Tài liệu Obstacles and favourable materials for extensive reading on 9th graders at hoai hai lower secondary school

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY TRUONG THI BICH NGOAN OBSTACLES AND FAVOURABLE MATERIALS FOR EXTENSIVE READING ON 9TH GRADERS AT HOAI HAI LOWER SECONDARY SCHOOL Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching Code: 8140111 Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. NGUYEN QUANG NGOAN BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƢỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN TRƢƠNG THỊ BÍCH NGOAN NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN VÀ TÀI LIỆU YÊU THÍCH CHO VIỆC ĐỌC MỞ RỘNG CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 9 TRƢỜNG THCS HOÀI HẢI Ngành: Lý luận và phƣơng pháp dạy học bộ môn tiếng Anh Mã số: 8140111 Ngƣời hƣớng dẫn: PGS.TS Nguyễn Quang Ngoạn i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I confirm that the work presented in this research report has been conducted by myself. Except where reference is made in the text of the thesis, no other person‟s work has been used without due acknowledgement in the thesis. I confirm that this work is submitted in partial fulfillment for the M.A. thesis in English at Quy Nhon University and has not been submitted elsewhere in any other form for the fulfillment of any other degree or qualification. Quy Nhon, May 2022 Trƣơng Thị Bích Ngoan ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Quang Ngoan who spent the valuable time on giving me instructions, advice, constructive comments, and encouragement. This thesis would not have been completed if it had not been for my supervisor‟s great support. Secondly, I would like to thank my colleagues who encouraged me and shared with me much experience in thesis writing. Thirdly, I am also grateful for all the students in my class who participated in the study, giving me useful insight into the research problem. Finally, thanks to all my family support, I was able to complete the thesis on time. iii ABSTRACT The benefits of extensive reading (ER) have been convinced by much literature. The employment of ER helps improve EFL learners‟ reading abilities and motivation. However, there remain many questions of obstacles and favorable reading materials, confirmed by EFL learners. These findings seemed to receive less scholarly attention, especially in Vietnamese context. As an attempt to understand this research phenomenon, the current study employed a questionnaire and face-toface interview to gather the insights of 90 ninth graders at Hoai Hai Lower Secondary School. They were invited to confirm obstacles and favorable materials for extensive reading within the semester. Five voluntary interviewees expressed their perspectives later on these findings. The results revealed major obstacles to the students‟ extensive reading practice were the limited command of language, low reading motivation, poor reading comprehension abilities, limited cultural or world knowledge, lack of reading resources, and lack of technological support. The favourable materials were ones related to school exams and students‟ needs. The students were particularly interested in their own favorite topics, and this motivation decreased when they had to read teachers‟ assigned reading materials. This study, therefore, may give specific ideas for local EFL teachers to adapt language materials suited to students‟ needs, in the hope that they could improve their reading comprehension abilities and motivation in the future. Key words: extensive reading, reading comprehension, reading motivation iv TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP ................................................................... i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................. ii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................... iii ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS .................................................. vi LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ..................................................................... 1 1.1. Rationale ................................................................................................. 1 1.2. Aims of the study and research questions ............................................... 4 1.3. Scope of the study ................................................................................... 4 1.4. Significance of the study ......................................................................... 5 1.5. Organization of the study ........................................................................ 5 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .......................................................... 7 2.1. Reading ................................................................................................... 7 2.1.1. Definitions of reading ....................................................................... 7 2.1.1. Extensive reading ............................................................................ 10 2.2. Approaches to teaching reading in the second language classroom ..... 12 2.3. Use of extensive reading in reading teaching ....................................... 15 2.4. Possible difficulties of students in extensive reading ........................... 16 2.5. Previous studies on extensive reading in reading teaching .................. 18 2.6. Summary ............................................................................................... 26 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ............................................ 27 3.1. Research design..................................................................................... 27 3.1.1. Case study ....................................................................................... 27 3.1.2. The current research design ............................................................ 28 3.2. Data collection instruments................................................................... 28 3.2.1. Questionnaire .................................................................................. 28 v 3.2.2. Semi-structured interview ............................................................... 30 3.3. Sampling and participants ..................................................................... 30 3.4. Data collection ...................................................................................... 31 3.4. Data analysis ......................................................................................... 31 3.5. Summary ............................................................................................... 32 CHAPTER 4. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION ............................................ 