VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES -------- NGUYỄN THỊ THANH HUYỀN IMPROVING STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY RETENTION THROUGH CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTIONS Cải thiện vốn từ vựng của sinh viên thông qua các hướng dẫn dựa trên nội dung M. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60.11 HANOI – 2014 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES -------- NGUYỄN THỊ THANH HUYỀN IMPROVING STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY RETENTION THROUGH CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTIONS Cải thiện vốn từ vựng của sinh viên thông qua các hướng dẫn dựa trên nội dung M. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60. Lâm Quang Đông HANOI - 2014 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT.
I hereby certify that this minor thesis entitled “Improving students’ vocabulary retention through content-based instructions” is completely the result of my own research for the Degree of Master at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, and that this thesis has not been submitted for any degree at any other university or tertiary institution. Signature: Date: NGUYỄN THỊ THANH HUYÊN i TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am, first of all, particularly indebted to my supervisor, Assoc. Lâm Quang Đông for his invaluable assistance, instructions and correction, excellent suggestions and constant encouragement during the research period. Without his guidance and help, this work would not have been accomplished.
Secondly, I am thankful to all the lecturers and staff of Faculty of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies, University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University for their scientific knowledge, guidance and enthusiasm during my course. My special thanks also go to the leaders and my colleagues at Ha Long College of Arts, Culture and Tourism for their support and encouragement. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the students who have participated in this research. I would like to send my sincere thanks to my friends and classmates for their enthusiasm and advice while the work was in progress.
Last but not least, I would like to convey my deepest gratitude to my dear family members, who are always besides me to support and encourage me to fulfill my study. NGUYỄN THỊ THANH HUYÊN ii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ABSTRACT This study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the use of content- based instructions on first year students‟ vocabulary retention at Ha Long College of Arts, Culture and Tourism. It made a comparison between a traditional method of teaching vocabulary with translation, spelling, the phonemic transcription and a new method involving content-based instructions to find out how students could memorize the words they learnt more effectively. The observation was carried out in 06 weeks of the second semester of the first year and was divided into 12 lessons.
The subjects were 45 students of a class of the Hotel and Restaurant Department NVDL K13. The class received the treatment involving content-based instructions and observed by the author, who entered every necessary information in her diary. Vocabulary tests, including pre-test, progress test and post-test, were administered. The data collected from the test scores were analyzed to measure the size of vocabulary that students could retain.
The result showed considerable improvement in word memorization of the students in the class. The findings of the study also indicated that content-based instructions should be used for future vocabulary learning. Some implications and recommendations for the future studies were also included. iii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com TABLE OF CONTENT CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT.
iii TABLE OF CONTENT. iv PART ONE: INTRODUCTION. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM.
AIM OF THE STUDY. SCOPE OF THE STUDY. METHODS OF THE STUDY. ORGANIZATION OF THE THESIS.
5 PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT. 6 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW. What is vocabulary?. What is involved in knowing a word?.
Traditional vocabulary teaching. Current vocabulary teaching. VOCABULARY MEMORIZATION IN LANGUAGE LEARNING. Short-term and long-term memory.
Major factors affecting word memorization. CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTIONS. What is Content-based instruction (CBI)?. Benefits of content-based instructions .3 Comparison with other approaches.
What does a content-based instruction lesson look like?. 16 iv TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. RESEARCH QUESTION RE-STATED. An action research process.
The teaching context. 28 CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND IMPLICATIONS. STATISTICS AND ANALYSIS OF DATA. Information from the observation.
Result of the continuous monitoring. The results of the pre-test, progress-test and post-test. MAJOR FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. 37 PART THREE: CONCLUSION.
LIMITATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS. I v TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the study Among influential factors to learning English, vocabulary is an essential component, central to language, and is of great significance to language learners. It provides us with materials to feed into the grammatical structures in order to produce complete utterances.
It is one element that links the four skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing all together. Without vocabulary, speakers cannot convey meaning and communicate with each other in a particular language. Vocabulary as the major part of language learning has been the subject of numerous studies which have made significant contributions to the field. The prominent theorists and researchers in the field have long recognized the role of vocabulary knowledge in second or foreign language learning.
Accordingly, new approaches, techniques, exercises and practice have been introduced into the field to teach vocabulary (Hatch & Brown, 1995). It has been suggested that teaching vocabulary should not only consist of teaching specific words but also aim at equipping learners with strategies necessary to expand their vocabulary knowledge (Hulstjin, 1997). At Ha Long College of Arts, Culture and Tourism (HCACT), which is known as a good education provider to students of Arts, Culture and Tourism, English has been considered a compulsory subject and has attracted considerable attention from the Management Board. Teaching and learning English in general and vocabulary in particular is the concern of both the teaching staff and the students.
