the degree of Master of TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library. In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for the purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for care, loan, or reproduction of the theses. Ho Chi Minh City, February 2009 Nguyen Thanh Binh 1 ACKNOWLEDGEGEMENTS I am very grateful to my supervisor, Ms.
Doan Hue Dung, Ph., for her explicit guidance in the completion of my thesis, and for her valuable advice, suggestions. I want to acknowledge and thank to all the members of my class, TESOL 2005, for their care and encouragement that make me feel shared and confident. And to all the teachers and students who have responded to the questionnaire survey to provide me a trustworthy source of data for the research. In addition, to my close friend, Ms.
Ta Thi Nguyet, for her cooperation in teaching the two experimental classes and valuable advice. My heartfelt thanks are also meant towards all the lectures and teachers whom I have studied in the course 2005-2008 at the USSH. 2 ABSTRACT The thesis investigates the difficulties of second-year students when they study ESP at the UL. In this thesis, possible causes for the students’ difficulties are also found, and then implications and recommendations for applying Schema approach to ease those difficulties are presented.
The study is carried out by means of an experimental teaching, which adopts the Schema theory, conducted on 255 students majoring in Law. Three sets of questionnaires were delivered to these students in two types of class (4 controlled classes and 4 experimental classes) and eight teachers of English at the UL who take part in teaching these classes. The results of the survey show that the students find ESP learning difficult because of their poor specialized vocabulary and lack of background knowledge related to the incoming texts. The findings also indicate that the students and teachers highlight the necessity of applying schema building in teaching and learning ESP.
Based on the findings, suggestions were made to provide the teachers with possible ways in order to overcome the obstacles in teaching ESP at the UL and effective techniques to improve students’ reading skills. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION. 01 CHAPTER 1: BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY.1 Description of the ESP course at the UL.2 Description of physical setting. 14 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .4 Data collection procedures.
45 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND SUGGESTIONS .2 Discussion of the findings. 65 CHAPTER 5: RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSION. 113 4 LIST OF CHARTS FIGURE 4.1: The ages of students in two types of class FIGURE 4.2: Students’ gender FIGURE 4.3: Students’ Placement Test Scores FIGURE 4.4: Students’ assessment of vocabulary FIGURE 4.5a: The students’ assessment of vocabulary in the experimental group.5b: The students’ assessment of vocabulary in the controlled group.6: The difficulty of grammar in ESP texts FIGURE 4.7: The difficulty of topics of ESP texts before the experimental teaching FIGURE 4.8: The difficulty of topics of ESP texts after the experimental teaching FIGURE 4.9a: The comparison of the difficulty of Topics of ESP texts in the controlled group.9b: The comparison of the difficulty of Topics of ESP texts in the experimental group.10: Students’ strategies in Pre-reading FIGURE 4.11: Teachers’ techniques in Pre-reading FIGURE 4.12: The necessity of Schema-building FIGURE 4.13: The frequency of applying Schema building FIGURE 4.14: The suitability of ESP teaching materials FIGURE 4.15: BBC News front page FIGURE 4.16: Encarta encyclopedia articles LIST OF TABLES TABLE 4.1: Students’ ages in two types of class TABLE 4.2: Students’ gender in two types of class.3: Students’ Placement Test Score TABLE 4.4: The difficulty of vocabulary TABLE 4.5: The difficulty of vocabulary after the experimental teaching 5 TABLE 4.6: The difficulty of grammar in ESP texts TABLE 4.7: The difficulty of topic of the ESP texts TABLE 4.8: The difficulty of topic of ESP text after experimental teaching TABLE 4.9: The difficulty of topics of ESP texts before and after the experimental teaching TABLE 4.10: Students’ strategies in pre-reading TABLE 4.11: Teachers’ pre-reading technique TABLE 4.12: The necessity of schema building in reading ESP text TABLE 4.13: The frequency of teachers’ uses Schema building in the class.14: The suitability of ESP material in learning and teaching 6 ABBREVIATIONS CD-ROM Compact Disc, Read-Only Memory ESP English for Specific Purposes EGP English for General Purposes IPR Intellectual Property Rights L1 First language L2 Second language UL University of Law, Ho Chi Minh City UN United Nations UNICEF United Nation International Children’s Emergency Fund WTO World Trade Organization 7 INTRODUCTION Vietnam’s economics has changed rapidly since Vietnam became a full member of the WTO; therefore, learning English, especially learning laws in English, has become an urgent need of government officers, managers, investors, lawyers, etc. in all over the country.
Using legal English terminology also becomes very necessary for students at the University of Laws, HCMC (UL) for their future usages. Therefore, ESP (English for specific purposes) is taught as a compulsory subject to second-year students and third-year students at the UL because of its importance. When studying English, students at the UL often think that reading skills can be accessed easier than other skills. However, in the process of reading, they can read words but they do not know what they mean so that they have to spend too much time looking up new vocabulary to understand the text.
