VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST–GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** HOÀNG THỊ MINH CHIÊM A STUDY ON USING WORD GUESSING STRATEGIES IN READING COMPREHENSION OF ECONOMICS TEXTS OF THIRD YEAR STUDENTS MAJORING IN ECONOMICS AT PHUC YEN COLLEGE OF INDUSTRY (Nghiên cứu việc sử dụng các chiến thuật đoán từ trong kỹ năng đọc hiểu các bài khóa chuyên ngành kinh tế của sinh viên năm thứ 3 chuyên ngành kinh tế trường Cao đẳng công nghiệp Phúc Yên) M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY CODE: 60140111 Hanoi, 2014 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST–GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** HOÀNG THỊ MINH CHIÊM A STUDY ON USING WORD GUESSING STRATEGIES IN READING COMPREHENSION OF ECONOMICS TEXTS OF THIRD YEAR STUDENTS MAJORING IN ECONOMICS AT PHUC YEN COLLEGE OF INDUSTRY (Nghiên cứu việc sử dụng các chiến thuật đoán từ trong kỹ năng đọc hiểu các bài khóa chuyên ngành kinh tế của sinh viên năm thứ 3 chuyên ngành kinh tế trường Cao đẳng công nghiệp Phúc Yên) M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY CODE: 60140111 SUPERVISOR: PHẠM THỊ THANH THÙY, Ph.D Hanoi, 2014 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com DECLARATION I hereby state that I - Hoang Thi Minh Chiem, being an M.A candidate of the Faculty of Post-graduate Studies, ULIS, VNU, certify my authorship of the study entitled A STUDY ON USING WORD GUESSING STRATEGIES IN READING COMPREHENSION OF ECONOMICS TEXTS OF THIRD YEAR STUDENTS MAJORING IN ECONOMICS AT PHUC YEN COLLEGE OF INDUSTRY The thesis is my own research and the substance of the thesis has not, wholly or in part, been submitted for a degree to any other universities or institutions. Hanoi, September 2014 Hoàng Thị Minh Chiêm i LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude and love to my supervisor, Ms. Pham Thi Thanh Thuy, Ph.D for her guidance, patience, comments, and especially her sympathy throughout the whole research process. Her guidance helped me in all the time of research and writing of this research.
My sincere thanks also go to Dr. Le Van Canh for his helpful suggestions during this study. I would also like to thank all teachers at the Postgraduate Department, ULIS, VNU, whose lectures and guidance have contributed to my understanding of the problem and led to the completion of this thesis. Especially, I wish to express my thankfulness to the teachers who will take their precious time reading and commending on this thesis.
I would like to express my special thanks to all the students who have been really helpful and cooperative in the implementation of the study. My thanks go to many writers whose important ideas and notions are exploited and developed in the study. And thanks also go to all librarians for their effort to make the atmosphere of reading rooms as convenient and friendly as possible. I warmly thank my parents for giving birth to me and supporting me spiritually throughout my life.
And finally, I wish to send my thanks to my lovely sweet daughter for being a nice girl and to my husband who always supports, cheers me up and stands by me through the good and bad time. ii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABSTRACT This study aims at examining the general strategies and the word guessing strategies used by the third year students majoring in economics at Phuc Yen College of Industry to deal with unknown words in reading comprehension economics texts in reading lessons; and the difficulties they experience in using these strategies. Three research questions are submitted and answered accordingly. A survey questionnaire and a task sheets are used as two research methods in this study.
The results indicate that: the participants of this study make use of various general strategies to deal with unknown words. Of all strategies, guessing meaning from context is most frequently used one by the students. Using local context and using discourse context are two most preferred guessing strategies by the students. Most of them particularly have difficulties in using strategies requiring knowledge of syntactic, association or collocation and extra-textual to work out the meaning of unknown words.
Discussion, research limitations and implications for pedagogy and further research are also presented. iii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS EFL: English as foreign language ELT: English language teaching ESL: English as second language ESP: English for specific purpose L2: Second Language PCI: Phuc Yen College of Industry FIGURE AND TABLES Figure: Types of ESP Table 1: Frequency use of general strategies for unknown words Table 2: General strategies use for unknown words: Mean analysis Table 3: Frequency use of guessing strategies for unknown words Table 4: Guessing strategies for unknown words: Mean analysis Table 5: Guessing strategies for unknown words Table 6: Ranks of strategies use in the Questionnaire and the Task sheets. Table 7: The outcome of word inferencing iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION. iii LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES.
iv PART I: INTRODUCTION. Rationale for the study. Aims of the study. Scope of the study.
Significance of the study. Methods of the study. Organization of the study. 4 PART II: DEVELOPMENT.
