NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF BUSINESS ENGLISH NGUYEN THAO HIEN FACTORS AFFECTING READING COMPREHENSION OF BUSINESS ENGLISH SOPHOMORES AT NEU AND SOME PEDAGOGICAL RECOMMENDATIONS NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF BUSINESS ENGLISH FACTORS AFFECTING READING COMPREHENSION OF BUSINESS ENGLISH SOPHOMORES AT NEU AND SOME PEDAGOGICAL RECOMMENDATIONS Supervisor: Nguyen Thi Thien Huong, M.A Hanoi, March 2023 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Ms. Nguyen Thi Thien Huong, for bringing the weight of her considerable experience and knowledge to this project. It’s a pleasure for me to receive your valuable support, advice, and encouragement with superb and constant guidance towards this project. I am also grateful to BE sophomores in NEU for enthusiastically fulfilling my questionnaires.
I wish to acknowledge the Faculty of Foreign Languages in NEU for providing me this internship program, without which this work could have never begun. A debt of gratitude is also owned to my internship group who have helped me with their valuable suggestions and have been very helpful in various stages of project completion. Last but not least, I would also like to give special thanks to my family and dearest friends as a whole for their continuous support and understanding when undertaking my research and writing my project. Your unconditional love for me was what sustained me this far.
TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGBEMETNTT. co 55-5 5< < HH 0009688088 08080 i TABLE OF COINTTIETN TYS. HH HH HH HC 00000804 ii LIST OF ABBREVIA TIHONS. HH HH HH mg 001080 iii LIST OF TABLES.
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Classification of reading comprehenSÏOII. Previous studies about factors affecting students’ reading comprehension. Previous international SÍHHCÏÏC. Factors affecting BE sophomores’ reading comprehension.
BACK ground KHOVUÏ©(ÏĐÔ. Syntax KHOVUÏC(ÏÔ. Họ họ HT. Proposed framework of factors affecting reading comprehension of BE sophomores iN TNEÌŨ.
5 s5 c°sS‡se=see 16 3. Participants and Setting. Data collection and aMnallySis. DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS.
Students’ perception on the importance Of ẨACẦOFS. Students’ Vocabulary KHOVVÌC(ÏUÔ. Students’ Syntax KHOVVÌC(CÏUÔ.2 The impact of factors on students’ reading comprehension .1 Impact on literal COIDT€HCTISÏOIH.2 Impact on Interpretation COIDYCÌHLSÏOH.3 Impact on Critical reading COIHDT€HCTSÏOHH. eo c5 55553333891 39355 59% 27 CHAPTER 5: RECOMMENDA TIONS.
on ng nga 31 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUUSIONN. co G5 <5 cọ TH cọ. TH TT 0000000 00000000 00966096 60 373 APPENDICES.010000006008090080 37 ill LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS NEU National Economics University BE Business English EFL English as Foreign Language 1V LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2. Framework of factors affecting reading comprehension of BE Sophomores 1n NEU.- - - <1 191 HH HH gen 15 Figure 4.
Students’ reading comprehension leVelL.--- ¿+ +-s++ss+s++exsss 18 Figure 4. The importance of factors to reading comprehension. 19 LIST OF TABLES Table 2. Previous studies about factors affecting students’ reading COMPTEhENSION, PP nm.
Students’ perception of the effect of four factors on reading lU9119ã9)1911310088 raẢÝỞỔỒ.2 Students’ ability to use background knowledge in reading COMPTEheNSION 0. Students’ ability to use reading strategies in reading comprehension 21 Table 4.4 Impact of students’ vocabulary on students’ reading comprehension. s11 TH HH key 24 Table 4. ANOVA of Literal ComprehenS1on.
Coefficients of literal comprehenSIOn.-- --‹- 55s ss+ss+s+seexss 25 Table 4. ANOVA of Interpretation Comprehension.- --- 5 «5s ss+<++xc+ 26 Table 4. Coefficients of Interpretation Comprehension. ANOVA of Critical Reading Comprehension.
Coefficients of Critical Reading Comprehension. Rationale of the study In the age of modernization and globalization, English is an international language that occupies a vital place in all parts of the world, especially in Vietnam and the Vietnamese educational system. Remarkably, English has been taught widely as a compulsory subject at all levels of education in the Vietnamese context. Among the four skills in language, reading has always been a key role which is a basic means to improve other skills.
According to Krashen and Brown (2007), reading is the most essential of the four language skills, as it may increase a language learner's overall competence. Barnett (1989) maintains that reading has always played a vital role in foreign and second languages. She adds that reading is now seen in a different light "as communication, as a mental process, as the reader's active participation in the creation of meaning, as a manipulation of strategies, as a receptive rather than a positive skill”. According to Stephanie (2020), reading is one of the fundamental language abilities that can impact a person's language development by helping them acquire new vocabulary and structure of sentences as they read.
Similarly, Alfassi (2004) notes that reading is a crucial ability in language learning and acquisition to properly function and collect information in society because it requires complex cognitive activity including the integration of memory and meaning formation. Walker (2001) further elaborates that reading is a process whereby the readers elaborate meaning and strategies from sources of information, thus evaluating their understanding and the application of social context to reflect their response. The importance of reading comprehension as a technique for producing successful written communication is also highlighted by Sadiku (2015). Most significantly, mastering reading comprehension is essential for students’ success in their studies.
