Luận văn Background to the study and statement of the problem

Part 1 introduction 1. Background to the study and statement of the problem 1.1. Critical thinking and critical reading skills in the Age of Information In the Age of Information, people are facing up with the information overload which can be both an advantage and a big threat. It is, therefore, necessary for people especially youngsters to have good ability of not being drowned in the ocean of information. Accordingly, reading, which is the most popular means of processing information, should be taken into account. Among the amount of information needed, the questions of what to read, how to read effectively and what to believe are worthy of readers’ consideration. In such a situation, critical reading is an essential skill which is described by Harris and Hodges (1981) as a process of making judgments in reading, evaluating relevance and adequacy of what is read, an act of reading in which a questioning attitude, logical analysis and inference are used to judge the worth of what is reading according to an establish standard Critical reading which is significant to EFL students for mastering critical reading skills will provide students with the ‘right tool’ (Milan, 1995), in short term, to enhance their process of studying at university and, in long term, to serve them well for the rest of their life. A remarkable number of students and teachers, however, does not have in-depth knowledge of critical reading, what its elements are and how to develop it. They are not even aware of the role of critical reading in the teaching and learning process. This leads to quite lots of problems concerning behaviorism, self discovery and other cognitive matters. The lack of a full awareness of critical reading may result in not only teachers’ clueing in and students’ knowledge acquiring but also curriculum design or teachers and students interaction in classroom, etc. In the history of pedagogy, methodology, psychology and humanism, a variety of research on critical thinking and its related problems and solutions have been conducted. In a very humble way, this research is aimed to follow the founding fathers of the field to bone up the most basic knowledge about critical thinking skill. Next, because of the limitation of time as well as of the restrains on reference sources, the researcher will not cover up every aspect of critical thinking but just critical thinking in relation to the effective reading of first year students in English Department, College of Foreign Languages (CFL), Vietnam National University (VNU). As applying critical thinking skills in reading, students will become more effective readers who are capable of applying the given skills to achieve academic success in their language learning. 1.2. An overview of reading course in English Division 1, English Department, CFL, VNU 1.2.1. Course objectives At the end of the course, first year students will be able to understand various average-level discourses such as magazine articles, letters, stories, etc. and apply basic reading strategies including locating specific information (scanning), extracting main ideas (skimming), dealing with unfamiliar words, understanding author’s attitude, understanding text organization, understanding referencing devices and understanding text inferences. Besides, the ability to deal with the following types of exercises such as true/ false, multiple choice, gap – fill, matching and open-ended questions and the ability to build up their background knowledge and vocabulary range through reading passages will also be attained. To develop critical reading skills, it is very important to set up a range of objectives which aims at developing thinking process in reading skills. In reality, out of seven objectives of Reading 2 mentioned above, only the last four ones relate to critical reading skills: understanding author’s attitude, understanding text organization, understanding referencing devices and understanding text inferences. However, the activities and tasks used in the course do not help students meet those objectives. (The analyses of the activities and tasks will be made in the analysis of the material from page 3-8.) 1.2.2. The syllabus (A detailed syllabus is provided in Appendix 1) The major strength of the syllabus is that it gives clear instructions to teachers and students on pieces of work they are expected to do every week. This will help them be well prepared for class and that would increase the efficiency of teaching and learning. Also, the syllabus saves the first week as an orientation week which is carried out in various forms such as formal lectures, discussions, debates, story telling, text reading or simply informal talks. The benefits of orientation activities are: 1. creating opportunities for students and teachers and students themselves to get to know each other to exchange experiences, attitudes and opinions. 2. orienting students towards college study methods in general and effective ways to learn the four language skills in particular. Such preparation has been proved to respond to actual needs of students during their early days at college. In addition, the syllabus gives space for the teachers to design or collect further reading by themselves. Nevertheless, it is not an easy task due to time restraints and the lack of reference sources. In the syllabus, there are three revision weeks. Traditionally, teachers give students the tests of the previous years to do as a way of practicing reading under time pressure and developing examination skills. In fact, this activity is relevant if the biggest purpose of the course is merely to get good marks in the exams. However, if developing critical thinking and critical reading skills for students are also the aims of the syllabus, then more thought-provoking tasks and activities would have to be included. 