Part 1: Introduction
1. Rationale
English is considered to be one of the most popular languages in the world. In
Vietnam, with the changes and the developments of the economy and society, as well
as the implementation of the open- door policy, English has been used more and more
widely both by the young and the old and it has been the most popular foreign
language. English also occupied a specially important status in the development of
international relationship in Vietnam. More importantly, English has been influenced
on our education curriculum as a compulsory subject. It is known that, in learning a
foreign language in general, and English in particular, the knowledge and mastery of
vocabulary play an extremely important role. Pyles and Algeo (1970) noted that:
"When we first think about the language, we think about words. It is words that we
arrange together to make sentences, conversations and discourse of all kind". In fact,
vocabulary is the element that links the four skills of speaking, listening, reading and
writing all together. In order to communicate well in a foreign language, students
should acquire an adequate number of words and should know how to use them
accurately. However, both teachers and learners have faced many difficulties in
English teaching and learning, especially in teaching and learning vocabulary. It seems
difficult for teachers to apply the suitable way to teach learners.
In the context of Thanh Hoa Teachers' Training School (THTTS), students with
Vocational Training level are taught English as a compulsory subject. And students of
Information Technology start learning IT English at the beginning of the second year.
The short period is mainly aimed at improving reading and translating skills. However,
with limited knowledge of vocabulary and English grammar, it is difficult for them to
study English for IT, especially in reading and translating exercises. They often learn
vocabulary passively through their teachers' explanation, It is hard for them to
memorize new words. Thus, it requires a great deal of help from teachers.
ESP (English for specific purpose) is viewed as something hard to teach for language
teachers. As a teacher of English for IT, I myself find out many difficulties during
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teaching vocabulary. They arise from the lack of specialized knowledge, so teachers

5. Methods of the study
In order to achieve the aims mentioned above, the study was designed to use varieties
of methods such as: interview and questionnaire. The data can be recorded formally
and informally. The interview is used to record information from teachers. The survey
questionnaire to students is to get more information to support the study.
6. Design of the study
This study is organized into 3 main parts:
Part 1: Introduction: in this part the rationale, the aims, the research questions, the
scope, the method, and the design of the study is presented.
Part 2: Development: It consists of three chapters.
Chapter 1 provides the theoretical background, which is relevant to the purposes of the
study.
Chapter 2 presents an introduction on the context of learning and teaching vocabulary
of Information Technology at THTTS.
Chapter 3 is the main part of the study. It includes the context of the study, the
subjects, and the data collection methods and data collection procedure. Also in this
chapter, the data will be analyzed and the finding will reveal teachers' difficulties in
teaching vocabulary to students of IT. On the basis of these findings, solutions in
teaching and learning will be suggested.
Part 3: Conclusion: This part offers a summary of the study and some suggestions for
further study.
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Part 2: Development
Chapter 1: Literature review
1.1. An overview of ESP
1.1.1. What is ESP?
"ESP" stands for English for Specific Purposes and different authors have defined this term
so far. According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987: 19), ESP is "an approach rather than a
product to language teaching in which all decisions as to content and method are based on
learner's reason for learning". For Hutchinson and Waters, starting point in determining

As school subject
Integrated
Figure 1: Types of ESP (Robinson, 1991: 3-4)
This division of ESP plays a very important role in affecting the degree of specificity that
is appropriate to the course. However, according to Hutchinson (1987: 16) " This is not a
clear- cut distinction: people can work and study simultaneously, it is also likely that in
many cases the language learnt for immediate use in a study environment will be used
later when the student takes up, or returns a job".
ESP
EST EBE ESS

EAP EOP EAP EOP EAP EOP

English for English for English for English for English for English for
Medical Study Technicians Economics Secretaries Psychology Teaching
Figure 2: Types of ESP (Hutchinson, 1987: 16)
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On Hutchinson' ELT tree, there are three categories basing on nature of the learners'
specialism. English for Science and Technology (EST), English for Business and
Economic (EBE) and English for the Social Science (ESS). Though ESP if classified by
different author, they are common that ESP can be divided into EAP and EOP. On ELT
tree mentioned above, English for Information Technology belongs to English for
Technician.
1.1.3. The roles of ESP teachers
The roles of ESP teachers have been pointed out by a variety of studies. An ESP teacher
must master fully the roles of General English teachers and ESP course process. In
learning process teacher must help the learner achieve their goals effectively. Especially,
in vocabulary teaching, the teacher mostly focus on words, idioms to express the topics
like "computer and its application" or "computer types", etc, plus words in the general,
and (s)he has to provide the students with the anxiety- free atmosphere. Besides, (s)he also

