VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES NGUYỄN HOÀNG PHƯƠNG TRANG AN INVESTIGATION ON THE WRITTEN TEST OF THE NATIONAL ENGLISH CERTICATE – LEVEL B - AT AN GIANG UNIVERSITY - CENTER FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGES A thesis in TESOL SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE MASTER OF TESOL Supervisor: Assoc. ĐINH ĐIỀN HOCHIMINH CITY – 2010 i CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINAL I certificate my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: “AN INVESTIGATION ON THE WRITTEN TEST OF THE NATIONAL ENGLISH CERTICATE – LEVEL B AT AN GIANG UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGES ” In terms of the statement of Requirement for Thesis in Master’s Programs issued by the Higher Degree Committee. This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other institution. Ho Chi Minh City , August 31, 2010 Nguyễn Hoàng Phương Trang ii RETENTION AND USE OF THESES I hereby state that I, NGUYEN HOANG PHUONG TRANG, being a candidate for the degree of Master of Arts (TESOL) accepted the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library.
In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of theses. Signature:…………………………………… Date: August 31, 2010 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First of all, I wish to express my profound gratefulness to my supervisor, Associate Professor – Dr. Dinh Dien, Lecture of the Department of Comparative Linguistics – HCMC University of Social Sciences and Humanities; Lecturer of the Department of Computing Science - HCMC University of Natural Sciences for his invaluable guidance, assistance and encouragement during the preparation and completion of this thesis. Also, I would like to thank to my colleagues of Angiang University Center for Foreign Languages for their kind support that helps me to collect and provide data related to my subject.
On a personal level, I am grateful to my family, without whom my thesis would not have been possible. Last but not least, never would this thesis have been accomplished without all those who helped me their handful hands in the research project: all my colleagues at my Center for Foreign Languages – An Giang University, their precious remarks and suggestions. iv ABSTRACT The relationship between vocabulary knowledge and text readability is a robust one. Vocabulary knowledge has consistently been found to be the foremost predictor of a text's difficulty.
However, the relationship is a complex one. Procedures used by readability formulae to assess the vocabulary factor can over- or underestimate text difficulty. In general, it is not the mechanical counts of easy or difficult words in a text that make a text easy or difficult, but what the reader knows about the words in a text. Vocabulary knowledge is strongly correlated to reading comprehension.
The correlations have been found to be vigorous almost regardless of the measures used or the populations tested. Although these measures are of reading comprehension, there certainly would be similar correlations between language comprehension and production and vocabulary. Knowledge of word meanings affects every aspect of language knowledge. Readability measurement is a research tradition that goes back to the beginnings of the 20th century.
Readability research generally produces formulae that purport to be able to estimate the relative difficulty of a passage by a combination of factors. Word difficulty is assumed to be a cause of comprehension difficulty in these formulae, although what we consider to be word difficulty may actually be a reflection of something else. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINAL.i RETENTION AND USES OF THESES. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS.
v LIST OF FIGURE. vi LIST OF TABLES. vii LIST OF ABBREVIATION. ix Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION.
Practical background of the study. Aims and scope of the study. Significance of the study. Overview of the thesis .7 Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW.
A review of Readability and use of Readability Analyzer. The Development of Readability Formulas in Short. Advantages and Limitation of Readability Formulas. A Focus on Two Readability Formulas.
Flesch Reading Ease .2 Flesch-Kincaid Readability Formula. Overview of some factors/variables in text difficulty. The vocabulary – reading connection. Vocabulary size, levels and lexical coverage.
The relationship between the vocabulary knowledge and success in reading comprehension .The vocabulary statistic Worksheet. The Concordance program (V3. 29 Chapter 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS .Readability Progress of texts within years. The relationship between the word frequencies and text difficulty.
The frequency of words in the test texts within years .The first 3000 MFWs in the Brown Corpus list .The first 5000 MFWs in the Brown Corpus list .The out of first 5000 MFWs in the Brown Corpus list.The 1000 MFWF of Paul Nation’s list .The frequency of word processing. The relationship between the difficulty of the reading texts and the students’ reading’s comprehension scores. 48 Chapter 5: RECOMMENDATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS. Recommendations for AGU CFL “Reading comprehension” testing practices.
Recommendations for AGU development Process of Reading comprehension tests. A general criterion in selecting test texts. A supportive tool for selecting test texts. A recommended wordlist for learning and teaching at AGU CFL.