As a result, the students who are good readers in their first language have difficulties transferring their reading skills to a second. In addition, in teaching and learning English, reading comprehension is one of the four skills that is spent much time and energy to develop. In fact, most effort and methods are spent on teaching vocabulary, grammar as well as translation and less attention is paid to teaching reading skills, especially building background information (Schema building) related to the texts.1 STATEMENT OF THE PURPOSE 8 Being a teacher of English with the experience of 10 years teaching English and with my observation at the UL, I recognize that in a reading class, specially in an ESP class, both teacher and students normally do not deal with reading as an intergrating skills that requires a combination of skills, knowledge and strategies. In reality, they pay more attention to teaching and learning some single aspects of the text like vocabulary and grammar or sentence structure.
They usually think that knowing the meaning of words is essential to understand the text; therefore, they tend to focus on the surface meaning and ignore factors like implied meaning, contexts, building background information related to the text. This results in the fact that the practice of reading skills is neglected. In other words, comprehension check is done through the question and answer exercises or true/false exercises and the reading comprehension is thought to be completed. The common reality of teaching an ESP reading text shows that the teacher skips the first important two stages (pre-reading and while reading) and focuses on the post-reading stage only.
Sometimes the teacher also discusses about the topic of the text and asks students to talk and match the vocabulary before reading the text but students are not interested in discussing and usually keep silent. As a result, reading class becomes boring and uninteresting to engage students in reading. Ultimately, students only do True-False exercises or answer the questions because their teacher asks them to do so in reading class. To make the reading lesson more comprehensible and enjoyable, there have to be a variety of tasks and activities that help students involve in the text.
According to Krashen (1982), comprehensible input is an important factor in language acquisition, and that a comprehension-before-production approach can facilitate language acquisition. Therefore, background knowledge is vital in reading classroom because it provides input for the readers and help them apply what they already know about a subject in reading comprehension. Rost (1994:142) states that without understanding input at the right level, learning cannot begin. 9 An important theoretical underprinting to the top-down approach is Schema theory.
The term schema was first used by the psychologist Bartlett (1932), and has had an important influence on researchers in the areas of speech processing and language comprehension ever since. Anderson (1977) points out that schema provides a form of representation for complex knowledge and that the construct, for the first time, provides a principled account of how old knowledge might influence the acquisition of new knowledge. Schema theory is immediately applied to understanding the reading process, where it serves as an important counterweight to purely bottom-up approaches to reading. The schema-theory approaches to reading emphasize that reading involves both the bottom-up information from the perceived letters coming into the eye and the use of top-down knowledge to construct a meaningful representation of the content of the text.
Schema Theory is a theory of learning. Schemata are models suggesting relationships between objects. They are learned and structure future learning. The theory hypothesizes that the schema a person uses during learning will determine how the learner interprets the task to be learned, how the learner understands the information, and what knowledge the learner acquires.
According to Nunan (1999:133), Schema theory suggests that the knowledge we carry around in our heads is organized into interrelated patterns. These are constructed from all our previous experiences of a given aspect of the experiential world, and they enable us to make predictions about future experience. In addition, Snow and Sweet (2003:1) consider reading comprehension as a process of “how to integrate new meanings with old information”. Therefore, it is necessary to provide the students the content knowledge to build up the meaning of the text.
The more students are familiar with the topics the more comprehension they get as they read. Building background knowledge should be thus a vital activity in a reading class. This study aims firstly at identifying factors which make reading ESP difficult; secondly at finding out whether schema-building activities and tasks 10 facilitate students’ comprehension and finally at proposing some pedagogical suggestions for teaching reading ESP effectively in order to help students build up their mental framework in studying this subject. In order to achieve the overall objectives of the study, three guiding questions are set up to answer the following research questions: 1.
What are the problems faced by the teachers and students in teaching and learning ESP at the UL? 2. How can Schema-building assist students in improving their reading skills? 3. What are solutions to enhance students’ reading skills in learning ESP at the UL? 02. PREVIOUS RESEARCHES IN RELATED FIELDS Many researchers have paid attention to ways of helping students to develop their proficiency in reading and to become good readers.
Some of them are various candidates for M.A in TESOL and they made great efforts to contribute something to the improvement of reading skills. Nguyen Thi Thanh Thao (2005:79) gave out a critical look at reading style preferences of the ESP students at Ton Duc Thang University. She indicated that in all classrooms there might be students with multiple learning styles. So are there in the reading classes.
She also conceded that, “at metalcognitive level”, there may be other factors other than reading styles that are closely related to learners’ reading process such as learners’ beliefs for their feelings, their motivations.