33 4.1. Main findings ........................................................................................ 33 4.1.1. The obstacles ................................................................................... 33 4.1.2. Favorable materials ......................................................................... 42 4.2. Discussion ............................................................................................. 50 4.2.1. Research question one .................................................................... 50 4.2.2. Research question two .................................................................... 52 4.3. Summary ............................................................................................... 54 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS .................. 55 5.1. Conclusions ........................................................................................... 55 5.2. Limitations ............................................................................................ 58 5.3. Recommendations ................................................................................. 59 5.3.1. For local students ............................................................................ 59 5.3.2. For local teachers ............................................................................ 59 5.3.3. For future research .......................................................................... 60 REFERENCES ................................................................................................ 62 APPENDICES vi ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS ER Extensive reading EFL English as a foreign language vii LIST OF TABLES Table Title number Page number Table 4.1 Obstacles to extensive reading 33 Table 4.2 Reasons for the difficulties 38 Table 4.3 Favorable materials for extensive reading 42 Specific favorable extensive reading topics shared 48 Table 4.4 by the interviewees 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Chapter one presents the introduction of the study. This chapter discusses five parts, namely rationale, the aim of the study and research question, the scope of the study, the significance of the study, and the outline of the study. 1.1. RATIONALE Researchers have proven reading to be an essential skill in our life when it keeps our mind updated, healthy and bright during our lifetime. Good reading skills are essential for effective daily communication, knowledge and skill acquisition, researching for academic purposes, business cooperation and operation, etc. (Heilman, 1967; Grabe & Stoller, 2000). Watkins (2017) discussed reading as “incredible human achievements” that allow people to communicate “across both space and time”. Reading is a complicated skill that can only be learned by continuous practice and effort of the people on the purpose of communicating, learning, or achieving knowledge. Reading, together with writing, is the scale to evaluate a person‟s literacy: a proficient reader will have better opportunities in learning and working than others, and higher literacy is often linked to the reduction of poverty in many countries (Giovetti, 2020). Reading is one of the macro skills in language teaching and learning and is highly evaluated by educators, teachers, and students for its functions in students‟ study progress (Brown, 2001). The skills allow students to have efficient access to the wide knowledge that is communicated among different regions and areas, leading them along the pathway of broadening their horizons of life skills and knowledge. Students mastering competent reading skills will find their gaining new knowledge and skills much easier and with 2 much better performance and speed during their study. Thus, learning to read efficiently and proficiently takes time. It takes memorizing rules and practicing methods and techniques; it takes long-term and continuous practice with reading for larger knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical structures, and ideas. However, this effort will prove valuable in students‟ school performance and during their lifetime (Nunan, 1991). As reading is important, it has been among the priorities of language teaching to provide students with the appropriate tools to achieve the skills effectively. In Vietnam, the distinctive features of English from Vietnamese in discourse, style, grammar, and vocabulary have resulted in inevitable difficulties for students. However, since the consciousness that reading is the major skill in English language acquisition, educators, teachers, and students have paid much concern over the practice of reading comprehension (Dang, 2012; Dung, 2020; Truong, 2018) and have suggested extensive reading as one of the solutions to the needs of reading improvement. Extensive reading refers to reading in large amounts and a wide range of topics for the readers‟ pleasure to absorb the advantages of the written materials and upgrade the readers‟ reading comprehension skills (Nation & Waring, 2020). When readers are free to choose the extensive reading materials, they will be enjoying reading them to know more about the topics for background knowledge; therefore extensive reading is an integrated means to study reading as well as other language skills. The literature review has brought to the researcher‟s mind the studied and potential difficulties with students when they practice extensive reading activities. Students may be challenged by the given extensive reading materials (Day et al, 1998) for the materials‟ level is higher than their level; they may find extensive reading difficult for their lack of vocabulary (Nation 3 & Ming-tzu, 1999) or lack of general knowledge to comprehend the reading text. Other difficulties may be the culture difference (Nation & Waring, 2020), learning environment, the teacher-student relationship, the curriculum, teaching method, time for reading (Westwood, 2002), and even the language metalinguistics problems (Chan & Dally, 2000). Among the many difficulties that the students may encounter during their reading practice, the researcher‟s hope is to analyze and compare the literature with the actual situation reflected in the collected data. The reality of students‟ difficulties that secondary students face during their reading lessons can be observed when they often meet with difficulties in extensive reading practice for their lack of vocabulary, inadequate grammatical structures, and wrong application of reading strategies, etc. The problem of students‟ reading ability appeared in the researcher‟s class when I gave them extensive reading assignments to find that they took longer time than given to fulfill the requirements. This