Recommendations for AGU CFL staff. 57 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3.1 The Vocabulary Statistic Worksheet Figure 3.2: The Concordance software- Concordance V 3. Average Flesch Reading Ease Grade Levels of the texts Figure 4.2: The first 3000 MFWs in the Brown Corpus wordlist Figure 4.3: The percentage rate of the MFWs in the first 5000 common words in the Brown Corpus word list Figure 4.4: The percentage rate of MFWs in the first out of 5000 words in the BrC wordlist Figure 4.5: The percentage rate of MFWFs in the Paul Nation 1000 list ix LIST OF TABLES Table3. Interpretation Table for Flesch Reading Ease Scores Table 4.1: The frequency of processed words in texts Table 4.2 : Correlation between the difficulty of the reading texts and students’ reading comprehension score x LIST OF ABRREVIATION AGU = AN GIANG UNIVERSITY CFL = CENTER FOR FOREIN LANGUAGES BrWL = BROWN HIGH FREQUENCY WORD LIST BrC = THE BROWN CORPUS FRE = FLESCH READING EASE MFW = MOST FREQUENT WORDS MFWF = MOST FREQUENT WORD FAMILIES P.L = PAUL NATION’S LIST Ws = WORDS 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This thesis reports the research on “reading sub- tests”, part of written paper tests of The National English Certificate of level B examinations, designed at Center of Foreign Languages of /at Angiang University.
As such, this introduction chapter will present the following (1) the rationales and the practical background for this study, which were related to the assessment of text difficulty, (2) aims of the study, (3) the scope of the study, (4)the research questions to find out the answers to the trouble previously articulated, (5) the significance of the study, (6), and the structure of the thesis. RATIONALES Readability of text means the ease with which a reading passage can be read. According to Webster Dictionary, “readable” indicates the text being “fit to be read, interesting, agreeable and attractive in style; and enjoyable.” In The Literacy Dictionary (Harris & Hodges, 1995) readability is defined as "the ease of comprehension because of style of writing" (p. In a common sense, it is the “ease of reading words and sentences, “(Hargis et.
In the classroom, readability is often associated with an objective numerical score obtained by applying a readability formula. Also, readability in the sense of language comprehensibility is concerned with the factors that affect the students’ success in reading and understanding. Since reading involves readers comprehending the text, the first consideration of readability usually is whether it is easy or difficulty for the reader to read. Readability then is matching the instructional materials to the student (Fry, 1977 ), or choosing the best textbooks for the group of students.
In a more technical term, it is concerned with how to relate the reading level of the text to the reading ability of the students. 2 Readability, or "text difficulty", has been an area of concern for all those who need to establish the appropriacy of a given text for a pedagogic purpose. Establishing text difficulty is, therefore, relevant to the teacher and syllabus designer who wish to select appropriate materials for learners at a variety of ability levels and to test developers in selecting reading texts at appropriate levels for inclusion into the reading sub-tests of examinations. Writers of texts for various audiences also need guidance related to the range of factors which make texts more or less accessible.
In all these cases, however, decisions are still made very much on intuitive grounds. At the most basic level, given reading materials that are too difficult may damage to the learning process and demotivate to the students as well. Typically, text difficulty was assessed with readability formulas. Studies which use readability formulae for this purpose often claim increased accuracy of match between text and reader (Jones, 1995), and the use of readability formulae in this field may encourage the naive application of simplistic calculations to the automatic advice given to novice writers.
Readability formulae have also been used in the field of testing, most notably as a "control" on the difficulty of text levels in reading tests (Davies and Irvine, 1996); therefore, the interpretation of text difficulty would qualify the examination. Generally, most studies focus on a single factor contributing to readability for a given intended audience. The use of rare words or technical terminology for example can make text difficult to read for certain audience types (Collins-Thompson and Callan, 2004; Schwarm and Ostendorf, 2005). Besides, syntactic complexity is associated with delayed processing time in understanding (Gibson, 1998) and is another factor that can decrease readability.
Text organization (discourse structure), topic development (entity coherence) and the form of referring expressions also determine readability. Chall, Bissex, Conard, and Harris-Sharples 3 (1996) suggest that linguistic characteristics (vocabulary and sentence structure and variety) as well as concepts presented, text organization, and background knowledge required of readers all need to be considered in determining appropriateness of text for a given grade level. It should be noted that Readability formulas cannot evaluate all these features that promote readability. Readability formulas measure certain features of text which can be subjected to mathematical calculations.
These formulas are usually based on one semantic factor (the difficulty of words according to their length in characters or syllables) and one syntactic factor (the difficulty of sentences according to their length in characters or words). So, not all features that promote readability can be measured mathematically and these mathematical equations cannot measure comprehension directly. Therefore, readability formulas are considered to be predictions of reading ease but not the only method for determining readability and they do not help us evaluate how well the reader will understand the ideas in the text. Vocabulary and sentence structure, are specifically the two factors considered in the readability formulas and most of used to assess text difficulty; they are, furthermore, are precisely facets of the text which have been used to attempt to predict the difficulty of texts.
According to Armbruster (1984), “readability or “text difficulty” was measured by lots of factors such as the number of syllables in the words and the number of words in the sentence, and the absence or presence of these factors then determines the extent to which a given text can be considered 'considerate' (to enable readers with minimal effort) or 'inconsiderate' (text requiring much greater effort)”. In fact, vocabulary is one of the most easily identifiable characteristics suggesting text difficulty and it is also a very influential factor.