VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HOCHIMINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES -----o0o------ TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF TESOL SUBMITTED BY: HỒ THỊ MỸ VÂN SUPERVISOR: NGUYỄN HOÀNG TUẤN, PhD. HO CHI MINH CITY, MAY 2006 Certificate of Originality I certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: Teaching Reading Comprehension from the Viewpoint of Discourse Analysis in terms of the statement of Requirements for Theses in Master’s Program Issued by the Higher Degree Committee Hochiminh city, May 2006 Hoà Thò Myõ Vaân i Retention and Use of the Thesis I hereby state that I, Hoà Thò Myõ Vaân, being the candidate for the degree of Master of TESOL, accept 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 the purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of theses. Hochiminh city, May 2006 Hoà Thò Myõ Vaân ii Acknowledgements I would like to express my appreciation to all who have been concerned about me and given thankful to me so far.
Firstly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Mr. Nguyen Hoang Tuan, PhD., who provided insightful discussions, valuable comments, criticisms and consistent support in the preparation and completion of this thesis. I would wish to thank Ms. Dang Thi Huong, PhD.
Truong Hon Huy, MA, who gave me a great deal of thought to selecting the topic of my thesis. Special thanks to my classmates in class TESOL 2002 sharing the happiness and difficulties with me during the course, I will never forget the time I have been studying with them as brothers and sisters in a big family. I am also grateful to my colleagues, those who are now working with me in the Practical High School – University of Pedagogy, Hochiminh city, for their consideration and participation in the survey. I am deeply indebted to them for all their help.
Most of all, I can never express enough my appreciation to my father, mother, brother, husband, and my little daughter. Without their endless love, I can never overcome all difficulties facing in my life to stand here as who I am now. I do love them always and forever. iii Abstract The main focus of the thesis is to point out the application of Discourse Analysis (DA) into teaching reading comprehension in a high school.
From the viewpoint of DA, we have a critical look at high school English course books. Approaches currently employed in teaching and learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in high school are also carefully surveyed and criticized. Those extensive observations provide a solid foundation for suggesting a DA-centered approach to efficiently improve the ELT in high school. This study is mainly carried out in the Teaching Demonstration High School (Thuc Hanh High School) – University of Pedagogy, Hochiminh city.
The English 12 course book is considered. Firstly, in order to identify all major difficulties that most teachers and students have been facing in reading comprehension, two questionnaires are designed and delivered to a large number of teachers and students. The collected results in the questionnaires have conclusively demonstrate that the traditional approach commonly used in most high schools nowadays is very inefficient and thus applying DA in teaching the reading comprehension is strongly desired. As a result, a number of relevant DA-based strategies are then suggested to help teachers and students to cope with those problems.
Basically, the lesson plan for a reading text should be prepared with relevant activities to activate students’ existing background, to arouse students’ attention to the text’s discourse genre, and to encourage students’ predictability. Based on those principles, a number of activities are suggested, e., describing pictures or completing a semantic map related to the topic of interest, discussing the topic in iv pairs or in groups, guessing the meaning exercises, cloze tests, guessing/supplying the ending of a narrative/a passage, etc. Finally, the benefits of our suggested strategy are evaluated by an experiment. In the experiment, a large number of high school students are divided into two groups and they are asked to do the same reading comprehension test.
The experiment results clearly indicate that students who are trained by our discourse-analysis-based approaches can do the test much better than those who are trained with traditional reading comprehension strategy. Therefore, it is believed that our suggested strategy should be applied in high schools or in other similar situations such as foreign language centers, colleges, and universities. v Table of Contents Certificate of Originality. i Retention and Use of the Thesis.
vi List of Figures .viii List of Tables. ix List of Abbreviations.1 Background to the Study. 1 Statement of Purpose….5 Significance of the Study ……….6 Overview of Thesis Chapters. 7 Chapter 2: Literature Review.
9 A Review on Related Studies. 24 Chapter 3: Research Methodology. 32 The Questionnaire for Teachers. 35 The Questionnaire for Students.
37 The Reading Comprehension Test. 39 vi Delivering the Questionnaires and the Test. 41 Chapter 4: Results and Discussions .43 Problems in Teaching Reading Comprehension. 43 Problems in Learning Reading Comprehension.
47 Discourse-Analysis-Centered Approach. 51 Chapter 5: Conclusions and Implications .81 Appendix A: The Contents of English Course Books in High Schools. 81 Appendix B: Some Irrelevant Activities in the English 12 Course Book. 82 Appendix C: A Sample Test of Academic Year 2003-2004.
85 Appendix D: A Sample Test of Academic Year 2004-2005. 86 Appendix E: A Sample Test of Academic Year 2005-2006. 87 Appendix F: The Questionnaire for Teachers. 89 Appendix G: The Questionnaire for Students.