1.2.3. The critique of the material ‘Practice your reading skills’ is the only in-use-textbook which is designed, adapted and combined by a group of teachers in the Division. The use of only one course book in the whole semester may reduce the chances for students to experience different view points, beliefs and values, build up their own knowledge, reflect their attitudes, assumptions and even prejudices through comparing and examining which inevitably may bring about the biased, subjective way of thinking being the killer of critical thinking. Therefore, introducing appropriate materials as supplementary to the main textbook is one of the researcher’s tasks in this study. this should be put in the part related to comments on weaknesses of the material/or final part related to “the material” Followings is a brief overview of major strengths and weaknesses of the material a. The strengths Comparing to the course objectives the syllabus is quite suitable. The core course book ‘Practice your reading skills’ is a basic reading for pre-intermediate students of English. Through 24 non-specialized theme-based units of the book and several extra activities, the reading course is aimed to develop the following reading skills for the students including getting the gist of a topic, drawing key concepts out of a reading, practicing reading strategies, learning how to use some clues for understanding. Besides, it also fosters the interaction between the readers and the texts. The core book contains informative, relevant and versatile texts, fun activity types, and varied vocabulary development materials. Specially, there are numerous activities designed to develop students’ communicative competence, i.e. the activities provide opportunities to incorporate listening, speaking and writing into the language lessons. In the book, the activities which are at low thinking levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy are conducive to individual, pair and group work and are designed not to teach students to read but to guide students to practice reading skills. As a result, the book can be used both for self-study and in the class room. The topics were well - chosen to fit the themes of other three skills so students can practice the language again and again when speaking, listening, writing and reading. The topics are interesting and relevant. They can be practical and real as in ‘Language Learning’, ‘Jobs and Career’, etc. but they can still be imaginative and brilliant as in ‘Achievers’ and ‘Science’. In general, the book can meet the general goal of the division for improving students’ reading skills. Nonetheless, during the teaching and learning process, ‘Practice your reading skills’ has revealed a lot of problems. b. The weaknesses ‘Practice your reading skills’ is the only in-use-textbook which is designed, adapted and combined by a group of teachers in the Division. The use of only one course book in the whole semester may reduce the chances for students to experience different view points, beliefs and values, build up their own knowledge, reflect their attitudes, assumptions and even prejudices through comparing and examining which inevitably may bring about the biased, subjective way of thinking being the killer of critical thinking. Therefore, introducing appropriate materials as supplementary to the main textbook is one of the researcher’s tasks in this study. The first apparent problem is the gap between theoretical objectives and reality. Being one of the four language courses in Division 1, reading must fit the objectives of the curriculum which attempts to reach the standard of the first level set by Cambridge University Local Examinations Syndicate. That means after finishing the first year, students will reach the standard of PET level (pre-intermediate). However, the level is only suitable for listening and speaking skills. Many first year students are so good at reading that they can easily finish the First Certificate reading texts. Therefore, it is a real challenge to design a material that is able to fit the curriculum as well as students’ ability, interests and demands. The book must contain multi-level reading texts from beginning to first certificate, from simple to more complicated. Within this light, the content, is not cohesive because some texts and exercises are quite easy while some others are quite difficult and more advanced. To fix the problem, teachers have to be flexible when using the material in class. They have to design some extra activities and questions for the simple reading texts and simplify the difficult tasks by helping students with new words, giving the instructions carefully or asking students to work in group where strong students can help weaker ones with the difficult tasks. The teachers can also classify the tasks by giving the more challenging tasks to stronger students and less difficult ones to weaker students. The second problem area is the content of the material. The text types in the material are quite variable, from short stories, specialized articles, reports, reviews, letters, advertisements to diagrams or pie charts. The reading texts are quite different in level of difficulties and complication and used mostly to present or practice new language, general comprehension and information-finding. To examine the content of the material carefully, the researcher has based on the two following categories: task types, stages of reading and possibility of combining with other skills (listening, speaking and writing). That action helps bring about the opportunities to comment on the criticalness of the material which will be discussed in the later part. From what is shown in detailed syllabus and the list of task types and text types in each stage of reading as analyzed by the writer (for details, see Appendix 2 ), it is easy to make some comments as follow: + In ‘Practice your reading skills’ many units lack pre-reading and/or post-reading stages which seems against the attempt to develop critical reading skills gradually through the stages. + The activities for the two stages are not diversified. Mainly, students are asked to discuss/write about related issues after reading which leads to frequent practices of speaking / writing skills but the neglect of listening. + The instructions of the activities are not clear enough. + The material is not cohesive as there are some parts with much more critical content (Unit 21 – Art) than any other parts. Besides, some instructions are so detailed that they become wordy. - ‘Criticalness’ (the portion or the percentage of being critical of the content of a material) To examine the criticalness of reading material, the researcher used three following criteria as suggested by Spiegel (1990:410) content validity, transfer potential and amount of reinforcement. Content validity refers to how well the materials deliver what they promise or whether they are true to the rationale or theory that the materials purport to follow. To assert that a material is critical means to prove its promotion of reflective thinking and strategic planning. The core book of the course, nevertheless, does not absolutely meet that demand. While being critical means being well-reasoned rather than having quick answers, along with some higher level (intermediate) tasks that do not have obvious solutions, there