The term "vocabulary" appears to be a very simple concept but in fact, we can find it
extremely difficult to give an exact definition of vocabulary. Based on different criteria,
linguistics defined vocabulary in different ways. According to Peny, Ur (1996: 60),
vocabulary "as the words we teach in the foreign language. However, a new item of
vocabulary may be more than a single word: a compound of two or three words or multi-
word idioms". Pyles and Algae (1970: 96) also noted that: "It is in words that sound and
meanings inter- lock to allow us to communicate with one another and it is words that we
range together to make sentences, conversations and discourses of all kinds".
In general, vocabulary is the total number of all the words that a language possesses,
including a single word, two or three word items expressing a single idea and multi- word
idioms whose meaning cannot be deduced from the analysis of the component words.
Vocabulary can be defined as the words we teach in the foreign language and a useful
convention is to cover all such cases by talking about vocabulary "items" rather than
"words". It can be seen that a "vocabulary" item can be more than one word. Therefore, it
is necessary not to make confusion between vocabulary item and word.
1.2.2. Main principles in Vocabulary Teaching
1.2.1. Decision about the content
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Before considering the main principles in vocabulary teaching, we should pay attention
where we select vocabulary from. According to Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman (1999:
54) vocabulary reaches the classroom from four mains sources such as the course book,
supplementary materials, the students, and specific vocabulary activities designed by the
teacher for his particular group of students
The course book: This will include the written and spoken texts, activities for the
presentation and practice of grammatical structures, testing exercises, and so on. Even the
instructions for classroom activities can form a source of new vocabulary.
Supplemental materials: these are not designed specially not for vocabulary development
or provided by educational institution, or selected by the teacher himself. This may
include texts, drill, role- plays, video, exercises etc.
The students: a wide range of unanticipated and unpredictable items will inevitably

to be taught.
1.2.3.1. Word form
When learning vocabulary students should be introduced its pronunciation and its spelling.
To many students, the complex relationship between sound and spelling in English seems
to make the language inexplicable. It is easy understand when we consider the number of
homophones in English such as: weight/ wait, sole/ soul, and the number of similar forms
that differ wildly in their pronunciation like hurry/ humor.
1.2.3.2. Grammar
There are two main pedagogic issues involved: the highlighting of regular and irregular
forms, and the role of source books in allowing learners to be sift- sufficient as Ruth
Gairns and Stuart Redman stated. In the classroom, the new item is not obviously covered
by general grammatical rule, grammar will need to be introduced or examined. The
teachers need to clarify regular forms and common regular forms for students. When a
new word is taught, for example we might also give its past form such as: buy/ bought and
it is transitive or intransitive, when a noun such as a person is taught, it should be given its
plural form as people.
1.2.3.3. Collocation
Collocation is the way in which words are used together regularly in a specific language. It
refers to the restriction on how words can be used together in right contexts. Thus, this is
another piece of information about a new item, which may be worth teaching. For
example, you throw a ball but toss a coin. We can talk about thick fog and dense fog, thick
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smoke and dense smoke with the same meaning. However, we cannot say dense hair
instead of thick hair
1.2.3.4. Aspects of meaning
Aspect of meaning include denotation, connotation, appropriateness and meaning
relationship
The denotation meaning refers to or point out things, concepts. This is often the sort of
definition given in dictionaries such as "cat" denotes a small animal with soft fur, often
kept as a pet or for catching mice.

1.3. Terminology
1.3.1. Definition of terminology
Linguists have stated varieties of definitions of technology. In Longman dictionary of
applied linguistics (1985: 290) defines terminology as the special lexical which occur in“
a particular discipline . ”
According to Nguyen Thien Giap (1985: 308), “Terminology, which is understood as a
special linguistic unit of a language consists of word and fixed phrase that provide
definitions of objectives that belong to a particular scientific area”. Also, Do Huu Chau
(1998) states: “Terms are specialist words used within a scientific field, a procession or
any technological field”.
These definitions, though raised at different times and by different people indicate that
there exist “special words in specialized fields or branches of human knowledge”,
1.3.2. Characteristics of terminology
Many linguists including Do Huu Chau (1981), Nguyen Thien Giap (1985) and Luu Van
Lang (1998) share the idea that terminology has at least three important features: accurate,
systematic, and international.
1.3.2.1. Accurate
This is the first criterion of a scientific term. It means that a term should express a
scientific concept or definition concretely and precisely in order to avoid misunderstanding
one concept for another. Terms exist without connotational, amotional meanings and avoid
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polysemy, synonymy and antonymy. In other word, terms remain the basic nuclear
meaning and it works on the principle that ‘ one concept has only one term for it and vice
versa’, it is fixed in specialized field and is attached to a definition. This relationship is
called the one- to- one equivalence between concept and a term.
1.3.2.2. Systematic
Systematism is considered to be one of the most important features of terminology because
every field of science has its own limited system of concept which are denoted by certain
terms and the value of each term is determined by its relationship with other term in the
same system. As a result, term loses its value when it is isolated from its system.

