Rationale The global spread of English over the last forty years is remarkable by the increasing number of users of the language, by its depth of penetration into societies and by its range of functions. Nowadays there is a requirement to study English usually because of the known role of English as an international language of communication, trade and research. In addition, with the globalization of trade and economy and the continuing increase of international communication in various fields, the demand for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is expanding, especially in countries where English is learned as a foreign language. The success of English language has turned it into a vehicle for international communication and the orientation of linguistic studies towards language as communication in social contexts has largely contributed to enhance the dignity of ESP studies.
Currently, there is a greater interest in the content with which ESP must be involved – the subject matter which ESP students have to study and work with through English. Furthermore, there have been a growing number of individuals who require language for occupational or vocational purposes. This has necessarily led to a corresponding increase in attention on teaching and learning ESP so as to provide appropriate knowledge toward the ESP students. ESP has become one of the most important areas of EFL teaching (Brunton, 2009).
In Vietnam, ESP plays an essential role in teaching and learning English because it prepares learners to “use English within academic, professional, or workplace environment” (Basturkmen, 2006, p. Many ESP courses such as English for Science and Technology, English for Business and Economics, English for social Science (Hutchinson & Water, 1987) have been organized in order to meet students‟ demand. As for students of economics, especially for accounting, the 1 demand for learning ESP is more increasing because of the requirements of an accountant in the future. As a teacher of a vocational school, I have found that the reading capability of students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College is still much limited.
First, the level of General English of most students is low, they could not read effectively, so they cannot gain understanding of major materials. Even some students don‟t know how to speak, listen or write in English, they know nothing in English. Second, many ESP students have a background knowledge in their specific area. However, one of the challenges that most of them face is their English language inadequacies, especially the specific English language competence necessary to read their content subjects.
Third, ESP teachers who devote a lot of time and energy to students‟ skills lessons find that constraints in the process of teaching are unavoidable. Many teachers at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College have difficulties designing lesson plan with interesting learning materials or motivating their students to learn ESP because of the limit of time for preparatory work, the limit of students‟ knowledge of English, the lack of necessary skills on the part of the teacher and the limited resources. And the last is that although there are some accounting books available on the market, the bookshop, no books meet the needs of students interested in becoming Certificated Public Accountant. Some books are out of date, some books do not have various and interesting activities to motivate the learning process of students.
Correspondingly, this research was carried out for the following reasons: Firstly, ESP has become more and more important, so the needs of studying ESP of accounting students have been stronger and stronger nowadays, especially reading skill needs to be paid much more attention. Secondly, English for accounting is a compulsory subject of learning process at university in general and at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College in particular. 2 The ESP reading skill can help students widen their background knowledge, as well as knowledge of accounting. Thirdly, reading ability of accounting students is too weak.
Many students cannot succeed in this subject because of facing many different difficulties. And their failure makes them unconcerned with learning reading in English. As a result, they cannot make progress and gain high score in examinations. This problem reduces the output quality of accounting students.
Last, I am now a language teacher of ESP class for the accounting students of Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College. As a matter of fact, how students actually learn reading is one of my major concerns. Exploring the students‟ difficulties in their learning reading ESP can help me better my teaching practices as well as providing my students‟ implications for a more efficient ESP reading learning. With these assumptions in mind, I decided to conduct a study with the following topic: Exploring difficulties faced by students of accounting in learning reading in English at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College, Phong Dien District, Thua Thien Hue Province.
Research purposes Based on the reasons mentioned above, the specific aims of this research are to study and investigate the following points: - The reality of teaching and learning reading comprehension ESP for accounting students at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College. - The difficulty in learning reading ESP that students of accounting at this college have been facing. - The main factors that lead to such difficulties in learning ESP reading comprehension. 3 - Making some suggestions to overcome the difficulties and improve ESP ability of learning reading comprehension for students of accounting.
Research questions How is ESP reading skill learned at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College? What difficulties do students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College often encounter in learning reading ESP? Which factors lead to such difficulties in learning reading ESP of Accounting students at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College? 1. Scope of the study This study is mainly carried out on a small scale including 3 language teachers, 3 content teachers, 100 third – year students of accounting at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College. Organization of the thesis This thesis is divided into five chapters as follows: Chapter 1: Introduction includes the rationale for the research, the purpose of the study, the objectives, research questions, scope and organization of the study. Chapter 2: Literature Review will be an introduction about the previous study related to the problem under investigation.
