CERTIFICATE OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: TEACHING READING TO THE FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS AT THE FACULTY OF ECONOMICS in terms of the statements of requirements for the Thesis in Master’s Programs issued by the Higher Degree Committee. Ho Chi Minh, December 2005 NGUYEÃN TÖÔØNG CHAÂU i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr., who gave me the valuable and dedicate guidance to do the research. It is his highly informatic instructions that helps me make the thesis to meet the standard. My special thanks to MA.
Laâm Töôøng Thoaïi, Vice Principle of Information Management System Department at at the Faculty of Economics, for his generous assistance to present the data collection by SPSS software. In particular, I would like to thank Dr. Ñinh Thò AÙnh Nguyeät, Principle of Foreign Language Department at the Faculty of Economics, who offered me many opportunities to teach reading to the sophomores at FOE. Many thanks to Dr.
Nguyeãn Hoaøng Tuaán, Principle of Foreign Language Department at the University of Natural Sciences, for his precious consultance on the research. I also wish to thank all my colleagues, the teachers at the Faculty of Economics, for their willing cooperation to carry out the large data collection. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my dearest mother and my lovely ant who prospered and encouraged me to do the research for a long time. ii ABSTRACT The thesis aims to measure the effects of four key including Teachers, Learners, Task, and Evironment on the first-year students’ reading performances.
This investidation was carried out by: (1) a survey of students’ opinions about the four key factors of teaching-learning process and (2) a collection of students’ reading scores of the mid-term test. Then, the mean-comparative stastistics analyses of T-test and One-way ANOVA were run to measure the effect of the four key factors of teaching-learning process on the students’ reading scores. The total number of respondents was 505 from 10 classes of five different departments at the Faculty of Ecconomics. The results showed that the poor readers have been influenced by many factors of teaching-learning process including: Teachers’ teaching practice (beliefs and methodology); Learners’ English background (subject areas, sub-recruitment, branch, places studied highschool, English learning duration, out-school English learning duration), characteristic (type of analytic learner), cultural differences (Content, Formal and Linguistic schema); Task difficulty of lexical and structural items (Multiple-meaning words, Articles, tenses, voices); and learning Environment (democratic and frinedly class climates).
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Certificate of authorship. iii Table of contents. viii List of tables. viii List of figures.
Background to the study. 3 Overview of the thesis. 4 Chapter 2 - LITERATURE REVIEW. 6 Teachers’ beliefs about Learners.
6 Teachers’ beliefs about Learning. 7 Teachers’ beliefs about themselves. Ways of teaching. 8 Summary of Teachers.
9 iv Concrete learners. 10 Authority-oriented learners. Meaning-making process. 15 Intrinsic motivation and Extrinsic motivation.
15 Learners’ beliefs about themselves. 17 Summary of Learners. The universe of content. Level of complexity.
Level of abstraction. Literal Reading comprehension. 20 Summary of Tasks. The interaction between these factors.
22 Summary of the Chapter 2. Purposes of the study. 32 Summary of Chapter 3. 32 Chapter 4 - RESULTS AND DISCUSSION .1 Results from the questionnaires and reading tests.
Results from the questionnaires. Results from reading tests. Findings and Discussion. The influence of Teachers’ factors .2 The influence of Learners’ factors.
The influence of Task difficulty. The influence of Learning environment .3 Limitation of the study. 81 Summary of the Chapter 4. Summary of the main findings.
93 Summary of Chapter 5. 103 vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS FOE = The Faculty of Economics VNU-HCMC = Viet Nam National University – Ho Chi Minh City LISTS OF TABLES Table 4. ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. x Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION English for Special Purposes (ESP) is a topic with broad and continued interest in developing countries.
Teaching ESP is an especially challenging set of duties for English teachers. The search for the most effective pedagogy and course outlines is a constant task in institutions of higher education that have a commitment to providing their students with the rudiments of English in their particular fields. This thesis focuses on the teaching of ESP in one particular setting in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam in 2004. Background to the study Over recent years, teaching ESP to sophomore level students who are not majoring in English has increased in many universities in Vietnam.
The effort was initiated as an improvement in the training of young educated students in a variety of technical and scientific fields. In order to introduce the teaching of ESP, many institutions choose to skip portions of the general English curriculum. There were many difficulties associated with this skipping of periods of general English. The most controversial issue was the need to upgrade all of the students to a pre-intermediate English level in order to allow them to acquire the xi knowledge of the ESP courses.
Another problem was that the teachers were expected to have a profound background knowledge of ESP contexts which was not the case. To relieve some of these tensions, the Faculty of Economics (FOE), one of the members of the Viet Nam National University-Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCMC), in 2004 adopted a Business English textbook to teaching English to sophomores. This text was built around a balance of the four skills, aiming to give students the opportunity to practice English in a meaningful context. It was thought this renovation was well suited for the learning of English as desired by the Economics students and appeared to fit the training objectives of the Faculty.