teaching approaches as well as their inter- relationship between developed one. Teachers
should make decision appropriate objectives of which approaches for the teaching
situation. Following is a brief presentation of some major foreign language teaching
method and their application in the vocabulary language teaching, especially in the context
of TTTC.
1.4.1. The Grammar- translation method
The Grammar- translation method is one of the oldest method foreign language teachings.
In general language teaching, the classes are taught mainly in Vietnamese, with little
active use of English. On regard of teaching vocabulary, much of it is taught in the form of
lists of isolated words. Then students are expected to study and memorize that list of
vocabulary together with their translation equivalents in the mother tongue. And the
students are also given the grammatical rules and paradigm to put words together. Besides,
the method aims at providing the rules with wide literary vocabulary in written exercises.
Teachers also find it an easy and quick way to explain the meaning of words.
In this method, the teachers' main task is to given the students grammatical rules,
paradigm and the list of vocabulary by writing down the new words and its meaning in
Vietnamese to help students to do the written exercise in grammatical analysis, not the
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exercises in the context of text. This method can be classed as mental discipline and is
easy to apply and simple to test and to control.
1.4.2. The Direct Method
According to this method, the second language learning should be treated as the first
language learning. It associates directly foreign utterances with object and actions without
the use of the native language. During the process of teaching and learning, only target
language is used, no mother tongue is allowed. This method requires no translation
between first and second languages, little or no analysis of grammatical rules. Besides, it
lays an emphasis on correct pronunciation and grammar.
This method is very useful for teaching vocabulary, the teachers introduces through objects
and pictures. The words used are very common, active and concerning daily activities. By
this method, concrete vocabulary is taught demonstration while the meanings of abstract

teaching methods in ESP vocabulary lesson such as the Grammar- Translation method, the
Direct Method, the Audio- Lingual method, and the Communicative approach. Classes are
usually conducted in the form of lectures, with most of the time the teachers playing the
key role in the classroom being the main speakers working through the text. The teachers
explain new words, terms and even translate into Vietnamese. However, the teachers are
always aware of the new trend in teaching methods and aware of the importance of the
Communicative approach when teaching English to their students in general and
vocabulary in particular.
2.2. Students and their background
Normally, there are two classes of IT, which made up totally 98 students. The age of the
students varies from 18 to 24. They come from different part of the province. Some of
them are from the rural or remote areas, where there are no good opportunities for
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studying English, these students commonly did not spend much time learning English at
high school before. The others come from cities, who, theoretically, have all finished three
years or seven years of learning English at secondary schools before entering the THTTS.
Most of them are male students (78%). To some extent, there are some students whose
English is very good, but generally the target students' English proficiency is still low
level. Most of them learn English to read specialized documents rather than speak English
to foreigners. Some have strong pressure to pass exams with high mark; the others would
prefer ESP enhance their specialized knowledge, which is required in their future jobs.
However, specialized knowledge in Vietnamese makes it easy for them to learn English
for Information Technology, and, o the other hand, brings them high motivation in
learning ESP. In addition, it helps students feel more confident to interact with teacher in
ESP class.
2.3. The teaching materials
2.3.1. The textbook
The book "English for Computer" are subjectively selected by the teachers and then
compiled into the material to teach students of IT at THTTS in 60 periods, and with the
following features:

3. 1. Context of the study
At THTTS, English is a compulsory subject in the curriculum of teaching and learning.
English course is divided into two parts: General English and English for special purpose.
The course is applied for students of all departments. General English is taught during the
first and the second term with the total of 120 periods with the aim of giving the students
basic general knowledge of English. At this stage, the teacher concentrates on developing
students’ 4 basic language skills in order to prepare for students’ knowledge towards ESP
taught in the third term. The textbook chosen is Lifelines- Elementary by Tom Hutchinson,
Hai Phong Press, 2004. During the third term students are introduced English for special
purpose (ESP) which is written by the teachers of English at THTTS in 60 periods. The
purpose of teaching ESP is to enable students to read books and materials related to
students’ major so that they will be able to use English for their study and future career.
3. 2. The subject
In order to achieve the aims of the thesis and answer the above research questions, the
main subjects of the study include a group of 4 teachers of English for IT currently
teaching at THTTS. All of them are female. They have at least 3 –years experience in
teaching English. And 45 second- year students of IT.
The number of participants is limited to only 4 teachers and 45 students because there are
only 7 teachers teaching in THTTS at the time the study was being carried out. 4 teachers
is not a small number in comparison with the total. The teachers involved in the study are
those who have experience on teaching English for IT. At present, there is one class with
45 students of IT in THTTS. The students are in their second year of studying in the school
and 15 of them are female.
3. 3. Instruments for collecting data
According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987: 59), there are a number ways in which
information about the needs can be gathered such as questionnaires, interviews,
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observation, etc. The researcher of this study decided to choose questionnaires and
interviews as main tools for collecting information.
3.3.1. Questionnaire

