ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my thanks to many people who have assisted my research
work.
To my supervisor Mr Le Quoc Hanh, M.A. (TESOLT), a senior lecture at Hanoi
University of Foreign Studies. I am grateful to him for his valuable guidance and
great insight into my thesis writing. His guidance was indispensable to the design
and completion of the study. I am also grateful to him for his comments,
correction and for his kindly encouragement and enthusiasm during the
development of this study.
My special words of thanks also go to the Management Board of the Post-
Graduate Department of the Hanoi University of Foreign studies for their
consideration and enthusiasm in helping me to pursue the course.
My particular thanks go to Ms. Nguyen Thai Ha, M.A. (TESOLT), a senior
lecture at Hanoi University of Foreign Studies, the Deputy Dean of post graduate
Department for her useful advice, criticism and support while the research was
being done.
I would also like to thank my collueges at Military Political Academy and my
students in the two classes of BT4A, BT4B for their participation and support.
Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my husband and my
children for their love, great encouragement and support to me to fulfill this
thesis.
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ABSTRACT
This study is an investigation into reading strategies of different groups of
learners in reading classes at the Military Political Academy. It purposes to find
out the reading strategies used by different groups of MPA learners in their
reading comprehension, especially while they do reading tasks, and look at the
factors influencing their reading strategy choice. The participants of this study
were forty-eight students at varied levels of English proficiency. An experimental
method was chosen as the methodological approach underpinning this study
Test, questionnaire and interview were used to gather data, which then analysed.
The findings indicate first, learners at the Military Political Academy used six
groups of reading strategies that offered by Oxfords (1990) at different degrees in
their reading comprehension. Among them, metacognitive strategies rank first,
next come social strategies. Second, the effective and ineffective learners’ uses of
reading strategies vary across the six reading strategy groups. The former tended
to use metacognitive, social and cognitive strategies at higher degree than did
ineffective ones while they do reading tasks. Final, MPA learners are most
strongly motivated by instrumental motivation although they were also
influenced by integrative and intrinsic motivation and they are not fully aware of
the use of reading strategies despite the fact that they used some kinds of reading
strategies in their reading. As for the implications of the study, some suggestions
are recommended for strategy training to MPA learners such enhance the
learners’ conception of the use of reading strategies in their learning reading
comprehension and implication for classroom learning and teaching.
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
EFL : English as a foreign language
ESL : English as a second language
SIIL : Strategy inventory for language learning
LSs : Learning strategies
LS : Learning strategy
RSs : Reading strategies
RS : Reading strategy
MPA : Military Political Academy
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LIST OF TABLES
Table 3.1 : Summary of the analysis of the SILL.
Table 4.1 : A Comparison of the use of RSs between effective and ineffective
learners across six groups of RSs.
Table 4.2.1 : The reading strategies used by two groups of sample at the pre-
reading stage.
Table 4.2.2 :The reading strategies used by two groups of sample at the while-
reading
Table 4.2.3 : The reading strategies used by two groups of sample at the post-
reading stage.
Table 4.3 : Summary of the analysis of informants’ reasons for learning
English
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CHAPTER i: INTRODUCTION
1.1. Background to the thesis
English is one of the most important of Vietnam’s foreign languages. It is used
not only by Vietnamese to communicate with native speakers of English but also
as an important international language in communicating with people from non-
native English countries. Although English functions as a foreign language,
Vietnamese who are likely to be in contact with foreigners in various areas, for
example, education, politics, tourism, industry, business and in general social
contexts, need considerable proficiency in English. In fact, many people
nowadays realize that a command of English has become essential for their future
occupations, since it is a pre-requisite for success in both the public and private
sectors.
Of the four macro skills in language (listening, speaking, reading and writing),
there has been growing and justified concern about reading in Vietnam. This
concern is due to the increasing amount of printed English material in the society.
Various sources of modern knowledge and technology needed in developing the
country at large are usually reported in English. Proficient readers in English are
high demand.
In connection with the matters, in recent years, together with the increasing needs
for English learning at colleges or universities in the Army in general and at the
MPA in particular, great efforts have been made to improve the quality of the
teaching reading. To meet the demand of the state military, every year, the MPA
trains about one thousand political officers at different levels, who are not only
expected to be competent at their specialties but also have good knowledge of
foreign language. Every year, about a thousand officers at different levels,
hundreds of potential teachers and many post-graduate students of different social
sciences and humanities are trained here. Foreign language is a compulsory
subject at the MPA, because it is very important and necessary for the learners’
future work. After the course, they will have to read different materials written in
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English such as academic texts from their specialist subjects, newspapers,
reports, the world’s military information, politics and economics, etc, from a
number of different sources.
In teaching and learning English as a foreign language at the MPA, reading has
always received a great deal of attention. Teaching English at the MPA provides
the students with the abilities to understand the written materials and to
communicate in English. Furthermore, English is taught and learnt in a non -
native environment. That is why reading is not only an important means to gain
knowledge but also a means by which further study takes place.
According to Carrell (1988:1), “if we consider the study of English as a foreign
language around the world - the situation in which most English learners finds
themselves - reading is the main reason why students learn the language”. This is
particularly true to the students of the English Department at the MPA. It is
crucial for them to acquire the ability to read English efficiently and effectively.
However, students at the MPA do not seem to be good at reading. In the past, at
the MPA, English teachers focused only on the teaching of grammatical rules,
ignoring how sentences were used in the performance of communicative acts. In
teaching reading, teachers paid too much attention to the explanation of language
points, but failed to help students analyze the connection between sentences, or to
find out the main ideas of a text. Consequently, what the students gained was just
a little knowledge about language. As the result, the students had no ability to
understand the text as a whole.