Even so, there were a certain number of students who could not pass the final examination after the first-term of study. Although this number is small (about 21%), it is a large enough problem that is very necessary to examine. In examining this problem it is hoped that some measures of help can be identified for the incompetent students to overcome the new English teaching-learning situation. This is the reason this study will focus on the teaching of English to the first-year non-English major students.
Another reason for the selection of this topic is the importance of reading as a skill needed for students of ESP. Reading is the major input sources of vocabulary acquisition (Naggy, Anderson & Herman 1987) in order to xii learn better the other skills such as Listening, Speaking and Writing (Carrell 1988, Krashen 1982, Nuttal 1982, Harmer 1991). It is also the only testing form employed by most current universities without testing Listening and Speaking directly. It is, therefore, the desire of this study to measure the effects of teaching-learning factors on the students’ reading performance.
The purposes of the study: The study was carried out across ten classes from five different departments at the FOE, aims to: 1. Identify the problems associated with teaching ESP using a Business English textbook. Measure the effects of the factors of teaching-learning process on the first-year students’ reading performances. Provide some recommendations to reduce the number of weak readers since the first year at the Faculty of Economics.
Research questions: xiii To specify the purposes of the study, the research questions sought for: 1. What teaching practices account for holding the interest of ESP students? 2. What are the students’ characteristics, learning motivation, learning goals and cultural background? 3. Are the students aware of reading strategies and skills? 4.
How do the students evaluate the difficulty of tasks? 5. To what extent are the students satisfied with the class climates? 6. Which of these sets of characteristics are associated with test performance? These questions aimed to explore the effects of four key factors of teaching-learning process (Teachers, Learners, Task, and learning Environment) on the first-year students’ reading performances. Overview of the thesis: This thesis includes five chapters.
Chapter 1 introduces the study background in which the problems exits and explains the purposes of the study as well as the research questions that will be addressed. Chapter 2 provides information background to understanding the study and all of the aspects examined in the study. Chapter 3 presents the methodology of the study including research subjects, purposes, questions, tools, and procedures. Chapter 4 describes the data collected and analyses the results as well as points out the limitations of the study.
Chapter 5 summarizes the findings and then suggests some useful solutions to deal with the problems; finally resulting in a set of conclusions concerning this thesis. xv Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW This Chapter provides background information necessary for understanding the nature of this study and the research questions being addressed. First, four key elements of a social constructivist model of the teaching-learning process are presented. Then, a brief introduction of the interaction between these four elements is mentioned.
Next, a description of the reading comprehension assessment is presented. And finally, the materials presented in this Chapter will be summarized. Four key elements of the teaching-learning process The four key elements of the teacher–learning processes which were identified by the social constructivist school included: Teachers, Learners, Tasks, and learning Environment. The Social Constructionist School is one of the popular schools of educational psychology.
Teachers: The teacher is the first element which has a great influence on the teaching- learning process. There are many factors affecting the actions of teachers, however, the various beliefs held by a teacher and the ways of teaching used xvi by a teacher mostly decide the success of teachers as well as their students’ learning. Teachers beliefs: There have been several studies carried out to demonstrate that the actions of the teachers are highly influenced by their beliefs. In general, teachers’ beliefs had a greater influence than teachers’ knowledge on the way they planned their lessons, on the kinds of decisions they made and on their general classroom practice.
There are three different aspects of teachers’ beliefs. Teachers beliefs about Learners: Teachers’ beliefs about Learners will determine the relationship between the teachers and the learners. Meighan (1990) found seven different ways which reflect the teachers’ views of the learners: resisters, receptacles, raw material, clients, partners, individual explorers and democratic explorers. These views will decide the roles of teachers in the interaction with students.
They can be advisors, facilitators, consultants, co-communicators, partners and joint problem-solvers (Marion W. For example of the adults learning foreign language at Foreign Language Centers, learners are considered as clients, the role of the teacher can be to meet all the learners’ needs from purpose, time to money. In addition, it is not true that all the students coming to the classroom are willing to learn, so the teachers will have some activities to help the resisters want to learn (Marion W. Classifying the learners’ role in the xvii teaching-learning process is very important for teachers to choose suitable techniques to improve their teaching.
Teachers beliefs about Learning: Teachers’ beliefs about learning mentioned here refer to teachers’ beliefs about learning outcomes of learners which must be planned clearly and concretely in the teaching process. According to Marion W. Burden (1997: 60), “the question of what makes a good teacher must ultimately be concerned with what and how much learners learn and what exactly that learning is for.” Effective teachers are suggested to know what kind of learning outcomes they want their learners to achieve, for example: a quantitative increase in knowledge, memorization, the acquisition of facts/procedures which can be retained and/or used in practice, the abstraction of meaning, an interpretative process aimed at the understanding of reality, and some form of personal change (Gow and Kember 1993). For the requirement of the first-term of the first-year English program at the Faculty of Economics, lexical and structural acquisition of business English was focused.
Teachers beliefs about themselves: As Marion W.