Reading comprehension is one of the most significant components in language acquisition for every student since it offers the framework for a large amount of learning in education (Alvermann & Earle, 2003). This is supported by Hermosa (2002) and Meniado (2016), who claim that reading comprehension is a collection of cognitive activities that cover many different aspects, such as the comprehension of words and their meanings, attentive response, and integration. Hence, reading comprehension problems among ESL learners have been a focus since the beginning of the 1960s (Vellutino et al. This is due to the fact that language comprehension requires not just word-level understanding but also the capacity to actively engage with the content to create a mental image.
In Vietnam, numerous research has been carried out to find out the importance as well as factors affecting the reading comprehension of EFL students. However, there seem to be a limited number of officially published articles focusing on factors affecting reading comprehension of second-year BE students, especially at National Economics University. Based on the mentioned reasons, this study is conducted to discover and analyze “Factors affecting reading comprehension of BE sophomores in NEU and some _ pedagogical recommendations” 1. Purposes of the study This study aims at: - Investigating the factors affecting BE sophomores’ reading comprehension in NEU - Suggesting some pedagogical recommendations for teaching methods to enhance NEU students’ reading comprehension 1.
Research questions This research is conducted to answer these questions: - What are the factors affecting second-year BE students’ reading comprehension? - What solutions can be done to develop second-year BE students' reading comprehension? 1. Scope of the study Geographical scope: this study is conducted at The Faculty of Foreign Languages of NEU. Time scope: the data and figures were collected and analyzed from 2023 January to 2023 March. Sample size: 60 BE sophomores at NEU were taken in for research.
Content scope: Reading comprehension of second-year BE students and factors affecting their reading comprehension 1. Research methodology This research implement the quantitative approach. Primary data is gathered through responses to questionnaires. About 60 National Economics University business English majors participated in the survey during the second semester of the 2022—2023 school year.
Participants participated in an online survey that included a series of questions and were able to express their own ideas and attitudes on the variables that influence their reading comprehension. The self-administered survey allows the researchers to get credible data in an unbiased way. The data collected throughout the investigation is then coded, examined and analyzed. The study used SPSS software to get the most accurate inferences from the data.
Through desk research, secondary data is collected from a variety of available sources. Design of the study The study consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction which presents the rationale, aims, scope, method, and design of the study. Chapter 2 is the theoretical framework which deals with the concepts of reading comprehension and reviewing previous studies of factors affecting reading comprehension of Business English sophomores in NEU.
Chapter 3 is about the methodology of the study which presents research questions, participants, methods of the study, instruments, data collection. Chapter 4 is about the data analysis, discussion and major findings. Chapter 5 presents some pedagogical recommendations to enhance students’ reading comprehension Chapter 6 is the conclusion which presents the summary of the study, limitations and suggestions for further study. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The chapter presents the theoretical review of reading comprehension.
Reading Comprehension Reading for general comprehension refers to the capacity to comprehend and accurately interpret the content in a book (Grable and Staller, 2002). Similarly, Pressley (2000) and Birsch (2011) define reading comprehension as the capacity to derive meaning from what is read. Reading comprehension, according to Block (2004) and Graves, Juel, and Graves (1998), is a challenging process in which readers have a significant part in deriving meaning from the text by putting current abilities to use. For the reader to quickly absorb information from the text, it requires a variety of reading skills, including word recognition, fluency, lexical knowledge, and prior knowledge.
Tompkins (2011) and Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, and Seidenberg (2001) also claims that reading comprehension is the degree of understanding a text, which results from the interaction between the written words and the knowledge they evoke outside the message. Similarly, RAND Reading Study (2002) describes comprehension as the act of extracting out and creating meaning from written language via interaction and engagement. McNamara and Magliano (2009) contend that this process, which occurs in a larger social context, incorporates both reader and text characteristics. Duke (2003) also holds the view that comprehension is a process in which readers engage with material to understand it using a combination of prior knowledge and experience, the information in the text, and their own opinions about the text.
It is not the purpose of reading comprehension to infer meaning from specific words or phrases, but rather to understand the passage as a whole. Reading comprehension results in a mental representation of a text's meaning paired with the readers’ prior knowledge. This is referred to as a mental model or a scenario model (Johnson- Laird, 1983). According to Tompkins (2011), developing reading comprehension is a creative process that depends on the four abilities of phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
The process of orchestrating the readers' background knowledge of both language and the world is known as reading comprehension, which includes activities like predicting, questioning, summarizing, determining out the context of terminology, checking one's own comprehension, and reflecting. According to Shankweiler (1999), language comprehension and decoding are two essential parts of reading comprehension. Pasquarella (2009) showed that decoding is a low-level skill that just needs a basic understanding of spelling letters in order to detect and comprehend written words. Hence, since comprehension is the core of reading, decoding by itself is insufficient to explain the process.
Drawing meaning from the reading material by actively participating in it is called reading comprehension. As a result, understanding and decoding are interconnected and eventually affect reading comprehension. Based on the foregoing explanation, reading comprehension is the reader's ability to simultaneously understand and extract information from a text. In this procedure, three elements are involved: the reader, text, and activity.
These three elements connect to one another at different stages of reading comprehension. These are: reading activities before, during, and after. Classification of reading comprehension Researchers have attempted to categorize these abilities using a variety of criteria. A review of the various classifications addressing reading comprehension skills (Koda, 2005; Hudson, 2007) identifies three fundamental categories: Literal comprehension, Inferential/ interpretive comprehension and _ Critical comprehension.
Literal comprehension is the initial stage, where understanding relies on surface meanings. This involves recalling factual information from the text.