Luận văn Techniques for developing content reading skills for the third year students at the university of odonto and stomatology

Part I: Introduction Rationale. English nowadays has been a language of internationalization so it is taking a very important role in most fields in personal and professional life as well because of its popularity in the world. Being a student in this new era, she/he has not only opportunities to approach scientific and technological achievements but also challenges of being backwards due to her/his knowledge, and ability. In this case, I mean the language knowledge and ability of language acquisition because English is now surely the language of communication in the world. If her/his English is excellent, there is little difficulty in understanding and acquiring sufficiently all she/he wants. In contrast, there is no chance for her/him to comprehend, communicate with foreigners when her/his language competence is at low level. This is true with students in ESP fields, hereby the students in Medicine specification. Medicine is one of the most difficult categories that everyone finds because of its highly academic features, and difficulties in studying. Learners who want to be experts in this field have to learn as well as they can not only about theories in textbooks, online documents, books and magazines, newspapers, etc., in the library but also the skillful steps they should follow to treat patients. In order to be good at theories, they of course have to read a lot due to the fact that what they learn at school is not enough, and most of the available documents in the library, on the internet, or other resources is written in English. But most students now do not know how to read effectively to get as much knowledge as they desire. When reading they face difficulties of lacking vocabulary, background knowledge, functional words,… And they do not know what to do to overcome these difficulties, which demotivate themselves from reading. With the wish of arming students with techniques for improving content reading skills to help them have motivation of reading the required textbooks at university and other available resources, I choose to do my research on the project entitled “Techniques For Developing Content Reading Skills For The Third Year Students At The University of Odonto and Stomatology” because I myself have profound understanding that reading can help learners to get information to the fullest, and that providing learners with useful techniques will motivate them in reading more and more. II. Aims of the study The study is aimed at: better understanding the concepts of reading, content reading, reading comprehension and reading in ESP teaching and learning. identifying some problems in teaching reading English in Medicine at Odonto - Stomatology University (UOS.). providing the students at UOS. with useful techniques of content reading skills. identifying how far the techniques can help to improve the quality of teaching and learning reading ESP. The study is the hope of the author of the study to make some contributions to the improvement of teaching reading Medical English at Odonto – Stomatology University. III. Scope of the study Covering every aspect of language theory and practice in this study is impossible. Therefore, the study focuses on problems in teaching reading experienced by teachers at UOS. It is not proposed to deal with other skills: speaking or writing skills. The other subjects of the study are the third year students at UOS. Also, the purposes of the course are confined to “English in Medicine”. IV. Methodology This study is conducted mainly basing on the theoretical background extracted from many published books written by different authors on language of medicine, communicative language teaching, English for specific purposes, material development, approaches to ESP teaching. In order to carry out this study, the author of the study uses the quantitative method in combination with a variety of methods such as class observation, informal interviews, discussions with the teachers and students at Odonto–Stomatology University. Following the quantitative method, all comments, consideration, suggestions given in the thesis are based on the analysis of the statistics from the survey questionnaires conducted with the teachers and the students at Odonto–Stomatology University. Following the above mentioned methods one more time claim the recommendations stated in the study if they are useful and helpful for both the teachers and the students. V. Design of the study The study consists of three main parts: the introduction, the development and the conclusion. Part I introduces rationales, aims of the study as well as scope and methods of the study. Part II comprises four chapters. Chapter I deals with an overview of the theoretical background of the research. It is concerned with the issues relevant to the topic of the research: reading and reading comprehension, classification of reading, the importance of improving reading skills, roles of reading teachers and those of reading students, reading in ESP teaching and learning. Chapter II is a close look at present teaching and learning reading English in Medicine at Odonto – Stomatology University. Chapter III explores reading problems experienced by the teachers and students at Odonto – Stomatology University. Chapter IV offers some suggestions to improve the teaching of reading English in Medicine and a sample work for some reading lessons for 3rd year students. Part III summarizes the issues addressed and presents recommendations for further improvements and some suggestions for further researches. Part II: Development. Chapter I: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND. In this chapter, the review of the issues most relevant considered as a theoretical background to the study will be provided. It consists of definitions of reading, content reading and reading comprehension, classification of reading according to manner and purpose, definition of English for specific purpose, the roles that students and teachers play in ESP class, factors affecting reading skills, and difficulties foreign language learners encounter when reading. I.1. Definitions of reading, content reading and reading comprehension. I.1.1. What is reading? It is stated that reading is a kind of culture that people regardless of age, sex, or class should learn and have. Although no one can deny the high frequency of reading in every daylife, to understand thoroughly what reading or reading comprehension is may not be well aware by many. There have been so many