MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY TRỊNH THỊ HUYÊN EFL STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN READING ACADEMIC TASKS Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching Code: 8140111 SUPERVISOR: LÊ NHÂN THÀNH, PhD BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƢỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN TRỊNH THỊ HUYÊN NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN CỦA HỌC SINH TRONG CÁC LOẠI BÀI TẬP ĐỌC HIỂU TIẾNG ANH Ngành: Lý luận và phƣơng pháp dạy học bộ môn Tiếng Anh Mã số: 8140111 NGƢỜI HƢỚNG DẪN: TS. LÊ NHÂN THÀNH i STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP The work contained in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. I certify that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, my thesis contains no material previously published or written by any other person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself. Date: Signed: Trinh Thi Huyen ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This paper could not have been completed without the encouragement and support from several individuals and groups to whom I would like to express my deep sense of gratitude during the stressful time of writing this paper.
First and foremost, I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Le Nhan Thanh, for his support, patience, and encouragement throughout my study. His technical and editorial advice was essential to the completion of this paper and has taught me innumerable lessons and insights on the workings of academic research in general. I have been extremely lucky to have a supervisor who cared so much about my work.
My sincere thanks also go to the teachers at the Department of Foreign Languages, Quy Nhon University for the useful knowledge that they taught me during the time I attended the M. I would also like to thank the teachers and students at Ly Tu Trong school for their untiring supports to this research paper. Without their passionate participation and input, the study could not have been successfully conducted. Last but not least, I owe an unpaid debt to all the generous support, love, and care from my beloved families and friends, which has given me more strength, belief, and motivation to overcome all the troubles in the whole process of this research.
Finally, I offer my regards and blessing to all of those who supported me in the completion of the thesis. iii ABSTRACT Reading comprehension is an important skill in learning English because students with poor reading comprehension often face academic challenges. In order to help students acquire good reading competence at school, it is essential to find out what difficulties they face in reading comprehension tasks. Therefore, this study aims to explore difficulties that secondary school students encounter in their English reading comprehension tasks by investigating their perceptions of the causes of the difficulties.
The study was conducted at Ly Tu Trong Secondary School, Gia Lai Province with the participation of 90 students. The data for this study was collected through questionnaires and 12 semi-structured interviews. Among eight groups of factors, including both linguistic or non-linguistic factors, poor grammar knowledge was perceived as the factor causing most difficulties for the students in their reading comprehension tasks, followed by lack of content knowledge, lack of vocabulary, lack of background knowledge, and lack of reading strategies. In contrast, non-linguistic factors including psychological factors, institutional factors, and physical factors were not perceived as the causes for difficulties with reading comprehension tasks.
The results from the analysis of the interviews supported those from the questionnaires. They affirmed that lack of vocabulary, grammar knowledge, background knowledge, content knowledge, and reading strategies were the major causes of difficulties for the students in doing reading comprehension tasks. Based on the findings, implications for educators, school administrators, and EFL teachers are addressed, and further studies are suggested. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP.
iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. v LIST OF TABLES. vi LIST OF FIGURES.BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY .RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY .AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY. Aim of the study.
Objectives of the study .SCOPE OF THE STUDY .SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY .ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY .READING AND READING COMPREHENSION .THE IMPORTANCE OF READING COMPREHENSION .TYPES OF READING .READING DIFFICULTIES AND FACTORS INFLUENCING READING DIFFICULTIES. Factors influencing reading difficulties .RESEARCH SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS .DATA COLLECTION INSTRUMENTS .DATA COLLECTION PROCEDURES. Administering the questionnaires. Administering the interviews .DATA ANALYSIS METHODS .RESEARCH RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY .LEGAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS.
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS .RESULTS FROM THE QUESTIONNAIRES. Difficulties caused by linguistic factors. Difficulties caused by non-linguistic factors .RESULTS FROM THE INTERVIEW. Discussion of difficulties caused by linguistic factors.
Discussion of difficulties caused by non-linguistic factors. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS .SUMMARY OF MAIN FINDINGS. Implications for students. Implications for school administrators.
Implications for teachers .LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY.RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER STUDIES. 75 APPENDICES v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS EFL: English as a Foreign Language FL: Foreign language L1: First Language L2: Second Language SPSS: Statistical Package for Social Sciences vi LIST OF TABLES Table 3. Background information of the participants. Process of conducting the survey.
Mean Range for Agreement Degree. Students‟ perceptions towards causes of difficulties in reading comprehension tasks. A comparison between linguistic and non- linguistic factors. 56 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3.
Quantitative data collection procedure. Qualitative data collection procedure. INTRODUCTION To establish the space for the topic and research questions for the study, this chapter starts with an overview of reading comprehension and difficulties of reading comprehension students face in the world and Vietnam context. It then describes the rationale for the study, the research aims and objects, and research questions.
