VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** TRAN THI THU HUONG AN EVALUATION OF THE TEXTBOOK ENGLISH FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES AT USSH, VNU (Đánh giá giáo trình Tiếng Anh chuyên ngành dành cho học viên cao học ngành xã hội nhân văn, trường Đại học Khoa học xã hội và Nhân văn, Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội) M.A Combined Programme Thesis English methodology Major code: 60 14 10 Hanoi - 2011 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** TRẦN THỊ THU HƢƠNG AN EVALUATION OF THE TEXTBOOK ENGLISH FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES AT USSH, VNU (Đánh giá giáo trình Tiếng Anh chuyên ngành dành cho học viên cao học ngành xã hội nhân văn, trường Đại học Khoa học xã hội và Nhân văn, Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội) M.A Combined Programme Thesis English methodology Major code: 60 14 11 Supervisor: Nguyễn Thúy Hƣơng, M.A Hanoi - 2011 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I: Introduction .1Background to the study.2 Aims of the study .4 Scope of the study. Design of the study. 14 Chapter II: Literature review .1 Materials in language teaching and learning .1 Roles of teaching material EFL/ESL classes.2 Types of materials .2 ESP and ESP materials.1 A brief overview of ESP .2 The role of ESP materials .1 Definitions of materials evaluation.2 Techniques of materials evaluation .3 Criteria for materials evaluation. Types of materials evaluation.
5 Models for material evaluation .1 Reasons for adaptation .2 Techniques for adaptation .5 Previous studies on materials evaluation. 43 Chapter III: Methodology. 45 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.2 Data collection instruments. 50 Chapter IV: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION .1 Results of data analysis .2 Data collected from questionnaires .1 The suitability of the ESP material to the aims .2 The suitability of the ESP material to the content of the material.3 The suitability of methodology.
73 CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS .1 The strengths and weaknesses of the material .1 To the content .2 To the methodology .4 Suggestion for further study .74 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 7 List of abbreviations CFL College of Foreign language VNU Vietnam national university, Hanoi USSH University of Social Sciences and Humanities ESP English for special purposes ESL English as second language ELT English Language Teaching EFL English as a Foreign Language TESOL Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 8 Lists of Figures and Tables Figure 1: Materials Evaluation Model of McDonough and Shaw (1993, p.3) Figure 2: Material Evaluation process (Hutchinson and Waters, 1993, p.98) Figure 3: Teachers‟ experience of teaching graduate students at USSH. Figure 4: Number of ESP classes of each teacher Figure 5: Students‟ working experience in their specialist field Figure 6: Student‟s purposes of taking ESP course Figure 7: Opinions of the ESP teachers and ex-students on the aims of the material Figure 8: Students‟ opinions on the difficulty level of the language items in the material Figure 9: Teachers‟ opinions on the difficulty level of the language items in the material Figure 10: Opinions of the ESP teachers and ex-students on the specialist vocabulary Figure 11 : Opinions of the ESP teachers and ex-students on the topics of reading texts Figure 12 : Opinions of the ESP teachers and ex-students on grammar structures Figure 13 : Opinions of the ESP teachers and ex-students on the frequency of different types of class-arrangement LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 9 Table 1 : The Selected criteria checklist for materials evaluation by Hutchinson and Waters (1993) and Cunningsworth (1984) Table 2 : The frequency of specialist topics students read Table 3 : Description of language focus in the material Table 4 : The frequency of skills covered in the material LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 10 Chapter I Introduction 1.1Background to the study 1.1 An overview of English teaching and learning for graduate students at USSH, VNU The University of Social Sciences and Humanities (USSH) is a prestigious educational institution where thousands of students of social sciences and humanities at different levels, ranging from undergraduate to graduate ones are being trained. They are trained to work in different fields of social sciences, including Journalism, Tourism, History, Sociology, etc. After graduation, a large number of learners will need English for their jobs.
Therefore, English is taught as a compulsory subject, aiming at providing learners sufficient knowledge and skills. During the whole course of graduate study, English accounts for 7 credits, equal to 105 class hours. According to the syllabus, there are two main stages: General English (GE) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP). In stage 1 comprising the first 4 credits, students are to achieve Basic English level C with general English knowledge and communication skills.
45 periods of English for Specific Purposes are expected to be covered in stage 2. However, for years, there was no ESP material for use, so during this stage, teachers and learners had to use the last 6 units in New Headway Intermediate by Liz and John Soars (1998) instead.2 The graduate learners To become a graduate student at the university, one has to be in the top group in entrance written exam of English and a specialized subject of their field; their results of English test scores must be from 50 out of 100 points at the minimum. It means that their English should be at pre-intermediate level. Thus, graduates are quite good at grammar, vocabulary and have fairly good writing skill.