90%
8%
2%
very important
important
not important
Chart 1
As shown in pie chart, most of the students consider vocabulary a very important
element in language learning. This number presents 90%, only 8% of them think
vocabulary is important and 2% not important. This means that most of these students
are well aware of the importance of vocabulary in their English learning. This
awareness leads to good motivation in their learning process.
2. Which way (s) do you find the most effective in learning English vocabulary for IT?
Ways of learning English vocabulary for IT Percentage
a. Using visual aids 23.2%
b. Store new words in notebook and read them everyday 5.3%
c. Write the words in English and Vietnamese 22%
d. Make sentences with them 6.5%
e. Write the words in English many times in pieces of paper 21.4%
f. Write the words and meaning, their synonyms or antonyms 10.8%
g. Other ways (song, game, internet, TV, radio program,) 12.2%
Table 2. Ways of learning English vocabulary for IT
The result in table 1 shows that 23.2 % ensure that they can remember new words more
easily if the teacher uses visual aids. It seems that it is visual aids and context that make
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students involved in and fascinated by the lesson. Most students are influenced by
traditional ways in their learning habits such as write the words in English and Vietnamese
or write the words in English many times in pieces of paper and trying to learn by heart.
Thus, more than half of students learn new words by writing them again (22% & 21.4%).
Obviously, it is not effective ways in learning vocabulary, as Decarrico (2001) states that

%
16.3% 10.2% 17.5% 25.7% 13.5% 5%
Table 3. Ways of vocabulary presentation students interested in
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As clearly stated in table 3, at the presentation stage, 25.7% of students answered that they
like saying the words clearly one by one and writing them on the board. The next position
is translating all the words into Vietnamese, counting for (18.2%). The number of students
who are interested in new words presenting by using visual aids and using target language
to define the new word hold nearly the same percentage (16.3% and 17.5%
correspondingly). Using synonyms and antonyms receives 13.5% while presenting new
words by using songs, games, or TV takes only 5%.
4. What would you like your teachers to do in vocabulary lesson?
Students interest towards teachers' vocabulary teaching
60.0%
6.5%
17.0%
16.5%
Use language activities in teaching
vocabulary
Instruct you how to pronounce
words correctly
Review learned vocabulary regularly
Provide many examples of word
usage
Chart 2
As clearly stated in Chart 2, a high percentage of the students express their wish to learn
vocabulary effectively in more interesting and useful ways than the traditional ones that
they knew. Answering to the question what they want their teachers to do to help them
learn English more effectively, a large number of students say that they wish their teachers
to combine teaching vocabulary with the variety of language activities (60%), 16.5% of

0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
Spelling rule
stress
Pronunciation
Collocation
Chart 3
As shown in Pie Chart 3, 26.6% said that spelling rules is one factor that always
makes them confused. Beside, 20% said that it is stress, which they find very difficult
to learn. 13.3% declared that the forms of words are really a problem for them. The
same number accounts for collocation. It seems that pronunciation is always a
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problem for most students while 40.1% said that it is very difficult for them to learn
how to pronounce.
7. What difficulties do you have when learning English vocabulary for IT?
Students vocabulary learning difficulties
17%
41.50%
28%
13.50%
Remember words but can not
pronounce correctly
Can not remember terminologies
Easy to forget words
Don't know how to use words in
sentences

make them unable to interpret. Thus, students should enrich vocabulary in order to
improve reading and writing skill, as well . ” Whereas, one of the teachers highlight the
important of teaching vocabulary for examination.
2. What difficulties do you find from your students' vocabulary learning when
teaching English to students of IT?
When being asked the question, all the teachers (4/4) say that students have difficulties in
understanding and remembering the new words and terminologies, their vocabulary is too
poor. They confirm that their students find it very difficult to understand and remember
words found in reading texts. With poor vocabulary, students cannot make sentences with
the taught words or practice speaking skill. Another obstacle is that the learners’
knowledge of vocabulary is limited, which also prevent the teachers from gaining their own
aims in the vocabulary lessons. In addition, many mistakes are found from their
pronunciation of the taught words. A number of students pronounce the taught words
incorrectly or even cannot say them at all, for example: “peripheral” (thiÕt bÞ ngo¹i vi),
“socket” (æ c¾m), “register” (thanh ghi)
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