This is followed by the scope and the significance of the study. Finally, there is an overview of the organization of the study. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY Nowadays, together with growth of global connection, English has recently been paid attention to as it is the language of era and science. The most important skill among the four language skills lies on reading as it can improve the overall language proficiency (Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998; McDonough & Shaw, 2003; Krashen & Brown, 2007).
More comprehensively, reading plays a central role in our educational, working, recreational and social lives. The ability to read is highly valued and important for social and economic advancement. A student may have no reading difficulty in his or her mother tongue. The problem exerts when reading is applied to a second language, as students might be lagging behind in a number of reading components, including accuracy, comprehension, and speed.
As Alsamadani (2008) mentioned, lagging behind is a cognitive difficulty associated with the process of reading in another language. In other words, these difficulties are more likely to be associated with the nature of the language or even sociocultural aspects. All models of comprehension recognize the need for readers to build up a mental representation of text, a process that requires integration across a range of sources of information, from lexical features to knowledge concerning events in the world (e., Garnham, 2001; Gernsbacher, 1990; Kintsch, 1998). 2 Researchers mentioned that the ability to read is crucial for children‟s future academic, economic, and social success (Norton & Wolf, 2012; Olitskey & Nelson, 2003; Snow, Burns, & Griffen, 1998).
A majority of children are able to learn to read with ease, and have average reading ability that is characterized by fluent word identification and adequate comprehension (Vellutino & Fletcher, 2005). However, 10% to 15% of English speaking school-aged children have reading difficulties (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2008; Snow et al., 1998; Vellutino & Fletcher, 2005; Vellutino et al. Reading comprehension is the process of constructing meaning by coordinating a number of complex processes that include word reading, word and world knowledge, and fluency (Harris & Graham, 2007). Readers comprehend a text when they are able to communicate with a text.
They are able to draw the information from written text and interpret this information appropriately. In other words, reading comprehension is a kind of interaction between the readers and the text through written symbol in order to grasp the information from written text. The importance of reading comprehension is really realized by the government to make a policy in educational system; reading as one of the four language skills must be taught for the students in the classroom (Tran Quoc Thao & Duong My Tham, 2018) Many academics agree that reading comprehension is not simply recognizing individual words, or even understanding each individual word as our eyes pass over it. Due to the reason, exploring the difficulties students face in reading tasks is an iportant part of to understand the current problems.
In the Vietnamese context, teaching and learning English is brought up as a top concern, especially in the current period of international integration 3 (Le Ha Van, 2021; Tran Quoc Thao & Duong My Tham, 2018). Therefore, English has been included in the national education curriculum and has become a compulsory subject in schools from primary school to university level. In addition, reading comprehension plays an important role in human life. Its role is realized as very substantial because it opens up new knowledge for individual.
The goal is to gain information from what the writer conveys through a text, to use this information to enrich his/her experiences, and to improve his/her intellectual ability. In Vietnam, there are two reasons explaining why the young generation seems to read less and less. The first reason is that they suffer pressure from school work and the second reason is that there are many obstacles and difficulties which reduce interest of the youth in reading book. Students seem to be distracted from reading because of the outside environment such as noisy friends, noisy school, and so on.
For such reasons, reading comprehension should be highly recommended in every school especially in secondary school. RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY Learning English seems to be one of main tasks of students from kindergarten to university. In this process, they encounter a large number of difficulties. As we know, if vocabulary is at the heart of developing proficiency and achieving competency in language skills, reading is one of the most important skills helping language learners improve language proficiency in language learning and retention in every aspect.
Many authors affirm that although reading is of great significance among four basic language skills, many students encounter problems in their reading comprehension (Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998; McDonough & Shaw, 1993; Krashen & Brown, 2007). 4 As we know, the success of language learner is largely influenced by his/ her reading practice. The role of reading in language proficiency is explained by Harmer (2007) who states: “Reading is useful for language acquisition and the more they read, the better they get…Reading also has a positive effect on students‟ vocabulary knowledge, on their spelling and their writing” (p. The problem is that few studies were conducted in the field of exploring issues and challenges facing secondary school students in Vietnam.
In addition, the land of Gia Lai province today is the long- standing residence of the Jrai (33,5%) and Bahnar (13,7%) ethnic groups who have a few chances to study English since primary school so they usually face difficulties in every aspect of English in general and in reading specifically. In fact, we have all taught many students who do not understand whatever they read, and we struggle with ways to increase their reading and comprehension skills. Thus, the students‟ reading acquisition and reading retention need to be enhanced. Consequently, to fill the literature gap concerning Vietnamese lower secondary school students‟ difficulties with reading comprehension tasks and to find out the measures to enable them to tackle these difficulties, the study aims at exploring difficulties that lower secondary school students encounter in doing reading comprehension tasks and causes of difficulties at Ly Tu Trong Secondary School, Gia Lai.
AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY 1.