5 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW .1 Overview of ESP .1 Definitions of ESP .2 Characteristics of ESP .1 Characteristics of ESP in general .2 Characteristics of English for Economics .3 Characteristics of English Economics Texts .2 The Nature of Reading Comprehension .1 Definitions of Reading Comprehension .2 Reading Comprehension Strategies .1 Definition of Reading Comprehension Strategy .2 Classification of Reading Comprehension Strategies .3 Guessing/ Inferencing Strategy .1 Definitions of Strategy. Guessing/ Inferencing strategy. 12 v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.3 Classification Types of Guessing/ Inferrencing strategies .4 College Students’ Characteristics .1 Definitions of Student .2 Characteristics of College Students in General .3 Characteristics of Economics Students. 16 CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .1 An overview of Phuc Yen College of Industry.3 Teachers and teaching methods .4 Course book for teaching ESP .4 Data Collection Instruments .5 Data Collection Procedures .6 Data Analysis Procedures.
24 CHAPTER 3: DATA, DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION .1 The students’ general strategies used for unknown words .2 Word guessing strategies used by the students .1 The guessing strategies used by the students collected through the questionnaire .2 The guessing strategies used by the students collected through the task sheets. 32 vi LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.3 The comparison of word guessing strategies used by the students in the questionnaire and the task sheets .3 The difficulties the student encounter when using the word guessing strategies to make the guess. 34 PART III: CONCLUSION. Pedagogical Implications of the Study.
Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research. I vii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale for the Study In the last three decades, the “learner-centeredness” theory has become very popular. It demonstrates that learners are the key component of the language acquisition process.
There is a fact that in the classroom, learners’ studying results are not the same though they are taught by the same teachers and under the same studying condition. Some students can acquire the language successfully but some fail to master it. One of the main reasons is that different learners employ different learning strategies. In other words, to be success in learning a second language, learners themselves should use some suitable learning strategies to make their learning more effective.
Reading is not simply a receptive process of getting information from the page in a word-by-word manner (Grabe, 1991, p. It is considered a selective process and characterized as an active process of comprehending. Therefore, to become more successful, non-English-speaking readers will need to learn to use different strategies to deal with unknown words encountered in reading. This is also true for dealing with reading comprehension texts of English for Specific Purpose (ESP).
Generally, a good reader has appropriate strategies to deal with unknown words in reading such as guessing or inferring the meaning of unknown words in a text. Therefore strategies of guessing word meaning play an important role in dealing with unknown words encountered in reading comprehension. With the hope of helping students to be equipped with necessary qualifications to get a good job after graduation, the English Faculty at PCI has applied ESP courses for all majors in this college and major of economics is not an exceptional one. Throughout the teaching ESP courses for economics major students at this college, the researcher observed that the students’ results in reading comprehension are not as good as what they have expected though they have tried a lot.
This situation has made the researcher wonder how the students 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com deal with their reading comprehension tasks, especially what general strategies and what guessing strategies they employ to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words when reading economics texts in reading lessons and what difficulties they encounter in using these strategies. In an effort to find out the idea to deal with this situation, the writer find that there are a lot of researches on guesswork in reading comprehension, however almost no researches on using word guessing strategies in reading ESP texts were carried out. Therefore, there is a need to have some works on this issue with the hope that the study will be able to shed some light on how the students actually do to deal with unknown words in reading comprehension economics texts. It also seeks to inform teachers on the problems the students encountered when they read.
The facts mentioned above have inspired the author to conduct a survey research with the title: “A Study on Using Word Guessing Strategies in Reading Comprehension of Economics texts of third Year Students Majoring in Economics at Phuc Yen College of Industry”. Aims of the Study The study aims at examining the general strategies that the students used to deal with unknown words in the reading passages in English, the guessing strategies the students used when they encounter unknown words in reading comprehension economics texts and the difficulties they experience in using these guessing strategies to make their guess. The specific aims of research are as follow: • To examine the general strategies that the students use to deal with unknown words in English reading comprehension lessons. • To discover the guessing strategies which are used by the students to deal with unknown words when reading economics texts in reading comprehension lessons.
• To find out the difficulties they confront in using these guessing strategies to make the guess. 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Research Questions In order to achieve the above aims, the following research questions will be addressed: (1) What general strategies do the students often use to deal with unknown words while reading English economics texts in the reading lessons? (2) What guessing strategies do the students use to work out the meaning of unknown words while reading comprehension economics texts in reading lessons? (3) What difficulties the students experience in using these guessing strategies? 4. Scope of the Study Due to the limited time and small scale of the research, the author only focuses on examining the general strategies the third year students at PCI use for unknown words, the guessing strategies they employ to make out the meaning of unknown words when reading economics texts in reading lessons and finding out the difficulties the students encounter when employing these strategies.