AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE READING ABILITIES IN ENGLISH OF CHINESE ENGLISH MAJOR
STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY
BY
XU YUAN YUAN
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR
THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF EDUCATION IN BILINGUAL EDUCATION
SURYADHEP TEACHERS COLLEGE
GRADUATE SCHOOL, RANGSIT UNIVERSITY ACADEMIC YEAR 2021
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6105364 Thesis Title
Program
Thesis Advisor
Abstract
The purposes of this survey study were 1) to identify the reading abilities of English major students at the Chinese college; and 2) to compare the reading abilities of different levels of English major students at the Chinese college in reading to identify strengths and weaknesses in their reading abilities. The participants in the study were 285 English major students at Yunnan Minzu University including 73 first-year students, 83 second-year students, 66 third- year students and 63 fourth-year students. A standardized English Reading Test of 50 items chosen for this purpose was the main instrument of the study used to identify the reading ability levels of these four groups. The English reading test scores were used for identifying the reading strengths and weaknesses of each group. Semi-structured interviews were the second instrument used for collecting students’ thoughts and opinions on the English Reading Test they took.
The findings of the study revealed that as a group, the reading scores of the first-year students were significantly lower than those of students in the upper years with the test scores of the fourth-year students scoring the highest reading test scores. The data collected from the questionnaires showed that the junior students mainly lacked vocabulary and effective reading strategies. Although the senior students scored the highest, they believed that the lack of reading strategies affected their reading speed, which means that the students’ weak reading abilities lay in the lack of vocabulary and reading strategies. The semi-structured interview data showed that the poor English reading abilities were due to not only the students’ own problems, but also the teachers’ neglect of the training of reading strategies and incorrect teaching methods.
(Total 176 page) KEYWORDS: English reading abilities, Effective reading strategies, Chinese English major students
Student’s Signature ...Thesis Advisor ...… : Xu Yuan Yuan
: An investigation into the Reading Abilities in English of Chinese : College English Major Students: A Case Study
: Master of Education in Bilingual Education : Asst. Prof. Anchalee Chayanuvat, Ed.D.
iii
CONTENT
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i
ABSTRACT ii
CONTENTS iii
LIST OF TABLES vii
LIST OF FIGURES viii
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 Background of the study 1
1.2 Statement of the problem 8
1.3 Objectives of the study 12
1.4 Research questions 13
1.5 Conceptual framework 13
1.6 Basic assumptions of the study 1.7 Scope of the study
14 14
1.8 Significance of the study 15
1.9 Limitations of the study 16
1.10 Definitions of terms 17
CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 19
2.1 The importance of reading in language learning 19
iv
CONTENT(Cont.)
Page 2.2 Reading as an important English skill 23
2.3 Reading theories 34
2.4 English teaching in China 39
2.5 Related researches 45
CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 50
3.1 Research design 50
3.2 Research site 52
3.3 Population and sample 53
3.4 Research instruments 54
3.5 Validity and reliability of research instruments 58
3.6 Data collection 64
3.7 Data analysis 64
3.8 Ethical considerations 66
CHAPTER 4 DATA ANALYSIS 67
4.1 Results of the English reading test 68
4.2 Results of the questionnaire 74
4.3 Analysis of the semi-structure interview data 86
4.4 Conclusion 92
v
CONTENT(Cont.)
CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSIONS, DISCUSSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Page
93
5.1 Conclusions 93
5.2 Discussions 96
5.3 Recommendations 108
REFERENCES 109
APPENDICES 119
Appendix A The English Reading Test 120 Appendix B IOC Experts for English reading test 142 Appendix C Scores of the English reading test 149
Appendix D Questionnaire 152
Appendix E IOC Expert for the questionnaire 159 Appendix F Interview questions 167 Appendix G IOC Expert for the interview questions 169 Appendix H Permission to collect data 172
BIOGRAPHY 176
vi
LIST OF TABLES
Page
Tables
1.1 Time Frame 15
2.1 The Historical Development of English Education 43
3.1 Research Design Step 51
3.2 Yamane Table for Population Sampling 53
3.3 Reading Question Type and the skills needed for each item 56
3.4 Interview Questions 57
3.5 Example IOC for Interview Questions 60
4.1 Correct rate of each item 68
4.2 English reading scores of the four year sample groups 73
4.3 The Questionnaire Respondents’Age Range 77
4.4 Number of Students in Each Year at the University 78
4.5 Average English Grades 78
4.6 Factors that Affect Students’ English Reading Speed 79 4.7 The Strategies Used in Trying to Understand the Text Read 80 4.8 What the Students Thought about the Reading Test
and Their Reading Abilities
83
4.9 Open–ended Question 85
vii
LIST OF FIGURES
Page Figures
1.1 Conceptual Framework 13
2.1 Six Skills Model 21
2.2 English Education in China 41
3.1 Test Reliability 62
4.1 Age Level 75
4.2 English Ability 76
4.3 The Reading Strategies Students Usually Used 88
4.4 The Items that Were Easy for Students 89
4.5 The Items that Were Difficult for Students 90
4.6 Ways for Reading Skill Improvement in the Future 92
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
This chapter introduces the background of the study and the research objectives to be followed by the research questions and the basic assumptions of the study. Besides, it describes the scope of the study, the conceptual framework, significance of the study, limitations of the study, and definitions of terms used in the study.
