VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ********************* CAO THỊ THẮM DEVELOPING SUPPLEMENTARY READING MATERIALS TO IMPROVE READING COMPREHENSION FOR GRADE 10th STUDENTS AT A HIGH SCHOOL IN BAC NINH PROVINCE (Phát triển tài liệu đọc nhằm nâng cao kĩ năng đọc cho học sinh lớp 10 tại một trường Trung học phổ thông ở Bắc Ninh) M.A MINOR THESIS (Type I) Hanoi – 2019 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ********************* CAO THỊ THẮM DEVELOPING SUPPLEMENTARY READING MATERIALS TO IMPROVE READING COMPREHENSION FOR GRADE 10th STUDENTS AT A HIGH SCHOOL IN BAC NINH PROVINCE (Phát triển tài liệu đọc nhằm nâng cao kĩ năng đọc cho học sinh lớp 10 tại một trường Trung học phổ thông ở Bắc Ninh) M.A MINOR THESIS (Type I) Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 8140231.01 Supervisor: Vu Thi Thanh Nha, Ph.D Hanoi – 2019 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis is my own work and effort and that it has not been submitted to any other university or institution wholly or partially. Hanoi, September 2019 Cao Thị Thắm i LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Vu Thi Thanh Nha who gave me a lot of valuable guidance, encouragements, criticisms and correction throughout my thesis writing. I am indebted to 40 students at Thuan Thanh 2 High School, who provided me with lots of useful information via the questionnaires.
My sincere thanks go to my family, my friends for their encouragement and support that help me to complete my work. ii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABSTRACT This thesis reports the findings of an action research study to improve reading skill for grade 10 students at a high school in Bac Ninh province. It attempts to find students‟ opinions of the current textbook, their difficulties in learning reading skill in order to provide suitable supplementary reading materials to improve students‟ reading competence. The data was collected via questionnaires with 40 students at a high school in Bac Ninh province, diagnostic and final test and classroom‟s observation.
The findings of this study have shown that most of the students find the reading texts in the current textbook interesting and relevant with suitable reading tasks. However, they find it hard to improve their reading skills because they lacked reading strategies and suitable supplementary reading materials. The research also gave some suggestions in suitable reading materials and reading strategies to help the students improve their reading comprehension. Surprisingly, her students make great progress in reading skills after the supplementation time.
iii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. vii LIST OF TABLES, CHARTS AND FIGURES.
viii CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION. Rationale for the study. Aims of the study. Scope of the study.
Significance of the study. Methods of the study. Design of the Thesis .2 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. Definitions of reading, reading comprehension.
Types of reading skills. Types of reading exercises .4 Factors involved in reading comprehension process of EFL learners .6 Regular reading practice. Material development in language teaching .1 Definition of language teaching materials and types of materials .12 iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.2 Processes of materials development. Supplementary materials in teaching reading skills .3 The course book .5 Data collection instruments.
Dianogstic test và Final test .26 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. Phrase 1: Diagnosing the Research topic .1 The result of the dianogstic test. The result of the survey questionaire. Phrase 2: The effects of using supplementary reading materials on improving students‟ reading comprehension.3 Phrase 3: Evaluate results.1 The students’ evaluation of the current text book for year tenth students.
Error! Bookmark not defined. The reasons for students’ low level of reading comprehension .42 v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.3 The ways to use supplementary reading materials to improve students’ reading comprehension. Conclusion of the study. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further study.
Suggestions for further study. I vi LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Abbreviations Meanings GCSE General cerificates of secondary education EFL English as a foreign language vii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES, CHARTS AND FIGURES Table 1: Exercises believed to be suitable to develop reading skills .8 Table 2: The result of the diagnostic test .28 Table 3: The students‟ opinion on level of difficulty, content and length of the reading texts in the textbook .29 Table 4: The teachers‟ and students‟ opinions on reading exercises .30 in the textbook.30 Table 5 : The frequency of doing reading practice outside the classtime .31 Table 6: The reasons for students‟ lack of reading practice .32 Table 7: The students‟ expectation of the supplementary reading materials .34 Chart 1: The kinds of exercises that students prefer .33 Chart 3: The result of Unit 7 .36 Chart 3: Test score of dianogstic test và final test.39 Figure 1: Action research spiral (adapted from Kemmis, 1983) .22 Figure 2: Detailed Action Research Model (adapted from Susman, 1983) .23 viii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale for the study Nowadays, English has become increasingly important as a means of global communication and a bridge to mankind‟s knowledge. In the process of global integration, the teaching and learning English has become a great concern in Viet Nam.