reality encouraged me to carry out a case study to find out the major obstacles that the students met with when they were facing extensive reading and work out the favorable extensive reading materials that may help in teaching reading to students. The assumption of the students‟ difficulties relating to the reading and extensive reading is from their lack of vocabulary, grammatical structures, and reading strategies shortage or wrong use. Therefore the researcher intended to deliver questionnaires and intensive interviews to collect students‟ opinions and toward the reading practice. The questionnaires had two parts, part 1 consisted of 7 questions asking students‟ opinions about their interest in extensive reading, the importance of extensive reading in learning reading skills, and their difficulties in extensive reading practice. The questions also investigated students‟ reasons for their difficulties in extensive reading, as 4 well as their suggestions for the activities that may help them improve their extensive reading. Part 2 of the questionnaire encouraged students to state their favorite reading materials and sources. The questionnaires were first delivered to 10 students to find out whether their answers match the initial anticipation of the researcher. The data collected from the small-scale of students were inputted and analyzed so that the researcher decided to continue to apply the questionnaire to the remaining students of the researching population. Intensive interviews were then delivered to 12 randomly picked students to collect their detailed statements about the major difficulties that they face with extensive reading and the reasons for those difficulties. The interviews aimed at finding students‟ favorite materials for extensive reading so that the researcher can collect more precise and valuable data for the study. 1.2. AIMS OF THE STUDY AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS The aim of this research is to study the difficulties the students have when they practice with extensive reading, and to work out the appropriate extensive reading materials that can be used to the students; therefore the study is conducted to study the questions: 1. What are the obstacles ninth graders at Hoai Hai Secondary School face with in extensive reading? 2. What are the favorable materials for ninth graders at Hoai Hai Secondary school in extensive reading? 1.3. SCOPE OF THE STUDY The study was carried out with 90 students who study in classes 9A2, 9A3, 9A4 of Hoai Hai Secondary School. The study was based on the survey questionnaires and interviews with the students. It restricts the conclusion 5 only to the collected data when the students‟ opinions and performance were gathered among this population of students only. Furthermore, the focus is on obstacles and favourable materials in extensive reading. 1.4. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY After the study, the teacher-researcher can have a more intensive understanding of students‟ difficulties in their extensive reading as well as improve teaching methods in teaching reading. The findings of the study will help the teacher determine the favorable extensive reading materials that are appropriate for students‟ reading practice. Moreover, the study will help students realize their obstacles in reading skills, encouraging them in their further language study. 1.5. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY The study consists of five chapters: Chapter 1, Introduction, introduces the the rationale, aim of the study with the research questions. The scope of the study, the significance of the study, and an introduction to the thesis structure are presented in this chapter as well. Chapter 2, Literature Review, discusses the literature related to different authors on teaching reading approaches and the application of the extensive reading approach on teaching reading. Some studies on students‟ difficulties in reading were also reviewed. Chapter 3, Methodology, states the research questions, the data collection instruments, the research methods, the participants, and the research procedures. Chapter 4, Findings and Discussion, analyses and discusses the data and the lists of major findings of the study. 6 Chapter 5, Conclusions and Recommendations where conclusions are written based on the major findings and discussion in the previous chapter for better use of extensive reading materials to teach reading. The final section of the thesis contains the appendices showing all documents concerning or used in the study. 7 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW Chapter 2, Literature Review, is composed of four sub-sections. The first section discusses the theoretical background of reading and extensive reading including the definitions of reading and types of reading. The second section studies some approaches to teaching reading in the second language classroom. The third section gives summaries of relating studies of applying extensive reading into the teaching of reading in the classroom, and students‟ difficulties in extensive reading practice. The last section summarizes key points studied in this chapter. 2.1. READING 2.1.1. Definitions of reading Reading is a complex but basic skill in human life (Anderson et al, 1985) that measures a person‟s achievement from his childhood and during his lifetime. According to Anderson et al (1985), reading can be compared to a symphony orchestra for its characteristics of comprehension, life-long effort, and the multiple ways of interpretation of a text. The researchers also defined “Reading is a process in which information from the text and the knowledge possessed by the reader act together to produce meaning. Good readers skilfully integrate information in the text with what they already know.” They generated five principles of reading that orient its achievement: (1) reading is a constructive process, in which the meaning from the same text can be different greatly among people for the difference in their knowledge, (2) reading must be fluent, in which the background ability is identifying individual words and the higher skill is decoding the words quickly and accurately, (3) reading must be strategic but flexible depending on the complication of the text, the familiarity of the text, and the reading purpose of the readers (4) reading requires 8 motivation as the key to readers‟ success, and (5) reading is a continuously developing skill like playing musical instruments by the readers‟ long-term practice” (p.7-18). RAND Reading Study Group (2002) discussed reading as “the process of extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language” (p. 11). More recently, Purcell-Gates et al. (2016) argued that reading definitions must