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Nobody in this decade would ever doubt the significance of the English language because it develops a special role that is recognized in every country. Evidently, English is considered the most important global language (Crystal, 1997; Melitz, 2016;
Rao, 2019). English occupies a leading position in international business, technology, science and academic fields (Roux, 2014). As the world becomes borderless, the importance of English cannot be ignored. It is often the first foreign language that children are likely to be taught in schools for its benefits. In brief learning English requires students' accumulated practice and their patience. (Rajathuraii, 2018).
Shaik (2016) says that English is the passport to better education and employment opportunities. English plays an important role in weaving the world into a thread. English is a second/foreign language in almost all non-English language speaking countries. Being able to carry out simple daily communication is the main purpose of learning any language. Language is a skill and just like any other skills, one
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professional development. Since English is a language commonly used by businesses, English knowledge is considered one of the necessary employability skills (Satya, 2018).
Recently, there has been an attempt to try to improve students’ English abilities,
“Language ability is defined by some as a set of language skills” (Liu. 2010. p.153).
Students should be using English automatically, in particular in the aspect of communication, which is the movement that reflects the development of the field of English language teaching and learning, which began with the Grammar Translation Approach and currently the trend is the movement away from teacher-directed approach to student-centered approach that places the students at the center of learning (Larsen- Freeman, 2000). They need to be the owners of their own learning by being willing learners (Dornyei, 2001).
Nowadays, the focus of English teaching has always been to develop the learners' ability to master four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing (Husain, 2015; Burns & Siegel, 2017). According to Copland, Garton and Burns (2014), there are many challenges to teaching English. Four major skills for students to master are further divided into two groups. Listening and reading are grouped as the receptive skills, while speaking and writing are production skills. For some people, receptive skills are easier to master than the productive skills as learners are only required to decode the messages conveyed. They do not have to produce any language to convey any messages as required in speaking and writing. However, for higher education, it is obvious that university students must have good reading and writing skills to deal with the reading load of their studies because most textbooks are mostly in English, especially for English majors (Cabral & Tavares, 2002). Li (2018) claims that reading skills are the
foundation and prerequisite for developing other language skills. Besides, though reading and writing are acts of communication, skilled readers learn more than
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is expected to find ways to support their students and design an appropriate curriculum and pedagogy at the university to cope with the problems found from the data collected.
Therefore, the focus of English teaching is to develop learners' ability to master four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing (Depdiknas, 2013, p.6).
All the skills complement one another but each needs a different approach. The investigation of this study focused on the area of academic reading, which is very important for students to access all sources of written knowledge worldwide. Reading is believed to be an important tool in accessing knowledge.
In many academic fields, reading has been the kernel study of English teaching system research (Fuchs, 2016) because students need information and conceptual reading comprehension through the process. Thus, students with poor reading skills are more likely to face more academic problems when studying. With lots of textbooks to negotiate, reading is one of the most important learning methods. According to Ahmadi and Hairul (2016), reading English comprehension is an important skill in the process of second/foreign language learning, and people should pay attention to it because reading is not only to decode the written words in front, the reader needs to understand the meaning these words point to.
Besides, reading is the foundation for the comprehensive development of second language skills (Horwitz, 2015). Some people have developed second-language listening and speaking skills through contact with the target language users or through time spent watching television and movies, but reading is essential for academic or professional purposes. Reading can provide a large amount of language input that
learners cannot obtain in other ways. Through reading, learners have a window into the daily lives of native speakers and their culture, and can experience a
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insufficient vocabulary, fuzzy syntactic structure, and discourse semantic barriers.
For this group of students to be in the study, according to the exam records of the English Department (Ting, 2017), their scores in the CET-4 were found to be reasonable but the students could have got higher scores if they were more proficient in English. The total score of this exam was 750 broken down into four areas: listening (249), reading (249), writing (106) and translation (106). The average score of each group of students (Year 1 to Year 4) is 450.06 (60.01%), 474.05 (63.21 %), 478.05 (63.74 %) and 495.18 (66.03 %) respectively. For reading comprehension, it is noticeable that they did not score high on the section, Interpreted from the average score of each year for reading comprehension. Year 1 could achieve 175 (70.28 %) out of the total of 249, Year 2--177 (71.08%), Year 3—185 (74.39%) and Year 4--192 (71.11%).