Among the language skills, reading is at the core of language learning instruction. It is reading that provides the foundation for success in language learning and academic learning. According to Carrell (1981, p.1), “reading is by far the most important of the four macro-skills, particularly in English as a second foreign language”. Reading involves the integration of various bottom-up and top-down skills in order to reach the goal of comprehension.
However, teaching and learning reading skill at high schools is still far from satisfactory for various reasons. One reason why students in general and students at a high school in Bac Ninh province, in particular, cannot improve their reading skill is that there is not sufficient material which is suitable to their demand and their language ability and their lack of reading strategies. Therefore, it is essential that the researcher develop reading materials and provide reading strategies to help 10th – form students at a high school in Bac Ninh province enhance their reading comprehension. Aims of the study This study aims at improving the quality of learning English reading comprehension for 10th – form students at a high school in Bac Ninh province based on learners‟ needs.
To achieve this aim, the study has to find answers to the following questions: 1. What is the students’opinion of the reading texts in the current used text book for grade 10th students 2. Why did the students have difficulties in reading comprhension? 3. How can teachers use supplementary reading materials to help the students to improve their reading comprehension? 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Scope of the study To improve reading comprehension skills for 10th – form students at a high school in Bac Ninh province, the teachers can make use of various techniques and a number of things should be done. However, in this study, the author only intends to a brief overview of current situation of learning reading comprehension skills in the 10th – form students of a high school in Bac Ninh province to develop reading material that can be applied in learning reading comprehension skill so as to help the students to become effective readers. Significance of the study This study was carried out to design extra reading materials in order to develop students‟ reading comprehension skills. Its findings hopefully would help the 10th-form students find out the suitable materials for improving their reading comprehension skills.
Regarding teachers, the study would raise their awareness concerning the topic and provide them with useful materials to better develop their learners‟ reading comprehension skills. Finally, with regard to researchers, those who happen to share the same interest in the topic could certainly rely on this research to find reliable and useful information for their related studies in the future. Methods of the study To achieve the aims mentioned above, the author used action research to find out the students‟ opinion of the currently used textbook and the problems that students face when learning English with a view to finding the solutions to their problems based on the results of survey questionnaire for the students, teacher‟s observation sheets. These will be discussed in detail in chapter 2, methodology.
Design of the Thesis The study consists of five chapters as follows: Chapter 1: Introduction – includes the rationale, aims, scope, significance and methodology of the study. Chapter 2: Literature review – presents literature related to the study. The focus of this chapter is definitions of reading, reading comprehension, the place of reading 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com skill in teaching a foreign language, strategies for reading comprehension and problems in reading comprehension of English foreign language learners. This part also mentions some criterion for developing comprehension materials.
Chapter 3: Methodology - describes the participants, data collection procedures and data collection instrument. Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion - offers some major findings, some suggestions for improving students‟ reading comprehension skills and a sample work for a reading lesson of the 10th-form students. Chapter 5: Conclusion - summarizes the main research points, points out the limitation of the study and makes suggestions for further studies.7 Summary The focus of this chapter has been on introduction of the research. It has clearly provided an overview of the study in terms of the statement of the problem and the rationale, the aims, the scope, the significance, the methodology of the study, and the design of the thesis.
3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter discusses different issues in the theories of reading in a foreign language. Three major features will be presented here: the definitions reading, reading comprehension, reading in second language, and material development in language teaching. Definitions of reading, reading comprehension 2. Reading Reading is often referred to as the most important of the four language skills for EFL learners, as it enables students to gain exposure to the target language and receive valuable linguistic input to build up language proficiency (Erten & Razı, 2003).
Reading is not just extracting meaning from a text but a process of connecting information in the text with the knowledge the reader brings to the act of reading. It is seen as an active cognitive process in which the reader‟s background knowledge plays a key role in the creation of meaning (Tierney & Pearson, 1994). Reading is an interactive process that goes on between the reader and the text, resulting in comprehension. The text presents letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs that encode meaning.
The reader uses knowledge, skills, and strategies to determine what that meaning is. So far reading has been defined differently by lots of scholars, however no single definition is acceptable to everyone.135) stated that reading is “a psycholinguistic process by which the reader, language user, reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display”. In his opinion, readers not only learn how to read the text, to master grammatical structures…but also understand the content expressed in the text. Having the same point with Goodman, William (1990, p.