SKKN Cross- cultural factors affecting Do luong 3 high school students’english reading copprehension: Problems and solusions

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Rationale of the study 

Along with the development of Applied Linguistics and Psycholinguistics, the American scholar, Goodman [13] negated the traditional reading theory and posed a “psycholinguistic reading model”, which considers that reading is not the process of passive decoding and reading literally any more. Rather it is the process of active “guessing – confirming” and interaction between the readers and the reading contents. In English learning, the linguistic knowledge elements play a vital role in RC, mastering linguistic knowledge of phonetics, vocabulary and grammar is helpful to decode the word symbols. However, in the process of reading, many Vietnamese students already possess the above knowledge but they still cannot comprehend the texts completely because the meanings of words are acquired in a certain circumstance of culture. “Every stage of comprehension involves reader’s background knowledge of culture (Anderson, [3, pg 14:369]).” Language is the carrier of culture, people’s words and deeds reflect certain cultural connotation consciously or unconsciously. Every social communication possesses its own certain thought pattern, value, custom, and way of life. Therefore, if a Vietnamese student does not know about the English culture, such as histories, values, mode of thinking, customs, religion and life style, he may fail to understand the exact meaning of the texts so understanding the cultural content of what one reads is a crucial factor in RC. 

From my personal observation and professional experience as a teacher of English at DL3 high school for six years, I have realized that, in spite of its importance, the cultural content is not really concerned by both students and teachers while studying reading lessons in textbooks. The cultural knowledge remains unexplored and neglected in English reading learning and teaching process in this school. That is why the great efforts made by teachers to improve the quality of English reading lessons can not help to meet the teaching goals and students have much trouble in comprehending of the reading texts in spite of achieving linguistic elements. This can be seen that the marks in reading tests of almost DL3 high school students are rather low and many of them seem not to be interested in learning English reading lessons. This has given rise to the question, “How can DL3 teachers improve the quality of reading lessons and help the students to get exact comprehension of reading texts?” And the following answer can be heard, “To teach reading texts in incorporation with the cultural knowledge.” But how can this be done? This issue has brought the researcher a great desire to conduct a research study to try to answer this question “ Cross- cultural factors affecting Do luong 3 high school students’english reading copprehension: Problems and solusions”. The researcher conducts action research in order to examine cross-cultural factors that cause barriers in English RC for students at DL3 high school as well as to give some suggestions for incorporating the cultural knowledge into reading lessons. With this study, the researcher hopes to help students at DL3 high school to have a better RC skill.

1.2. Scope of the study

As mentioned above, to improve students’ RC in the classrooms at DL3 high school depends on many different factors. Because of the limited time, it is impossible to cover all of these in this study. The scope of this thesis is limited to a research on cross-cultural factors causing barriers in RC lessons in DL3 high school. From these barriers, the internal and external causes are analyzed to give some suggestions for reducing them in order to improve students’ RC. The study was conducted on the students of grade 10, 11, 12 at DL3 high school with the textbook “Tiếng Anh 10”, “Tiếng Anh 11”, and “Tiếng Anh 12”.

1.3. Aims of the study

The study aims at improving the students’ RC skills and cross-cultural background knowledge at DL3 high school. To complete the overall aim, the following specific ones must be obtained: 

– Investigating the attitudes of students at DL3 high schools towards the importance of culture in English RC. 

– Finding out the cross-cultural factors in students’ English RC process at DL3 high schools 

– Discovering students’ cross-cultural barriers to English RC in the classrooms, and suggest some solutions to reduce and eliminate them in order to achieve the exact comprehension.

1.4 Research questions of the study.

 This study is implemented to find answers to the following research questions

1. What are typical cross cultural factors causing barriers in English RC at DL3 high school? 
2. What are  the causes of these barriers? 
3. What are some suggestions for solutions? 

1.5 Research methods of the study.

In order to get the goals of the study, this study is conducted action research that employs both quantitative and qualitative approaches to collect data. With this action research, the quantitative analyses are through the process of data collected from pre-test and post-test, pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire. In addition, the qualitative approach is employed to deal with the data gathered from follow-up interviews that are made to help the researcher interpret the questionnaire data more accurately to collect exact information and evidence for the study.

The combination of these data collection methods will help the author achieve the aims of the study. All comments, remarks, suggestions, and conclusions provided in the study are based on the results of the data analysis.

1.6 Significance of the study

Even though cross-cultural factors in English RC are necessary for most English learners, it is surprising that there is not much investigation into these. This research provides an insight into cross-cultural factors that cause barriers in English RC that most of the Vietnamese students who are studying English encounter. 

* Theoretical aspect: It is hopefully expected that this study would make a small contribution to help teachers and students realize the essential role of the cross-cultural background knowledge in their reading lessons. More importantly, the findings of the study are believed to identify cross-cultural barriers from cross-cultural elements. From this, to give some suggestions for solutions 

* Practical aspect: with the results of the study, it is hoped that teachers and students would find the best ways to incorporate cross-cultural knowledge in their reading lessons.