These average scores of students from Year 1 to Year 4 would be considered at the fair level if the scores were placed for the traditional grading system as 90-100 means excellent, 80-89 good, 70-79 fair, 60-69 just pass and below 60 fail. However, it was worth finding out how they scored in each sub-skills of reading that were required to tackle an academic text.
This research, thus, aimed to find the areas where the English major students at Yunnan Minzu University were weak in so that they could improve themselves in further studies. Volunteer students took a specially prepared reading test prepared by the researcher to identify their English reading strengths and weaknesses they had.
Meanwhile, it also helped teachers to know the deficiencies of students in reading and as a result they could plan how to support their students.
1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter presents a review of the literature related to the study. The study will first discuss the importance of reading in language learning, and more specifically, some basic information about the importance of reading in English. Next, selected reading theories are introduced to reveal what reading is about and the significance of reading elements focusing on the academic reading skills. Finally, the chapter explains the situation of English reading teaching in China and selected related researches about this study.
2.1 READING IN LANGUAGE LEARNING
This section shows how and why reading is an important skill in language learning and what should be done to become an effective English language reader.
2.1.1 The importance of reading
According to Yang (2014), there are many challenges in learning English.
First of all, there are in general four major skills to master. As everyone knows, reading and listening belong to the receptive skills, while writing and speaking are production skills. However, some scholars add two more challenges to English language learning:
grammar and vocabulary (Yang, 2014). Comparing the significance of all the skills in English, Nurjana (2018) states that reading is an
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essential skill and is the basis for improving other skills, for instance, writing and speaking. For some people, reading is the easiest skill because the readers are only asked to decode the supplied information. Along the same line, Krashen (2006) is convinced that in order for language acquisition to take place, recipients should receive listening and reading comprehensible input before using it. However, as Hammond (2020) says, to be proficient in a language skill, one needs to practice or use it regularly as it is considered a habit to form.
Figure 2.1 A Six Skills Model Source: Krashen, 2006
Kovacs (2018) states that reading is one of the basic skills that must be mastered in linguistics. In the history of language teaching there have been several attempts to classify the language skills necessary for communication. One example is from Bárdos (2005). He proposes a six skills model divided into three levels, each level including listening, reading, writing, speaking, translation and interpretation. Reading functions as the one skill to master first. As this model shows, reading is an essential basic skill and is very important for the development of other skills.
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2.2 READING AS AN IMPORTANT ENGLISH LANGUAGE SKILL
It is commonly acknowledged that in learning English, although the overall ability in English is directed towards the ability to communicate with understanding, each skill in English, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing needs a different teaching approach.
2.2.1 The Definitions of Reading
Today, more and more information pass through texts: therefore, students’
reading abilities are often measured in the standardized tests such as TOEFL and IELTS.
Test-takers are advised to practice test-taking with appropriate strategies. In order to understand the concept of reading strategy, we need to understand the concept of reading strategy and try to clarify what is reading and what is reading strategy. To some extent, reading can be understood in some simple ways, such as "Reading is speaking a series of words", "Reading is reading with your mouth" and so on. However, the concept of reading is more complicated than this, and researchers have argued over a long time when defining reading (Roomy & Alhawsawi, 2019). Others limit reading to extracting meaningful written material from printed matter or books, that is, reading as a response (Goodman, 1970; Broughton et al., 1980). The feature of this simple definition is that it does not take into account the authenticity of reading ability, such as causes and participation, complex competence processes, and the role of social context in explaining different contexts (Grabe & Stroller, 2011).
Reading is a psychological process. Reading has many definitions. Reading is when someone looks at the written text and begins to absorb the information in the written language information. (Grabe, 2009).
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factors such as: students' language proficiency, reading strategies, and sentence factors (Tang, 2014)
The reform of basic English teaching continues to permeate all aspects of teaching, and English reading teaching is no exception. As an important part of the basic curriculum, the teaching of English for basic education requires students to have a certain basic knowledge and a certain level of English reading and writing ability, to form basic English reading ability and comprehensive language ability, and to cultivate students' observation, memory, thinking, Imagination and innovation. English is the universal language in the world. It is an important medium for obtaining information resources in modern daily work. Therefore, improving English reading ability has become an important task in current English teaching (Ping, 2018).
2.4.1 The English Curriculum in China
Since the mid-1980s, English education has been considered a top priority in China. In order to improve the quality of English teaching, in the context of the unprecedented popularity of English as a general language, China has launched multiple rounds of English curriculum reform at different levels (Xu & Fan, 2017).
At the turn of the century, the Chinese Ministry of Education established a new English education curriculum. This policy requires Chinese schools to teach English from the third grade, although many schools will choose to teach English in kindergarten or first grade if they have the resources. Therefore, English becomes part of the compulsory education curriculum (Hu, 2014).
