文化研究论文代写 越南大学生参与阅读活动

文化研究论文代写 越南大学生参与阅读活动

Narrow context

The research is held an English class at College of Technology, Hanoi National University. It is a class of 30 students at low pre-intermediate level of English proficiency. As they are in an international-standard program (as it is called by the College), the students are expected to get band 6.0 of IELTS after 900 periods of studying English at college. English, then, is one of the only two obligatory subjects (the other is Math) that the students study during this first semester at college. Actually, they study 20 fifty-minute periods per week which are divided equally for 4 skills (i.e. reading, listening, speaking and writing) and pronunciation.

As in the curriculum, the four lessons for reading are allocated in two separate afternoons. One is for topic and vocabulary introduction with an intensive reading in the course book New Cutting Edge Pre-Intermediate. The other is for free or extensive reading practice and a reading test. In those extensive reading classes, students are asked to find texts related to the topic of the previous class and then in turn (actually assigned) to present their readings in front of the class. In the presentation, students are required to give a short summary of what they have read, introduce some new words (at least five), and finally ask their classmates some questions, gap-filling or True – False exercises to check their understandings. A mark will be given as a part of learning assessment. The result is that most of them do the task as an obligation to get the needed mark. Some put much attention and effort to do the task while most of the others do it reluctantly. Some even asks their friends who are better at English to do the task for them. The situation is even worse from the perspective of the audience in every presenation lesson.

From the light of such above-mentioned innovative changes in English teaching and learning in Vietnam, it is realized that the activity has given the students some tasks to complete and actually has already put the learners in the central position of the learning process. In fact, the activity has given them the opportunities to choose the texts of their interest and at their level of proficiency. At this point, the texts sound meaningful to them. However, the final task of giving questions or exercises to the audience to check understandings and the outcomes of marks put the presenters in pressure and a fake situation to complete. As above-mentioned, they are studying English to facilitate their career of IT engineers in the futures, not presenters or lecturers. So checking the audience’s understanding by asking questions or exercises has no meaning to them. As a result, they seem not to engage in the activity but do it reluctantly as an obligation.

Aware of all those problems and acknowledged the advantages of using “meaningful tasks”, I would like to propose some tasks that I think might be ‘meaningful’ to my students in order to engage them more in my extensive reading class. Instead of asking only two students to find texts a week, I ask all the students to find texts that are related to the given topic and must be of their interest. They all have to summary the readings and send the summaries to me two days before the class. Then, my task is to look through all the summaries and choose five of them to be the materials for the class. Based on those five summaries, five forms of information gap-filling are designed for students to complete. In the class, instead of asking the students whose summaries are selected to present in front of the whole class, I ask them to present in groups of 6 students (grouped randomly). The other members of the groups are given gap-filling forms to fill in the needed information. After 10 minutes, all the forms are handed in to be marked or not (it depends). Then, in my point of view, the task become more meaningful because the presenters have the reasons to present and the audience have the reason to listen and consequently may engage my students more.

METHODS AND METHODOLOGY

Methods of research

The research is done qualitatively in the context of a 30-student English class as above-mentioned and two research methods, i.e. observation and interview, are chosen to collect the needed data.

I choose observation since it is proved to be a useful tool for data collection from actual processes of language teaching and learning (Hopkins, 1985 and Peacock, 1997). With the technique of note-taking (both during and after the lessons) and a voice recorder, I plan to observe extensive reading activities in two of my reading lessons. In the first lesson, I use old tasks as usual and in the other one, I implemente new tasks which I think might be more meaningful to my students. I choose note-taking and voice recorder instead of using video recorder to avoid the presence of another person, which may affect the usual process of learning and teaching.

The second method I use in this research is interviews with students via yahoo messenger which I suppose to reveal more about the students’ opinions and attitudes towards the two kinds of tasks. I choose to chat with them via yahoo messenger firstly because I often chat with them before to help them with their learning. Moreover, in my experience, when we chat, we talk as friends and they can easily express what they really think about the lessons. This seems to be difficult to happen when we talk face to face as the teacher and students or as the researcher and participants. As they are just low pre-intermediate students of English, it is not possible for them to express their ideas about the lessons in English. Thus, we chat in our mother tongue – Vietnamese. The interviews are then recorded and translated into English.