92 Appendix H: The Lesson Plan Prepared with the Conventional Approach. 95 Appendix I: The Lesson Plan Prepared with the DA-centered Approach. 101 Appendix J: The Reading Text in Unit 5 – Air Pollution. 108 Appendix K: The Reading Comprehension Test .116 vii List of Figures Figure 2.1 A model for reading comprehension .2 The discourse processing model for reading comprehension.1 The distribution of average scores of all subjects in four classes……………………………………………………….2 The distribution of scores of the English subject in four classes………………………………………………………….1 A sample of using a semantic map to teach unit 6 .2 A sample of summarizing unit 5 with a diagram.3 The overall test scores of (a) group 1 and (b) group 2.4 The test result of part 1 in each group .5 The test result of part 2 in each group .6 The test result of part 3 in each group.
73 viii List of Tables Table 3.1 The average scores of all the subjects ……………….2 The average scores of English …………………………33 Table 4.1 The result of the questionnaire for teachers ……………43 Table 4.2 The result of the questionnaire for students ……………47 Table 4.3 The test result of group 1 ………………………………68 Table 4.4 The test result of group 2 ………………………………69 ix List of Abbreviations and Symbols This thesis uses the following abbreviations: DA Discourse Analysis DOET Department of Education and Training EFL English as a Foreign Language EGP English for General Purposes ELT English Language Teaching ESL English as a Second Language ESP English for Specific Purposes FL Foreign Language MOET Ministry of Education and Training TESOL Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages TOEFL Test of English as a Foreign Language x Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Background to the Study In recent years, many outstanding achievements in telecommunication, biology, and medicine have dramatically improved human life. World trade and service industry in banking and tourism have been developing more and more. The exploration of such modern knowledge requires us to master English. Scientists and researchers have to keep abreast of the developments in their fields of study by reading scientific textbooks, magazines, and journals that are mostly written in English.
For anyone who is keen on using the Internet, reading is a basic skill that makes access to computers and the Internet possible. In business, English is very important because it is used as a formal language, especially when the market is globally opened in the world. An important fact is that Vietnam is now pushing ahead with its negotiations with various bilateral trading partners to finalize deals for joining the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO entry will bring many benefits to the country via an expanding market, equal treatment as enjoyed by other WTO members, more investment capital and advanced technology.
On the other side of the coin, once joining the WTO, Vietnam must open its market for foreign goods and investors. This will be the biggest challenge. In this context, Vietnam has no alternative but to raise the competitiveness of the whole economy, and the ability to integrate Vietnamese economy deeply into the world market. One of the most fundamental steps to do such things is to improve the English proficiency in Vietnamese government and business communities.
1 For high school students, after finishing their secondary school, they have been learning English for at least four years. They acquired most of English basic grammatical structures and basic vocabularies about different kind of topics such as friends, families, and daily activities. Furthermore, they have been equipped with background knowledge of natural and social sciences through learning other subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemists, biology, etc. In high schools, teachers should help their students efficiently improve their reading skills because after entering colleges or universities, their students have to read many documents and books written in English in their specific study fields.
Unfortunately, teachers and their students have still encountered many problems. There is a conflict between the practical need, the aim of the syllabus, and the current way of teaching reading comprehension in high schools. Whereas the aim of the syllabus as well as the practical need focuses on developing students’ reading skill, most students are working with grammatical points, new vocabularies, and simple translation in their reading lecture hours. Basically, reading comprehension does not mean the translation of word by word, or sentence by sentence into the reader’s mother language.
To some extent, translation should not be used as a skill, but as a way to check reading comprehension in terms of some difficult words and structures. Students should not understand a sentence separately in a written text, but the meaning of a discourse through the combination of sentences to express an event or a concept. Students should be also trained to understand the cohesion and the coherence of a passage. In addition, there is an urgent need for English teachers to improve their way of teaching reading comprehension, particularly when they get the overview of high school textbooks and reading comprehension tests.
2 Firstly, the aim of the English high school textbooks, i., English 10, English 11, and English 12, is ‘to help the student review and systematize to train his four language skills: listening and comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing. In the English 12 textbook, more emphasis is placed on the development of the reading skill. For that purpose, besides engaging the students in aural-oral activities, it introduces them, by degrees, to the world of fact and ideas, and provides them with a range of exercises which makes them more familiar with different styles of writing, as shown in Appendix A. In the three textbooks, each reading passage is generally composed of around 400 words.
To develop the reading skill, different kinds of activities such as true/false questions, multiple choice questions, gathering main ideas questions, etc. In spite of that, most of them cannot meet the aims of the textbooks as mentioned above. First, the activities are too simple compared with students’ prior knowledge.