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The Ministry of Education (2001) clearly requires thatEnglish courses should be offered in the first year of basic school and cover a long period of time during elementary school. In addition, it shows the weekly course time and totals the course time in one school year: from the moment the school year starts, in the sub-category, the course time should be weekly, and the total course time for one school year should reach 175 Hours; in the third and fourth years, the total course time for each school year should reach 280; and in the fifth and sixth years, the total class hours should reach 280 hours per school year (Zhang, 2014).
In this document (China's Ministry of Education, 2001), clear recommendations are also made teaching content requirements: In the first stage (primary and secondary school), the teaching content should mainly be English listening and speaking English; in the second stage, not only learn to listen to and speak English, but also read and write English; and in the third stage (Grades 5 and 6), The content should be English listening, speaking, reading, writing.
In addition, the document also proposes three stages of the minimum level that students should reach: the first stage (Year 1-Year 2) is supported by visual aids, pictures, teacher actions, and students can make correct responses to teachers' English requirements; 2) in visual Teaching aids, such as, pictures and teacher actions, students not only need to understand the meaning of about 400 English words, but also need to master the correct words and pronunciation; 3) students even need to recite English songs and sing them; 4) students in daily life be proficient in elementary English words and have simple conversations in English.
The second stage (Year 3 and Year 4), 1) students can basically understand words in English classes; 2) students can recite English letters in order, correctly
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distinguish and spell uppercase and ordinary letters, and also distinguish the way of spelling English words; 3) students can read English words correctly , sentences and sentence patterns, pronunciation and intonation are correct; students can have simple conversations with correct pronunciation and intonation according to the context; not only must students understand and speak the correct pronunciation and intonation of about 400 English words, they must also spell about 200 correctly 6 English words; 6) students can write English letters, words and sentences in uppercase and standard format correctly.
In the third stage (Year 5 and Year 6), 1) students can understand the listening materials they have learned when they are in English at a rate of 80 words / minute; 2) in addition to reading English words, sentences and texts. In addition to having correct pronunciation and intonation, students also need to master the key words, basic usage and expressions of words. At the same time, they need to speak about 400 English words to have pronunciation and tone, and they can spell about 250 English words; 3) students can communicate daily in English within their knowledge; 4) students can read and understand simple English picture book stories; 5) students can answer related questions in English, and the relevant knowledge of textbooks they learned in written form can be in English as well as write simple messages.
2.5 RELATED RESEARCHES
This section describes researches conducted to investigate various areas of reading.
Saengpakdeejit (2014) did a research on the title “Reading Strategies in Foreign Language Academic Reading: A Qualitative Investigation”. This study mainly
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explores how college English majors can improve their reading comprehension, solve problems encountered in reading, and overcome obstacles to reading comprehension.
This paper uses semi-structured interviews as the main research method. A total of 39 students participated in the study. Finally, data analysis shows that understanding reading strategies and improving text understanding strategies are the two main emerging categories of reading strategies.
Jiang (2015) conducted a research on “Chinese College Students’ English Reading Comprehension in Silent and Loud Reading-Mode”. This study attempted to find out their respective effects on the reading comprehension of Chinese college students by comparing the reading modes of silent reading mode and audio reading mode. A 16-week experiment was conducted with 29 sophomores, who were divided into an experimental group and a control group. Data are extracted through the routine language experiment process. In addition to these quantitative data, the purpose of an interview was to collect student attitudes and opinions as qualitative data. All the results show that the quiet reading mode significantly improved the reading comprehension ability of the subjects, while the loud reading mode improved the reading comprehension ability of the subjects without revealing the same findings.
Ling (2014) experimented a study on “Investigating Chinese English Majors’
Use of Reading Strategies” and stated that English majors use intermediate reading strategies in reading comprehension tests. There were some differences in the use of reading strategies between high-level readers and low-level readers. Teachers paid less attention to reading strategies in teaching, and had certain reference significance to the teaching of reading strategies. In this study, the reading comprehension part of TEM 4 and two questionnaires were used to collect data for the surveyed students. Participants were 54 sophomores from an English university.
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3.3 POPULATION AND SAMPLE
Population in this study consisted of the English major students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages of Yunnan Minzu University (YMU) in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. The total number of English major students were 350 in Academic Year 2019.
For the sample selection technique and the sample size, stratification of the population was adopted to get the sample groups that truly represent students in the four years of the university (Fowler, 2002). In this way. the test results of students in Year 1, Year 2, Year 3 and Year 4 were believed to present a true picture of the English reading abilities of the whole population. For the sample size of each level, Yamane’s formulae table was adopted in the calculation of the most probable acceptable numbers of participating students. Also, for semi=structured volunteers, two volunteer students per year were interviewed. Look at the following table.