Procedure

As a matter of ethics, the whole procedure of teaching and learning is implemented similarly to all students of the class after all of them give consent to be part of the research. However, due to the limit of the study, I only focus to observe and record the learning engagement of four students (who I call anonymously in this report as A, B, C and D as a matter of ethics) in the two lessons as the data for analysis. Those four students are chosen because of their performance in the chosen lessons as well as the previous one. In the first lesson, A and B are in turn the presenters as assigned at the beginning of the course while C and D are the audience in the whole lesson. In the second lesson, they were assigned the same tasks.

The interviews are also conducted with only those four students to explore the reasons for their different performance in the lessons. However, the interviews are carried out at different time depended on the online time of each student.

ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS

Data analysis

In general, there is great difference of my students’ engagement in reading activities of the two lessons.

Analysis of data from the first lesson

As I observed, the level of students’ engagement is not very high in the first lesson. Actually, only A and B are recorded to be engaged in the lesson when they present in front of the class. However, their engagement decreases when they are in the position of the audience. Low engagement of C and D as the audience is also easily observed during the presentation.

More specifically, A seems to work very hard to read his text and tries to summarize it creatively in his own ways by using pictures and the help of Microsoft PowerPoint Software to facilitate his explanations. He moves around class, asked his classmates questions during and after the presentation to make his friends involved in his presentation. The result is: many of his classmates are totally involved in his presentation by asking and answering questions. However, some of them, including B, C and D, seem to ignore him and his presentation by focusing on something on their desks and talking to each other. Their low engagement is more clearly revealed when they cannot answer my question related to the content of the presentation.

When B presents, the situation is slight different. This time, B shows higher engagement than he did some minutes ago. He tries his best to read, summarize and present the text to his classmates although his reading presentation is not as good as A’s. A still has a relatively high engagement during the presentation. However, sometimes he has some personal talk with the student next to him. During this second presentation, C and D does not talk to each other as in the previous presentation, but their engagement is still low because instead of talking to each other, they say nothing, just sit there, ask nothing and answer nothing.

Besides the above problems of low engagement, this activity gives no or just little chances of reading (reading of slides or questions given by the presenters) to most of the students except for the presenters who were already assigned to present at the beginning of the semester. Instead, what most of them mainly practice in the lesson is listening.

Analysis of data from the second lesson

In this lesson, it is noted that most of students are highly engaged in the activity. This is revealed by the forms handed in from the students. Most of them are filled although in some forms, there are still some Vietnamese words. Regarding the four selected students to be focus on in the analysis, it is noticed that their engagement also generally increases.

A still keeps a high level of engagement as usual as the result of high learning motivation which is later revealed from the interview. In fact, he talks (actually asks) most of the time, even more than the presenter of the group in order to complete the task of filling required information. He sometimes helps the presenter to express his ideas.

According to the observation, B, C and D are also more engaged in the activity. As they are forced to complete the task in only 10 minutes, they spend all that given time asking and talking about the reading in their groups (B and D in the same group and C in another). The forms they hand in also reveal their increased engagement in the tasks. They complete most of the questions even though one or two answers are similar to those of some members’ in their groups. All in all, it must be noted that they did make a great improvement of engagement in the lesson.

Analysis of data from the interview

The information from the interviewed reveals the reasons for the different engagement of four students in the two lessons. In fact, among the four, only A’s engagement is high because he is the only one who really wants to learn English and has high motivation to learn English. He says that he learns English firstly to prepare for his future career in which he knows that he will have to read much in English. He also knows that he will have to do research and present different topics in his major in the later part of the university program, thus, he always tries his best in all tasks he is assigned.

For B, C, D, even though they know the importance of English in their future careers, they just learn English with a short-term target: to pass the final exam of the semester in which they have to do no task like reading summarization or presentation. Consequently, their engagement is hard to be high in such previous kinds of tasks.