The most frequently-used method of teaching vocabulary in a class of English is giving the explanations and Vietnamese equivalents of words, and then having students do written practice exercises. Several teachers have also tried to apply one or two new ways of teaching vocabulary in their classes; however, the effect has not been significant enough. Students just sit in silence, and then copy the corrected 1 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com answers that are given by their teachers. They seem to get bored with this way of learning every day, then they forget and cannot speak or make sentences with the words they have learned.
Perhaps, there can be various reasons for this, including large classes, psychological or cultural differences, teaching methods, teacher‟s knowledge, student‟s lack of ideas or language devices, etc. More importantly, words cannot be memorized if introduced out of context in which they are used. In other words, if teachers wish that their students could retain new words better in their memory, new words must be put into, or associated with, meaningful content. This is exactly the belief which drove me to conduct this action research entitled “Improving students’ vocabulary retention through content-based instructions”.
Statement of the problem In language learning, students need to have tools to learn new words as well as to prevent them from forgetting new words (Pimsleur, 1967, cited in Nation, 2001). This is true with students of Tourism at HCACT, who have to learn English as a compulsory subject at the college. Nguyễn Thị Linh Lam (2004) and Đào Thị Thanh Mai (2004) suggest that Vietnamese students need to be taught how to apply appropriate vocabulary learning strategies to acquire vocabulary in a more effective way. HCACT students of Tourism specializing in restaurant and hotel services are trained to be waiters /waitresses or receptionists who are required to use English very often in their jobs.
Therefore, a large proportion of the college‟s training curriculum is allocated for the English subject. In the first year, they have 10 forty-five minute periods of English a week or 150 periods during the two terms of the year. Moreover, the majority of the students learnt English for 3 years and some for 7 years before entering this college. Despite this large amount of English learning time, their vocabulary is still poor.
Many of them complain that they spend most of the time learning vocabulary, but the results are disappointing. They cannot remember the words they learn. Consequently, their lack of good vocabulary has 2 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com badly affected their writing, reading, listening and speaking proficiency. They seem to be not eager enough to learn vocabulary lessons in particular and the English subject in general.
The real situation leads to our assumption that the students may have problems in their vocabulary learning techniques. With years of teaching experience, the author realizes that the teaching of vocabulary for the first year students of Tourism at HCACT encounters a lot of trouble because they have to cope with a large number of words specializing in restaurant and hotel services. Although several techniques in teaching vocabulary are presented, the effectiveness is not considerable. Teaching vocabulary through games is often recommended and also shows some advantages.
For example, it can help students acquire English words quickly and create rather relaxing learning atmosphere for students. However, it makes the class very noisy and some games do not require students to speak any language during the games. Teaching vocabulary through word lists is also applied at HCACT, but it does not seem to be very effective for the first year students because it is said to be boring, so it cannot help them to memorize words as effectively as they expect. The English teachers at HCACT are now faced with the challenge of finding ways how to help their students memorize vocabulary effectively and how to motivate them in the vocabulary lessons.
Following is a description how vocabulary of the textbooks “May I help you” or “English for cooking” is taught. There are many ESP words presented in each unit of the book, but there is a lack of visual illustrations for students to imagine the things that they have never seen before. Pictures or photos, for instance, are hardly ever used in the vocabulary lessons. It can be said that the teachers want to make changes neither to the course book nor to their current teaching techniques.
They just present vocabulary by supplying the words‟ meaning and phonemic transcription. Their students repeat the words and 3 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com simply copy them into their notebooks. This outdated way of teaching makes the lessons boring and fails to stimulate the learner‟s imagination and memorization. That is why it cannot motivate students to learn vocabulary and they consequently forget the words that they have just learnt.
In brief, the problems of teaching and learning vocabulary for the first year students of Tourism are regarded as serious by both the teaching staff and students. Therefore, there is an urgent need for an alternative to the conservative way of teaching vocabulary at HCACT. Aim of the study The current situation has urged the author to apply the method of content-based instructions in teaching vocabulary for the first year students of Tourism at HCACT in order to help her students learn new words more effectively and remember them longer. With the hope to help these students improve their vocabulary retention, the study was conducted to evaluate how content-based instructions could help students to be better at retaining the meaning of the words.
Ultimately, this will help improve English learning and teaching at the institution. Research question The study was conducted based on the hypothesis that the use of content-based instructions in teaching vocabulary helps students memorize vocabulary and word meanings better and more logically.