Table 3.2 Yamane Table for Population Sampling
Population Yamane (Sample) error (+5%)
Year 1 90 73 75
Year 2 105 83 89
Year 3 80 66 70
Year 4 75 63 67
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The questionnaire was designed to respond to the three main objectives set.
They were: 1) To find the factors that affected the students’ reading speed 2) To find the reading strategies that students used to understand the texts, and 3) To find the students’
thoughts about the tests. The whole questionnaire had 30 questions: Part 1 (1-4 on Personal Particulars), Part 2 (5-29 on The Factors Affecting the Reading Speed, the Reading Strategies Adopted and Thoughts about the Test), and Part 3 (One Open-ended Question on Ways to improve the Reading Skills).
3.4.3 Instrument 3: The Semi-Structured Interviews
Five semi-structured interview questions were used to ask 8 volunteer students which reading part they felt the most difficult when they did the test. The concept of semi-structured interviews was the prompt questions were prepared in advance, but students did not respond to the questions in a set order. The interview atmosphere would be like two persons were making a conversation. The interviewees were allowed to say what they wished to tell the researcher without guided interruptions. This interview method has many advantages, with two-way communication, interviewers can get more abundant, complete and in-depth information than the material method (Zhong, 2017).
The following table shows the interview questions.
Table 3.4 Interview Questions Question 1
What do you think about the Reading Test that you just took?
This question aims to identify the overall ability level of the students.
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Table 3.4 Interview Questions(Cont.) Question 2
While you were doing the test, what techniques did you use in trying to understand the reading passages?
This question aims to find out students reading strategies used to deal with text reading, vocabulary guessing and reading comprehension.
Question 3
Please explain what is easy in the test for you?
This question aims to investigate while reading, which question type the students could handle best?
Question 4
In your opinion, what makes the reading test difficult?
This question aims to investigate while reading, which question type was difficult for the test-takers?
Question 5
What do you think you need to improve to be able to do this Reading test?
This question aims to collect students’ opinions about how to improve their English reading abilities.
In order to avoid students' psychological worries, all information the students provided would be kept confidential. The researcher was the only one to deal with the data. Besides, when the data were analyzed, no names would be revealed to the public.
3.5 VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY OF RESEARCH INSTRUMENTS
This step is a measure to ensure that all research instruments were valid and reliable so that claims on the findings could be made with confidence.
3.5.1 Validity of Research Instruments
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The study used an English reading test to collect the data and information needed for this study. The test paper is released by the responsible organization – ETS (Educational Testing Service). ETS, founded in 1947, is the world’s largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization, including TOEFL, IELTS, GRE, TOEIC test and so on (ETS website), the researcher downloaded the test paper from ETS for free. As common practices are that the standardized test items will be tried out several times with validity and reliability check, this reading test was exempted from these actions but it went through Item Objective Congruence (IOC) check for the identification of the eight reading sub-skills.
The English reading test included 3 passages, and 42 questions totally. The test lasted one hour. The results are presented as follows:
For the Questionnaire and the Semi-Structured interviews
In order to ascertain the degree of consistency of each expert over each statement, the item-objective congruence based on Sukamolson and Sitthi (2019) was adopted.
Experts will evaluate each item and give it a rating of +1, 0, and -1. Item-objective congruence (IOC) was used to evaluate each questionnaire items and each semi-structured interview question with a score ranging from -1 to +1 to identify whether each questionnaire item or each interview question matched the research objectives. This means these items and questions would bring the responses that could be used to answer the research questions. The criteria used were presented below:
The method of index of item objective congruence (IOC) was calculated under the following formula:
CHAPTER 4
DATA ANALYSIS
This chapter presents the analysis of the English reading test scores from English major students from Year1 to Year 4 who study in Yunnan Minzu University.
This study took the reading scores of English majors as the investigation object, and collected their test scores in the way of examination to obtain the necessary quantitative data. Meanwhile, at the end of the exam, all the students who took the exam were asked to fill out the questionnaire and 8 volunteers participated in the semi-structured interviews to deliver the qualitative data. Different research analysis methods were used to interpret the different types of data. The quantitative data analysis was done in mean and S.D. The qualitative data were content analyzed by the researcher into the themes that emerged, and the themes were reported.
This chapter reveals the following.
The results of the English reading test shown in Tables 4.1 to 4.6 in responses to Objective 1: To identify the reading abilities of Chinese college English major students and objective 2: To compare the reading abilities of different levels of Chinese college English major students in reading.
The findings from the questionnaire analysis to find out the views of the students on their test taking technique: 1) factors that affect their reading speed; 2) the strategies they used n trying to understand the text read; 3) Emerging thoughts about the
test. Besides, for open-ended question 1: in their opinion, are there ways to
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improve their scores in the test.
The results from semi-structured interviews showed some problems and suggestions from their answers.
The results of data analysis are as follows:
4.1 RESULTS OF THE ENGLISH READING TEST
The following table shows the performance of each sample group in accuracy check.