The interviews also reveals that all four students like the new tasks more because all of them have to choose something to read every week which may help them to improve their English faster. It is different from the other lesson when assessment is only for the two presenters in the lesson but not for the audience. They also like the new tasks more because in those tasks they work in small groups where they feel more confident and thus, more comfortable to communicate with each other. Then, the task to get needed information, discuss or share ideas related to the reading has more possibility to be completed. And because of this, they say that the tasks are more meaningful for all of them than the previous lessons when one has to stand in front of the class and present and the others do nothing.

Through the interviews, the students also suggest me some of their ideas that can make the tasks more meaningful to them. For example, they say that it would be better if this kind of task is located in the last lesson of the four lessons of the week. In the other lessons, they want to learn the vocabulary of the topic, the reading skills and in-class reading activities so that they can prepare well for the tests at the end of the semester.

Findings

According to the data analysis from the two lessons, it can be personally concluded that

the most important feature that makes my students to engage more in the lesson is the kind of assessment which forces them to learn although the meaningfulness of tasks also more or less affect the level of engagement

the most meaningful tasks to my students are tasks that can help them to pass the tests at the end of the semester not tasks that give them reasons to communicate as I expected

REFLECTIONS

This study has given me a chance to know more about my students, about what goes wrong with them when they are not engaged in my reading class. In the study, I also have chance to access a number of researches of many experienced language educators and teachers, from which I obtain new knowledge of language teaching and learning in general and knowledge of meaningful tasks in teaching extensive reading in particular.

During the research, I also learn more about the methods of doing research in a scientific way. Firstly, I learn to look at the situation of my English teaching and learning critically and make research questions with the hope of improving it. I also learn to arrange and organize my ideas and my work systematically to fit the timetable of the research procedure. But the most important thing is that I learn how to put my background knowledge into the knowledge repertoire of related previous studies to have a broader view of the situation and to make my research skills (such summarizing and synthesizing) useful by activating them creatively and critically.

However, the research still has some drawbacks regarding the methods of data collection and analysis that I might change in my next research if I have more time. Firstly, instead of just doing the research on 2 lessons, I intend to do research from the beginning of the semester so that my students not only have chances to choose the texts themselves but also have chances to choose the topics they are interested in. Moreover, when I observe them in the whole semester, the effect of other aspects like the pressure of testing, the emotion of learners, etc. can be avoided and thus, the data I collect may become more reliable. Secondly, instead of interviewing my students after the research, I will interview them during the research, which may give me more chances to adjust my lessons to be more suitable and meaningful to them.

在人类历史上的任何时刻，阅读一直被视为人类生活的一个基本需要。这也是不可否认的，尽管技术的快速进步，随着电视的发明，视频，录音带和信息的快速传递，阅读各种材料仍具有十分重要的意义。此外，越来越需要的需求，新鲜和最新的信息要求适当的阅读技巧与适当的材料和任务。这是我选择做阅读教学研究的第一个原因。

我的研究的第二个原因是我的学生的未来工作的严格要求-在他们的未来工作时间的工作与英语阅读作为信息技术的工程师。然而，这是事实上，在我的阅读课，许多学生没有深入地从事的课程，这导致他们的低水平的分配任务的完成和小的技能熟练程度的提高。他们中的一些人甚至对我说，教训是无聊的，他们不感兴趣，让他们从事。他们列出的问题之一是不恰当的或不相关的任务。然后，一个问题出现了：如何提高那些阅读任务，鼓励学生参加我的阅读课。以我的观点来看，答案在于“有意义”的任务，这可能是蔡狄克马MOI GV Deu共岗和谐有效。

最后但并非最不重要的原因是，寻找“有意义的任务的研究是不容易的”。研究人员在“有意义的学习研究”（耶兰，2000；Mayer，2002朋和floden，2006），“有意义的评价”（约翰逊&约翰逊，2002；Brantley，2005和音乐et al，2008），“有意义的情境”的学习（Kramsch，2000和马铃薯，2003），等有的说“有意义的任务”（Nunan，1989；Foertsch，1992；大桥及大桥、1993和理查兹&罗杰斯，2001）。然而，它是很难找到任何以前的研究，彻底的研究有意义的任务，特别是在越南的英语教学和学习的背景下，在一般和特别是在阅读类。

上述所有理由都让我选择“有意义的任务，以增加越南高校非主要学生参与广泛阅读活动”的动机。