are numerous situations when students can easily find the answers to the questions. Mostly, the material does not require students to pause, reflect, consider and ‘try out more than one hypothesis or attend to several factors before settling upon an answer’. (For the sample reading task of week two, see Appendix 3) Normally, the six main comprehensive questions are being successful tools for teachers to develop scanning skills of students. Yet, in term of critical thinking development, they do not meet the intellectual demands of high level cognition skills and can only be categorized as Right There QARs whose answers are obvious in the text. To answer this type of questions, students only have to use low level cognitive skills. If it is to develop students’ critical reading skills, the book needs a lot of further improvements. Among all ten units analyzed, there is only one passage in unit 21 – Arts that contains the ‘criticalness’. The activities require students not only to comprehend but also dig down into the author’s points, the referencing devices and the organization and purposes of the ideas. The tasks given out also have a very close relationship with other critical and communication skills beside simple reading. Doing the tasks, students have to write, reflect, express and compare. Transfer potential involves the manner in which the students practices or uses the task of interest. The second criterion, which involves exploring right or wrong answers, explaining divergent answers and identifying clue words, asks about three aspects: practicing, awareness and acceptance. In the first place, students must be given opportunities to practice the transferring skills. To beginners, this stage must be controlled by the teacher who has the responsibility of stating the connection between the text and other non verbal materials. Besides, students are also instructed to know where to transfer and how to transfer. In order to have a detailed plan to transfer, the material should be systematic and well-instructive. Yet, the material lacks both features as it was designed without a consistent format and united language proficiency. Some tasks are too easy, some others are too complicated. Some types of exercises are too long and some are repeated. Certain instructions are even incorrect in grammar and not clear enough to understand. Moreover, the connection between the texts and other skills is not clear. That leads to the lack of transferring the tasks and the knowledge. Amount of reinforcement is the provision of opportunities to apply new understanding in meaningful and interesting contexts. This is considered more important for critical reading than other reading tasks. To obtain this criterion, the material must be designed with variety of activities to develop analyzing skills, determining sequence, etc with variety of activities. Some reading materials in the world which are accredited as good critical reading materials must have three to five activities accompanying with one unit. The material, unfortunately, does not provide any other resource pack for the teacher as well as students. All the time spent in class is for students to do the exercises and teachers to correct the answers. If the teachers want to provide students with more extra tasks they will have to design themselves. This work, however, is rather difficult for beginning teachers due to the restraint on time, money and professional supervision. One more thing about the material is that it has no teacher’s manuals. It is true that the teachers’ instructions, methods and behaviors play a very significant role in developing students critical reading skills. The teacher’s manuals, therefore, will be a good professional help as they do not only bring in transparency matters for the lessons but the guidelines that assist teachers in many ways. 1.2.4. Teachers Conventionally, all teachers in Division 1 are young which presumably means they do not have much experience in teaching in particular and in life in general. However, they do possess certain advantages such as being enthusiastic, active, ready to apply new methods or think in new ways and adaptive to different situations. They are also very hard-working. The evidence is that they were continuously working very hard to produce all the materials used in the reading course. Another notable point is that all teachers in Division 1 have graduated from CFL, VNU and many of them experienced the same non-cognition oriented reading materials as well as a curriculum with no subject named critical thinking when they were students. Only a few ones graduating from fast track classes had chances to develop good thinking skills through their exposure to a learning environment where critical thinking is promoted 1.2.5. Students Generally, at high school, every week students only have one forty five minute-reading class and reading materials are poor in terms of quality. The reading skills which are paid most attention to in the English syllabus at high school are scanning, skimming, guessing the meaning of new words and inferring. Not only for reading for speaking, writing and listening skills as well, thought-provoking activities are seldom found in their textbook. It is obvious that most first year students of English Department are well selected, and eager to learn since they all have to go through a very demanding entrance examination. Among the four language skills taught in the first year, reading seems to be the strongest skill for most students because it was more frequently practiced when they were still at school to serve the main purpose of passing the university entrance examination. However, once they have to learn how to read critically, reading is no longer too easy. Usually in the orientation week, first year students have chances to express their own opinions about reading and they all agree that reading is very important not only in English learning but also in any content class English is used as a medium. Yet, hardly do they know about how to develop reading skill as a cognitive and communicative skill. As well, they do not know how to combine different strategies in reading. The effectiveness of learning reading skills, therefore, remains a big challenge for a large number of first year students. 2. Aims of the study The research aims specifically at (1) investigating the attitudes of first year students and teachers toward critical reading; (2) exploring the problems that students encounter in studying and applying critical reading; (3) offering suitable teaching strategies in developing critical reading skills for f