Table 4.1 Correct rate of each item
Item Year 1 (n=73) Year 2 (n=83) Year 3 (n=66) Year 4 (n=63)
- Frequency Percentage Frequency Percentage Frequency Percentage Frequency Percentage
Passage 1
1 30 41.1% 46 55.4% 40 60.6% 45 71.4%
2 36 49.3% 50 60.2% 41 62.1% 40 63.5%
3 45 61.6% 53 63.9% 38 57.6% 51 80.9%
4 42 57.5% 60 72.3% 39 59.0% 50 79.4%
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mentioned by a little over half of the number of students. “Reading English books” (165 times),“Watching English movies” (130 times) and “Improve interest in English reading”
(60 times) were mentioned by fewer students. It means that these 3 reading techniques were not used a lot by English major students. From the table, it can be concluded that students felt they needed to learn more reading strategies. Maybe, they found it not easy to tackle the reading texts some of which were complex and needed advanced reading strategies to help. From the responses as shown in Table 4.9 below:
Table 4.9 Open–ended Question: In your opinion, are there ways to improve your scores in the test?
NO. Themes Frequency Percentage(%)
1 Learn new vocabulary 223 78.2%
2 Watching English movies 130 45.6%
3 Reading English books 165 57.9%
4 Strengthenskimming strategies
253 88.9%
5 Strengthen scanning strategies 242 85.0%
6 Listening English music 190 66.7%
7 Improve interest in English reading
60 21.1%
8 Learn more reading strategies 270 94.7%
9 More practice in free time 180 63.2%
Although the data shown in Table 4.9 the group of English major students put forward so many ways to improve their English reading abilities, the responses in this questionnaire were revealed that 9 reading techniques. The frequency of the
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSIONS, DISCUSSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
According to the findings of the fourth chapter, this chapter will be divided into three parts, from the research conclusion, discussion and research recommendations.
5.1 CONCLUSIONS
The purpose of this study was to explore the reading abilities in English of Chinese college English major students. Mixed methods Approach was used to collect both, quantitative and qualitative data. The study was based on the following two objectives:
1) To identify the reading abilities of Chinese college English major students 2) To compare the reading abilities of different levels of Chinese college English major students in reading
Data were first collected from an English Reading Test results of participating students so that the student’s reading subskills could be analysed, The second instrument, the questionnaire was used to explore the students’ opinions about the test they had taken and specific imformation about their adopted reading strategies. The semi-structured interview was also carried out on 8 volunteers so that more in-depth information about the students’ reading abilities could be collected.
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5.1.1 Responses to Objective 1
The first objective of the study was to identify the reading abilities of Chinese college English major students. The English reading test result analysis well reflected the first objective of the study. The English reading test choose from an TOEFL reading test, included 3 passages, and a total of 42 questions. The test lasted one hour, according to their final scores to judge their English reading abilities. The full reading score of this study was 42 points, and if students get 36 points, it means students are “excellent”. 33- 35 points means “good” and 22-32 it means “average” 21 points or below means “poor”.
The analysis showed that the highest score in the first year was 26 and the lowest score was 18; the highest score in the second year was 31 and the lowest score was 21; the highest score in the third year was 34 and the lowest score was 22; the highest score in the fourth year was 39 and the lowest score was 18. Among them, English reading scores of the first year are the worst, those of the second and third years are nearly, and those of the fourth year are the best.
According to the One-Sample T-test (Tables 4.14 and 4.15), the mean value of the four grades was 25.77, which is significantly different from 22, indicating that the English reading test score of most students were greater than 22. But when English reading test score was 32, the mean value of the four grades was 25.77, which is significantly different from 32, indicating that the English reading test score of most students were less than 32. From the above data, it revealed that the grades of freshmen are significantly lower than those of seniors, and the grades of sophomores and juniors are relatively average.
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5.1.2 Responses to Objective 2
The second objective of the study was to compare the reading abilities of different levels of Chinese college English major students in reading. The English reading test of each year accurate rate and semi-structure interview analysis reflected the first objective of the study.
It can be seen from the English reading test of each year accurate rate, in the first grade was significantly lower than other grades, especially in guessing vocabulary, inferring, sentence coherence and summarizing, only a few people got it right, overall, scanning strategies scores slightly better. For Year 2 students, they were mainly weak in identify the writer’s purpose, inferring and sentence coherence. For Year 3 students, it’s obviously that they were weak in inferring and sentence coherence. For Year 4 students, overall, their scores were high, but there were still some items that were less than half correct rate, such as sentence coherence and identify the writer’s purpose.
The semi-structured interview analysis reflected the second objective. The interviewees included 12 volunteer students, 3 students for each year. A face-to-face interview was conducted for each interviewee. The data from each interviewee was analyzed and interpreted using the content analysis technique. It was found that the most common reading strategies used were skimming, scanning and guessing the vocabulary.