definitions of reading that they cause much confusion. However, no single definition or explanation can be everyone’s satisfaction. According to Harmer, it is the eyes and the brain to dominantly participate in the reading process. The eyes are on messages and the brain then has to identify the meanings of those messages (Harmer (1989:153)). So the speed of reading depends much on the mechanical process of looking and perceiving and it is the reader who decides how fast he wants to read the text. Sharing the same viewpoint on reading, Smith defined that “reading is to understand author’s thought” (Smith (1985:102)). But the problem posed hereof is that how the reader understands the written texts because the meanings of a word depend on the context in which it appears. The closer the reader shares the context with the author, the more he/she can understand what the author wants to say through the message. This mostly depends on the reader’s reading proficiency. Goodman pointed out that, reading is “a psycholinguistics process by which the reader – a language user reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display” (Goodman (1988:135)). This act of reconstruction is considered as a cyclical process of sampling, predicting, testing, and confirming. To make the matter simple and easy, Nuttal relates reading to communication process and concludes that “reading means getting out of the text as nearly as possible the message the writer puts into it” (Nuttal (1996:4)). He also presses the interaction of texts and readers in the reading process. In his opinion, “text is full of meaning like a jug of water, the reader’s mind soaks it up like sponge”. To conclude, definitions of reading are many but no definition can possibly express all the ideas and features of what reading is. However, from the opinions above, the authors all concentrate on the nature of reading that is the necessity for the reader while dealing with reading is to understand the author’s mind not the author’s words. I.1.2. What is content reading? According to the dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, content reading is not like reading for pleasure or relaxation but the reading of books and other printed materials that contains information needed for learning in the content areas, such as textbooks or other study materials (Richards, J. et al, (1985:81)). This means that with different purposes of reading, readers have different ways of reading to work out the significance of the text. If the reader reads for pleasure, it is of course less pressure of time and understanding ability as well for him/her during reading process. In contrast, he/she has to pay his/her greater attention to what he/she is reading to comprehend it to the fullest in content areas. Regardless of reading for relaxation or reading for information in content areas, it is necessary to make sense of the reading, otherwise reading is useless. There are six types of knowledge to help readers make sense of the text as follows: syntactic knowledge; morphological knowledge; general world knowledge; sociocultural knowledge; topic knowledge; and genre knowledge (Hedge (2001:189)). Among those types, syntactic and morphological knowledge are to do with the language itself which help a reader to decode the language of a text, and the rest four ones enable a reader to work with the language of the text in order to interpret its meaning. When a reader moves through a text, it is essential to employ all types of knowledge but he/she is to know how to interact them with each other for understanding the text most. I.1.3. What is reading comprehension? Reading comprehension takes a very important part in teaching and learning reading a language and a foreign language as well. It can be seen as the ability to retain information of a written text to the fullest of the readers. Grellet defined that “reading comprehension or understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it as effectively as possible” (Grellet, 1981:34). From this point of view, Grellet focuses on readers’ ability of understanding the meaning of a written text based on the individual’s background knowledge. Having the same point of view with Grellet, Swan stated that “A student is good at comprehension we mean that he can read accurately and efficiently, so as to get the maximum information of a text with the minimum of understanding” ( Swan,1975: 1). This means that the student can show his understanding by re-expressing the content of the text in many ways such as summarizing the text, answering questions, etc. For a little more different definition of reading comprehension, Richards and Rodgers put their emphasis on the share of opinion between the author and the reader. So according to them, “reading comprehension is best described as an understanding between the author and the reader” (Richards and Rodgers (1987: 9)). This implies that during the reading process, readers on the way to discover what the author means and to build meaning for themselves at the same time in their own language, their thoughts, and their own view of the world based on their background knowledge. It is very difficult, even impossible to understand the author’s meaning to the maximum if there is no interaction between the author and the reader about language and thoughts. Consequently, the reader is as active in searching for meaning as is the writer in creating written language. From the above mentioned definitions, it is possible to draw a conclusion that it is meaningless if readers spend time reading but have no comprehension or attain nothing or even little from a written text. In other words, it is no use of reading without comprehension. Therefore, reading comprehension is an important part in teaching and learning a foreign language in general and teaching reading in particular. And it is a need to improve reading skills so that reading motivation is increased, benefits from reading such as being able to progress through assignments faster and to retain more information, learning more and being more knowledgeable, improving spelling and grammar skills, and having a more active imagination … are to the fullest To sum up, reading comprehension plays a very important part in teaching and learning a foreign language in general and teaching reading in particular. However, the reasons for reading differ from one person to another. As a result, the ways we read are also different. In other words, the purposes of reading determine the ways or the styles of reading. Now it is necessary to have a close look at the classification of reading according to