go further by addressing the process as it occurs in the context of "socioculturally constructed literacy practices" (p. 1218), which includes the values, beliefs, and power relations that characterize those practices, such as those related to language, gender, ethnicity, religion, economics, and geopolitics. Reading has been playing a vitally important role in human‟s long history of survival and development, presented by its various advantages and notably positive effects on other language macro and micro-skills as well as a diverse application into different aspects of life (Brown, 2001; Gunderson, 2013; Pearson & Johnson, 1978; Watkins, 2018). Either in printed form or electric form, reading has maintained the constant central keys to the voyage of acquiring new knowledge, skills, and technology of human beings. Reading and applying new things into life allowed people to make progress through the years so that people could record their knowledge and hand it over from generation to generation (Heilman, 1967; Krashen, 1982). In another study, Alyousef (2005, P.143) recommended automatic recognition skills, vocabulary and structural knowledge, discourse/content/word background knowledge, synthesis, and evaluation skills and strategies, and metacognitive knowledge and skills monitoring as general component skills and knowledge areas in reading. In modern EFL situations, reading is highly appreciated by students for its value in acquiring language skills and knowledge (Brown, 2001). 9 Researchers have paid much concern as to defining reading, researching effective reading comprehension strategies which should happen to make readers improve their background knowledge and linguistic competence. Grabe (1991) had an intensive discussion that many researchers attempt to understand and explain the fluent reading process by analyzing the process into a set of component skills: (1) auto recognition skills could be understood as perceptional or identificational skills; the development of these skills was critical to fluent reading ability; (2) Vocabulary and syntactic knowledge had a vital facilitative impact on reading comprehension as the fluency of readers depended on the number of vocabulary they knew; (3) Formal discourse structure knowledge was the knowledge that readers were expected to master since they would better understand the text by knowing how it was organized, (4) Content/word background knowledge had a major impact on readers‟ comprehension of the text when they read, evaluated and compared the information they were reading with their sources of knowledge they had already been experiencing, (5) Synthesis and evaluation skills/strategies helped the readers to predict from the text, so the skills played a critical role to reading comprehension , (6) Metacognitive knowledge and skills monitoring presented its importance in the readers‟ language knowledge, structure and organization recognition, and proper strategies use for specific targets in reading practice (P.379-382). Krashen (1982, P.23) stated: “Reading is good for you. The research supports a stronger conclusion, however. Reading is the only way, the only way we become good readers, develop a good writing style, an adequate vocabulary, advanced grammar, and the only way we become good spellers.”, and Brown (2001) mentioned the „SQ3R‟ effective series of procedures for approaching a reading text: 1. Survey: Skim the text for an overview of main ideas. 10 2. Question: The reader asks questions about what he or she wishes to get out of the text 3. Read: Read the text while looking for answers to the previously formulated questions. 4. Recite: Reprocess the salient points of the text through oral or written language. 5. Review: Assess the importance of what one has just read and incorporate it into long-term association. (P.315) Comprehending a reading text, according to scholars, entails more than just comprehending the meaning of the words or the structures utilized; it also entails the interpretation of signs, the realization of sophisticated cognitive processes, and the comprehension of intrinsic conventions. Reading comprehension is a cognitive and selective process in which readers must demonstrate their background knowledge, linguistic competence, strategy application, and critical evaluation of what they have learned from the text (Hedge, 2000). 2.1.1. Extensive reading For its practical and useful application in language acquisition and reading comprehension improvement, there are many definitions of extensive reading that have been given by different researchers (Nation & Waring, 2020). The authors stated that extensive reading is the case of “each learner independently and silently reading a lot of material which is at the right level for them” and involves comprehension so that learners should gain information from the input. The reading content should be interesting and motivating so that it can encourage the learners to read, comprehend and acquire some language skills (Krashen, 1982, Nation & Waring, 2020). 11 Extensive reading is reading in large quantity, normally outside the classroom, often in free time for information, pleasure, or expansion of knowledge or vocabulary (Krashen, 1982; Day et al, 1998). Extensive reading brings a lot of benefits to students, varying from knowledge, meaning, pleasure, to confidence and enthusiasm. Extensive reading gives students much exposure to the rich context of reading materials for large vocabulary input. Krashen believed that developing a large vocabulary is the necessary part of mastering a language that is most associated with implicit learning of vocabulary through reading, and reading comprehensible input plays the most valuable source of vocabulary acquisition. According to Day et al (1998, P.188), a successful extensive reading program should contain the key characteristics: 1. Students read large amounts of printed material; 2. Students read a variety of materials in terms of topic and genre; 3. The material students read is within their level of comprehension; 4. Students choose what they want to read; 5. Reading is its own reward; 6. Students read for pleasure, information, and general understanding; 7. Students read their selection at a faster rate; 8. Reading is individual (students read on their own); 9. Teachers read with their students, thus serving as role models of good readers; 10. Teachers guide and keep track of students‟ progress. In a foreign language curriculum, extensive reading plays an important role in students‟ language acquisition (Day, 2015), including student‟s improvements in grammar understanding, reading speed, and reading fluency; therefore, it has often been used by teachers and educators as a practice in reading teaching methodology.