The reading skills that were difficult for most were unfamiliar vocabulary, paraphrasing and sentence insertion questions but there were no obvious easy skills for the test takers.
Learning about more effective reading strategies as well as learning more new words were preferred as a way to improve the reading skills.
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5.2 DISCUSSIONS
Responses to the study objectives both 1 and 2 are clear-cut and explainable.
1) The reading abilities of Chinese college English major students as can be interpreted by their earned scores in the English Reading Test (Instrument 1) show that there is ample room for improvement. because only 77.70 % the students in the fourth year could score over 75%. For English major students, it is undeniable that the expectations for them are high. They are expected to have advanced reading abilities to show their mastery of the English language. This is in line with Brown (2004), who identified the reading sub-skills that all readers must master: 1) skimming 2) scanning 3) identifying the writer’s purpose 4) paraphrasing 5) ability to guess words 6) inferring and 7) summarizing. Similarly, Hessamy and Sadegi (2013) point out that reading sub- skills are significant. They cite Munby (1978) that these skills are overlapped and poorly distinguished. Thus, five sub-skills were identified: 1) identifying the main idea, 2) Understanding specific information, making inferences, 4) identifying the writer’s views or claims and 5) extracting information from a prose text to put into diagrammatic representation. Generally, many people believe that reading is easy to master because it is a receptive skill but in fact, for Grabe (2010, 72-73), “fluent reading is what good readers do most of the time when they read about anything, especially in their L1s.” He proposes a term “reading fluency” to describe the ability effectively. He says “Reading fluency has been a complex issue. Fluency is a complex concept involving rapid and accurate processing.”
2) To compare the reading abilities of different levels (Year 1 to Year 4) of Chinese college English major students in reading to identify strengths and weaknesses in their reading abilities. As could be predicted but shown by the scores in the Reading
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Test, Year 4 students should score the highest because they are going to complete their bachelor’s degree in English. Their exposure time to studying English is longer than students in other years. They felt more comfortable with the test items because the found only few difficulties. Besides, they were more familiar with the reading strategies and used more of them than students in other years. The skill areas that most students found they needed improvement were inferencing, summarizing, understanding the writer’s purpose and sentence insertion into the text, which are not easy for many people. One obvious reason for many students was found to be the short time for the test. Exposure to various types of texts as well as the world knowledge will help the students to read faster besides skimming and scanning. “A common definition of reading fluency is the ability to read rapidly with ease and accuracy, and to read with appropriate expression and phasing.”
Recommendations for the reading teachers are to give students more practices in the difficult areas and offer students training in effective reading strategies. However, a point to pay attention to is that “this skill set cannot be learned in a short time as millions of L2 readers develop reading fluency after many years of reading L2 texts.”
(Grabe, 2010, p73).
According to this research, using effective reading strategies is really a useful method for English major students to improve their English reading abilities. There are 8 major issues as follows:
5.2.1 English major students reading comprehension scores were generally not high.
As can be seen from the data, some of the problems came from the students
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themselves in terms of readiness for the test. Most students could not understand the meaning of the passage they were reading and were not familiar with the vocabulary in the passage. This is consistent with the view of Ulfa (2012), who points out that in his study the English scores of most students are below the minimum proficiency standards.
This means that students' basic English knowledge is below average, affecting their reading comprehension. Along the same line, Hasibuan (2018) points out that students often have problems with information from the text and that students have some reasons for not being able to comprehend the text meaning. For some reasons lack of vocabulary and not understanding the gist blur comprehension of the text. Another reason may be the level of the students' attraction to reading and their learning motivation. Ulfa (2012) states that there are students who do not have good motivation to read and the text is not interesting. Or they need to look up the words in the dictionary to find out the meaning words they do not know. These activities make them bored and uninterested in reading comprehension. Therefore, if the students are not motivated learners, they may not spend time practicing many reading sub-skills.
Besides, under the influence of traditional teaching methods, college students generally believe that the main task of reading class is to learn words and grammar. The class is very boring and they are not interested in it. Secondly, students are exposed to less kinds of reading materials. At the same time, students pay more attention to the understanding of words in reading and neglect the central idea and framework of the passage, which results in low efficiency and low scores in reading and fail to apply the reading strategies in the process of reading.
Through analysis, it is found that the grades of freshmen are significantly lower than those of seniors, and the grades of sophomores and juniors are relatively average.
However, the biggest obstacle for all students.
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Thus, students should be given more practice in advance reading. The reading lessons should be redesigned to get students to do more work on their own under the supervision of the reading teachers.