The theory background such as theory of reading, reading comprehension, English for specific purposes, accounting is included in this chapter. Chapter 3: Method and Procedure will present research method, procedure of data collection, description of samples, data analysis and research procedures. Chapter 4: Findings and discussion will analyze the results from the questionnaires, the classroom observation as well as interviews. The results is the 4 base to suggest some solutions to help students of accounting study better at ESP reading skill in the next chapter.
Chapter 5: Conclusion and Implication summarizes the major findings of the research and gives implications for teaching and learning reading ESP at Nguyen Tri Phuong Vocational College, and point out the limitations of the study. There are also some suggestions for further research works related to the study. 5 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2. Previous studies related to difficulties in reading In Japan, Matsumura (1984, cited in Kitao (1982) said that Japanese learners believe that they can read English well but cannot speak it well.
But this is only a fiction. Most of the Japanese, according to this person, can neither speak nor read English well. The author has taught reading English to more than 2,000 Japanese college students since 1978, he has strong doubts about Japanese students‟ actual English reading proficiency. According to Kitao (1982), Japanese learners meet a lot of difficulties when reading because of the following reasons: Firstly, vocabulary plays an important role in reading in English.
Students often use an English-Japanese dictionary whenever they read English materials. As soon as they find a new word, they look it up in the dictionary and write down the first meaning in Japanese language. They do not care whether the meaning of the word fits in that context or not. They continue reading until they find another word.
After knowing all the meaning of all new words one by one, they replace all English words into Japanese words one by one. They do not pay attention to the meaning of the context. Secondly, most students know a little about the culture or social implication of words, sentences or discourse. Thirdly, some students considered reading aloud as reading strategies.
If being asked to read a text aloud, most of the students can read it so that it is understandable to native speaker of English. However, these students cannot remember anything about the content of the text after finishing reading if they do not read it again silently. In order to overcome the above problem, Kitao (1982) gave some solutions such as: 6 Textbooks should not use exercises that involve replacing Japanese words with English words. Students need to read English without using Japanese.
Students should be encouraged to read faster, for example, by keeping track of their speed. In this way, students can improve not only their reading speed but also their reading comprehension. Students should know a purpose for reading each time they read. In Vietnam, Nguyen (2012) in her research paper, she did an investigation on difficulties encountered by students majoring in general practitioner in reading at Hue University, College of Medicine and Pharmacy.
She indicated many problems in reading texts such as limited vocabulary knowledge, difficult terminology. Among them, vocabulary is considered as the biggest problems. To overcome the above problems, Nguyen (2012) stated that teachers should improve their methodology. They should apply different approaches to teach vocabulary, giving homework and checking previous lesson frequently.
Similarly, Nie (2011) carried out a case study on the difficulties in learning English reading comprehension by 11th grade students at a high school in Daklak province. This study showed that these 11th grade students did not face any difficulties relating to the issue of perception of reading comprehension. However, it pointed out a number of difficulties resulted from teaching method of the teachers as well as learning materials. The findings of this research were significant and helpful in drawing solutions to deal with these difficulties and help students improve their reading comprehension skill.
In brief, there are many researches of problems in reading skill and many solutions for the above problems. However, these pieces of research focused on students who learn general English. For ESP students, realizing difficulties in their learning reading ESP is also important and necessary. Thus, difficulties in reading ESP faced by subjects are worth investigating.
Theoretical background of teaching and learning reading 2. What is reading? Reading belongs to receptive skills and is considered as one of the cognitive activities of languages that are written or printed in a text. However, there are a number of definitions of reading but the following can be regarded as the most typical ones. William (1984) and Grellet (1981) argues that “Reading is a process whereby one looks at and understands what has been written or printed in a given text” (p.
According to Lefevre (1964), reading is one of the great practical significances to everyone. It helps us to open our minds to understand and watch everything in every field in the world. It brings us new overview about society and human beings. Moreover, Witty (1963) claims that “Reading is one of means of communication” (p.16), and explains that reading is considered as a two-way action that involves both the writers and readers, and reading is successful when the writer‟s meaning is clear in the reader‟s mind.
In addition, Nuttall (1982) also asserts that reading is a process of communication between writers and readers through a text. This process shows us that the writer has a message, which he wants the readers to share through the form of encoding and decoding. Kenneth Goodman (1967, cited in Carrell and Eisterhold, 1998) refers to reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game (p. The “guessing”, however, is far from random.