Most learners complain that there are too many new words and complicated
sentences throughout the whole English reading texts. However, reading does not
only involve the understanding of what words or sentences mean on the surface,
but it also involve the logic and value relations between sentences.
Some other learners think that it is difficult to understand the English text
because of lacking background knowledge. And some students say their reading
2
skills are very poor only because they do not know how to get the meaning of
some new words which appear in the texts. In this sense, they even cannot
understand “skills” very well. The notion of “skills” in learners’ minds is limited.
All the above show that learners focus too much on the texts, while they ignore
their own abilities to infer the meaning. Actually, reading is a cognitive process
“whereby the meaning of a text is recreated or reconstructed by the reader” (Shi,
2000: 28). Therefore, it is necessary to arouse learners’ awareness of their own
ways to read and help learners get some ideas of how to read. From the
experiences in learning and teaching English as a foreign language, the
researcher finds it necessary to study learning strategies, which can help MPA
learners, especially in learning reading comprehension.
1.2. The aims of the study
The aim of the study is to examine what reading strategies are used by the third
year students at MPA in their learning reading comprehension and look at the
factors affecting their reading strategies choice. And the research aims to arouse
the awareness of the learners’ own way to read and to get some new ideas to
improve their reading skills.
1.3. Research questions
The research was carried out to answer the following questions:
1. What reading strategies are used by different learner groups at the MPA in
their reading comprehension?
2. What reading strategies do the effective and ineffective learners use while
they are doing reading tasks?
3. What factors influence the learners’ reading strategy choice?
1.4. Outline of the thesis
This thesis is divided into five chapters below.
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Chapter I, the Introduction, states the research problem, the aims and the outline
of the thesis.
Chapter II, Literature Review, presents briefly some general theories related to
reading and reading strategies, terminological definitions, classification systems
and major characteristics of learning strategies. This is followed by a discussion
of factors affecting the reading strategy choice of the learners at the MPA.
Chapter III discusses the methodology and the procedures by which the study had
been carried out such as selections of samples, instruments for data gathering,
and methods of data analysis.
In Chapter IV analyses the results obtained from the investigation. The data
collected are quantitatively and qualitatively analysed. The differences in the use
of reading strategies in students’ learning reading comprehension between the
two learner groups and the factors influencing their reading strategy choice are
compared and analyzed.
In Chapter V, the conclusion mentions some applications of the study for strategy
training to students at the MPA, the limitation of the work, and makes
suggestions for further studies, and conclusion.
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CHAPTER ii: LITERATURE REVIEW
In the field of second language acquisition, language learning strategies are
attracting a great number of language teachers and researchers’ consideration.
Language learning strategies investigations attempt to identify, describe and
classify specific language learning strategies used by second or foreign language
learners to facilitate their own learning (Oxford, 1985b). This chapter will begin
by reviewing important background theory on reading model and reading
strategies as a basis for the present research and relevant literature related to
learning strategies, which contain terminological definitions, classification
systems and major characteristics of language learning. This is followed by a
discussion of factors affecting the language learning strategy choice of language
learners such as motivation and personality traits. Finally, it provides an overview
of previous studies that involved language learning strategies used for improving
reading competence. This review is done with the purpose of providing a
theoretical foundation for an investigation into reading strategies used by students
at the Military Political Academy, especially the strategies that help them to
improve their reading competence.
2.1. Definition of reading
Reading has been defined in various ways. Smith (1982) stated that “reading is an
imprecise, hypothesis-driven process, and the reader contributed more than did
the visual symbols on page”. Goodman (1985: 815) mentioned that “there is an
essential interaction between language and thought in reading. The writer
encodes thought as language and the reader decodes language to thought”. The
reader’s thought and behavior play an important role in reading.
Later Grabe (1991: 37) argued that “reading is flexible, the reader employs a
range of strategies to read efficiently”. Recently, there has been a shift in
attention from a focus on the product of reading to emphasis on determining the
strategies that readers use in reading context. In the present study, the argument
is that reading strategies play an important role in the whole reading process.
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With regard to reading processes, three general descriptions of reading: bottom-
up, top-down, or interactive, have been developed over years.
Bottom-up models have not been favored by second language researchers, but
they provide some insights into the second language reading research. In bottom-
up reading models, the reader begins with the written text, and constructs
meaning from the letters, words and phrases. “Following an information-
processing approach to comprehension, bottom-up models analyze reading as a
process in which small chunks of text are absorbed, analyzed, and gradually
added to the next chunks until they become meaningful” (Barnett, 1989: 13).
Goodman (1982) and Smith (1982) challenged this view, and argued that reading
was a top-down models, the reader uses his or her expectations and previous
understanding to guess about text content. Although top-down models have given
way to interactive models, they have made a great contribution to second
language reading theory.
Interactive models of reading were developed over time. According to Anderson
& Pearson’s (1984), the interactive model was namely a schema- theoretic
model:
Readers may compensate for insufficient knowledge in a particular area,
such as word recognition of syntactic knowledge (bottom-up skills), by
relying heavily on other knowledge sources, such as topic recognition or use
of genre or content schemata ( top- down skills) in order to comprehend
texts. (Stanovich, 1980: 35)
The schema-theoretic model focuses on “how the reader’ schemata, or knowledge
already stored in memory, function in the process of interpreting new information
and allowing it to enter and become a part of the knowledge store” (Carrell, 1988:
10). Background knowledge really plays an integral role in reading
comprehension.
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