5.2.2 The English reading test can be used as a diagnostic test.
Diagnostic tests are tests used to determine a situation or its causes. It is often used for diagnosis. Diagnostic tests performed as part of a medical examination may be used to determine the cause of symptoms or to determine the disease. For example, a student with dyslexia may have a diagnostic test to determine whether he or she is dyslexic or visually impaired (Workplace, September,16, 2018). When used for other purpose, diagnostic tests can be used to determine specific strengths and weaknesses.
According to Teaching English (British Council), “A diagnostic test is a test that helps the teacher and learners identify problems that they have with the language.” Mock proficiency test should be given once in a while to monitor the students’ progress based on the beliefs that individual learners may have different problems.
However, the study did not aim to single out students with reading difficulties on mentioned above. This study took English Reading Test to identify the areas that English major students with weak skills. From the chapter 4 analysis, it obviously that Year 1 and Year 2 students are mainly week in vocabulary items, in addition to this, Year 2 students could not get high score due to their English reading speed and paraphrasing. Almost of Year 3 students are week in paraphrasing and detail questions, the obstacle of Year 4 students is sentence insert question, it proves that they cannot understand the paragraph organization.
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Therefore, in future learning, for Year 1 and Year 2, teachers should pay more attention on their vocabulary learning and memory, vocabulary is the foundation of reading, if students are weak in vocabulary it’s impossible that if they want get a high score in English reading. Meanwhile, the importance of strengthening the teaching of reading strategies is also self-evident, if students can master many reading strategies such as skimming, scanning, inferring, paraphrasing and so on, it’s not difficult for them to solve the paraphrasing and detail questions, even sentence insert questions. It is recommended that teachers give them more practice to improve their English reading speed.
5.2.3 English major students lack effective reading strategies.
Teaching reading strategies is a key element in developing student comprehension, in the previous chapter, the researchers pointed out that the purpose of this study was to identify the difficulties English majors face in reading comprehension.
The students' difficulties were related to the type of questions on the reading comprehension test. After analyzing the test data, the authors concluded that most students fail in reading comprehension tests because of their poor vocabulary, poor grasp of grammar, difficulty understanding long sentences and texts, lack of media learning or family support, and lack of knowledge of reading comprehension strategies.
The frequency of using reading strategies is not high. According to the results of this study. The strategy of skimming is the most frequently used one in the cognitive strategy category. The sequences of 8 subcategories of reading strategies in this research are skimming, guessing, word meaning, paraphrasing, scanning, summarizing, identify the writer's purpose, inferring, referencing. Of these eight strategies, in terms of the results, identify the writer’s purpose, inferring and referencing they are not use mostly.
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Rong (2015) points out that at present, an important factor affecting students' effective reading is that students do not master effective reading strategies and skills.
Mechanical reading not only wastes a lot of time, but the reading effect is not ideal. It means that students may understand words and parts of the sentence but cannot understand the gist. In the teaching process, teachers should focus on training students to effectively use reading methods and skills to improve the effectiveness of students' reading.
Ting (2017) states that insufficient vocabulary is the main problem encountered by students in the process of English reading. Sentence structure and lexical obstacles also affect students' English reading. This shows that in English reading, the three main problems encountered by junior high school students are: insufficient vocabulary, fuzzy syntactic structure, and discourse semantic barriers.
5.2.4 Students do not pay much attention on English reading strategies learning.
Ulfa (2012) points out that the English scores of most students are below the minimum proficiency standards. This means that students' basic English knowledge is below average, affecting their reading comprehension. It may not be easy to describe exactly what the English reading test examined, but the students who took part in the study seemed to have a clear idea of why they could not get high scores. The descriptions are as follows:
The lack of vocabulary is still a huge obstacle for students. The 3 passages of this English reading test contained many unfamiliar words, so it is a big obstacle for students understand the whole passage meaning. The context of each passage was too
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long and the exam time was only one hour. Therefore, they don't have enough time to read and they can't quickly locate the answer to each question, they need spend much more time think about and find the where the answer is.
Sentence insert questions were the biggest problem for them. This question type tests student’s understanding of the logic in the passage and also tests their ability to understand the grammatical connections from one sentence to another, so as long as they do not understand the meaning of the whole article or the paragraph in which the sentence insert question appears has many unfamiliar words, they are likely to make mistakes in this question.
Inference questions were also the items with the most mistakes. Inference is the process of drawing conclusions based on existing evidence and prior knowledge and experience. Inference questions are the types of questions that involve reading between sentences. When students are asked to educate guesses, they often fin the tasks too difficult. because the answers are not be explicit. Students must draw logical conclusions from the clues in the text and their own experiences. Therefore, it is a great challenge for students to test their ability to grasp the article as a whole. In brief, they need to have a clear understand of detail questions, identify purpose and main idea questions are asked to test this high level reading skill.
All the students interviewed thought that having good reading methods could help them improve their reading comprehension and make fewer mistakes. They thought they could rely on this shortcut to quickly make the right answers for their own achievements.
Almost all the interviewees felt that the reading method explained by the
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