manner and the purposes of reading to identify different types of reading. I.2. Classification of reading. I.2.1. Classification of reading according to manner. According to manner, reading aloud and silent reading are two types of reading in which “reading aloud involves looking at the text, understanding it and also saying it” (Doff, 1988:70). Although reading aloud is considered a way to convey necessary information to the others, it is an unpopular activity outside classroom. In fact, reading aloud proves itself to be advantages for learners because it helps them make the connection between sounds and spelling of letters and words, and assists teachers to check learners’ pronunciation. However, there are contradictory opinions about it. While Nuttall (1996) refers reading aloud as an aid for beginners to improve their pronunciation, Greenwood (1985) criticizes the overemphasis of the purpose of “teaching pronunciation” through reading aloud. Unlike reading aloud, silent reading is more often used in both real life and classroom, and “it is the method we normally use with our native language, and on the whole the quickest and most efficient” (Lewis, 1985:110). Because reading is a very personal skill, silent reading is a more effective skill for reading comprehension for these reasons: firstly learners do not need to read all the words in the text, secondly they can read at their own speed and if they do not understand the sentence, they can go back, thirdly students can not only attain the main ideas in a short time but also understand its details thoroughly to answer the questions, and finally the teacher can check his/her learners’ understanding easily and add reading materials and exercises suitable to their ability. I.2.2. Classification of reading according to purposes. It is clear to assume that the reasons for reading are different from this person to that person because of their uncommon purposes. According to purposes, reading is categorized into intensive reading, extensive reading, skimming and scanning. In terms of intensive reading, Francoise Grellet defined that “Intensive reading means reading short texts to extract specific information. This is an accuracy activity involving reading for details” (Grellet,1981:41). It requires readers when performing reading process to understand not only what the text means but also how the meaning is produced. According to Nuttall (2000:38), “Intensive reading involves approaching the text under the guidance of a teacher or a task which forces the student to pay great attention to the text”. To this kind of reading, readers are required a profound and detailed understanding of the text. They have to know every idea, every hidden information in the text. They also have to pay attention to the area of the words in the passage through which some hints may be conveyed. Intensive reading is also associated with the teaching of reading in terms of its component skills. Texts are studied intensively in order to introduce and practise reading skills such as distinguishing the main idea of a text from the detail, finding pronoun referents, or guessing the meaning of unknown words. In terms of extensive reading, reading in quantity with the aim of getting an overall understanding of the material. Readers are more concerned with the meaning of the text than the meaning of individual words or sentences. Because extensive reading is to deal with longer texts, it is difficult to attain the general meaning for the whole if reader don’t understand thoroughly and adequately the parts (sentences, paragraphs, chapters) of which it is made up when the whole is not the sum of its parts, the time of people’s temporary memory is short, and the author and the readers don’t have full interaction with each other. As a result, most of extensive reading is done silently and out of the classroom and it gives learners of all ages and levels of language proficiency opportunities to build their language competence, to progress in their reading ability, to become more independent in their studies, to acquire cultural knowledge, and to develop confidence and motivation to carry on learning. From Nuttall’s point of view, “intensive and extensive reading are not just two contrasting ways of reading but an infinitive variety of interrelated and overlapping strategies” (Nuttall, 2000:38) . These two types of reading, of course, are complementary and reciprocal with each other, and necessary. In terms of skimming, Grellet assumed that “when skimming, we go through the reading material quickly in order to get its main points or the intention of the writer, but not to find the answer to specific questions” (Grellet, 1981:19). That means when to see the text is useful or not, interesting or uninteresting, it is advisable for reader to read quickly, not to search for a specific item and key words. Skimming provides an overview of the text. Because the purposes of skimming are to check whether texts are relevant or not, and to set the scene for more concentrated effort that is to follow if the text is worth reading, skimming is useful to look at chapter/section headings, summaries and opening paragraphs. If skimming requires a reader to move rapidly through a text to emphasize on relevant matters and to ignore what is not of importance to him/her, scanning means glancing rapidly through a text either to search for a specific piece of information or to get an initial impression of whether the text is suitable for a given purpose (Nuttall, 2000: 49). From this notion, scanning is a type of reading that involves finding a particular piece of information located in material that is otherwise of no interest to the reader. This is widely used in reading comprehension. It can be practised with variety of texts such as advertisements, telephone books, dictionaries, indexes, etc. Scanning is important and useful as a study technique when reading is a requirement of finding particular words or phrases that are relevant to the task you are doing. In short, when teaching and learning reading comprehension teachers and students should remember that there are several reading types and an effective reader is the one who can adapt his style flexibly according to his purpose. Generally, readers do not choose to read a text either intensively or extensively, for gist or specific information because a text can be best tackled by a combination of strategies. I.3. Reading in English for specific purpose (ESP) teaching and learning I.3.1. Definition of ESP? What is ESP? This is a big and complicated question that requires much effort in seeing how ESP at the presen