Moreover, before taking ESP LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 11 course, the graduates have already finished the GE stage with 60 class hours and at the end of this stage they are assumed to have achieved the intermediate level of proficiency. In addition, they pay much attention to ESP because they are aware of the importance of English language in general and ESP in particular to their future job and study. However, most of them have very limited access to documents in English, even in their field of work.3 The teaching staff The Department of Foreign languages at USSH, VNU, has now become a unit under ULIS, VNU since 2009. It has a large teaching staff of English, both full-time and part-time teachers and all of them have to pass a serious recruitment exam which involves both English knowledge and skills and teaching skill, which helps to select qualified teaching staff.4 The ESP material Graduates of social sciences and humanities are from different fields: Literature, Journalism, Psychology, International studies, Tourism, etc.
whose demands for terminologies and specialized English expressions are varied. Practically, providing a helpful ESP program that can meet the demands of different sub-groups of learners of social sciences and humanities is a great challenge. To be more precise, with one textbook, not only learners of Tourism but also other groups of students like Journalism or International studies can get useful knowledge and skills. As has been mentioned previously, for many years, the English teachers at USSH used the 6 last units in New Headway Intermediate by Liz & John Soars together with teaching materials designed or selected by themselves for the 45 periods for ESP.
However, the demand of a specially designed ESP material for an ESP training course of social sciences and humanities was increasing, which forced the authorities of USSH to find a solution, and English for graduate students of social sciences and humanities, compiled by the Dean of the Department of Foreign LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 12 language, Dr. Lam Quang Dong, who is the most experienced teacher with more than 10 years teaching English at USSH, was the result. This material has been officially used as the core teaching material for students of social sciences and humanities at USSH since 2008. This material contains 3 topic areas: Population and economic issues, Superstitions and customs, and Religions.
Each unit is organized in such sections as follows: Language focus, Reading, Listening, which in some lessons is replaced by Writing. Language focus section deals with certain grammatical points in which learners are required to do rewriting exercises, gap-fill and correcting mistakes exercises or translating sentences from English into Vietnamese and vice versa. In the reading section, students read a passage on some topics related to their studying fields, like What is in a name?, Black cats and broken mirrors, Customs, and so on. Learners are provided tasks to gain some new terminologies, cultural and social knowledge and they also have much chance to practice reading and translating skills.
For Listening, teachers in charge of each class have to select their own listening passages to teach their students. In the writing section, the author provides different kinds of exercises varying from gap-fill to matching, writing stories or essays and describing graphs or charts, etc. in order for students to build sentences and extend them into paragraphs and essays. The material was highly appreciated by the administrators, teachers and students at USSH because it seemed to meet learners‟ needs.5 Arising problem However, after two semesters using the new course-book, there have been a lot of reflections from both teachers and learners on the appropriateness of the material and the learning outcomes.
Some reflections were positive but some were extremely negative. Therefore, an investigation into the appropriateness of this textbook to LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 13 learners‟ needs would be of great importance, as this study would provide information for the author to improve it so that students‟ language levels and teaching aims are met. These above mentioned facts inspired me to conduct this study “An evaluation of English for graduate students of social sciences and humanities at USSH, VNU”. Hopefully, the results of this study will be of much help to the teachers of graduate students at USSH in achieving the objectives of the ESP program in the coming years.2 Aims of the study The paper is aimed at evaluating the textbook English for graduate students of social sciences and humanities in terms of aims, content, methodology based on users‟ responses toward its appropriateness to the course requirements.
Based on the findings, recommendations on how to improve it, and thereby, improve the effectiveness of ESP teaching and learning at USSH shall be given. And the specific aims are: to evaluate the appropriateness of the material to the course requirements in terms of aims, content, and methodology. Then areas for improvement of this textbook will be identified. finally, to raise some recommendations to improve this textbook in order to meet the learning demands of learners.
In addition, theoretically the improved textbook of social sciences and humanities, which is rather rare, can be an effective and helpful referential material for teachers and learners.3 Research question To achieve the above mentioned aims, the following research question was posed: LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 14 - To what extent does the ESP material English for graduate students of social sciences and humanities at USSH, VNU meet the course requirements in terms of aims, content, and methodology? 1.4 Scope of the study Hutchinson and Waters (1993), Brown (1995) and many other language evaluation experts agreed that evaluating a teaching material is a complicated process based on different criteria such as audience, content, physical appearance, cultural bias, needs and so on. However, because of time limitation, the researcher just focuses on the criteria stated in the requirements of the ESP course for graduates of social sciences and humanities at USSH, VNU, including aims, content and methodology and time allocation. Design of the study The paper is organized into five chapters: 1.