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Title:
Factors Affecting ESP Vocabulary Learning at Hanoi Community College
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part A Introduction–
1. Rationale
English learning has been popular in Vietnam over the last few decades. Especially, learning
English has become a burgeoning need when Vietnam fosters its international relations. Every day
an increasing number of people learn and use English for different purposes.
In teaching and learning English as a foreign language in Vietnam, English for Specific Purposes
(ESP) has recently received a great deal of attention. A teacher or institution may wish to provide
teaching materials that will fit the specific subject area of particular learners. Such materials may not
be available commercially. In addition, ESP courses can vary from one week of intensive study to an
hour a week for three years or more with different schools’ timetables and for different training
level. For these reasons, there is already an established tradition of ESP teachers producing in-house
materials. They are written by the teachers of a particular institution for the students at that
institution. This is often something difficult for teachers because few have had any training in the
skills and techniques of materials writing; needless to say about their limited knowledge in the
specific area. (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987)
In Vietnam, English seems to be learnt and taught in non-English environment, so reading is an
important means to get knowledge in ESP, and also a means for further study. In other words,
learners “read to learn” (Burn, 1988:11). This is true for the students at Hanoi Community College,
where learners are future technical engineers and technicians who learn English in order to be able to
handle subject-related written materials in English and to work with modern technological
equipment. So ESP materials used at Hanoi Community College now are often reading materials
with the topics in the specific area. “Vocabulary learning has long had a synergistic association with
reading; each activity nourishes the other” (Coady and Huckin, 1997:2). So if one wants to read ESP
materials well he needs to learn ESP vocabulary.
Given the central role of vocabulary and lexis as carrier content in ESP, also confirmed by
different authors, for example Robinson (1991: 4) who says that: “It may often be thought that a

1. What are the factors affecting ESP Vocabulary Learning at Hanoi Community College?
2. What are the suggestions to help the learners learn ESP vocabulary better?
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4. Scope of the Study
The study limited itself to the investigation of some factors affecting ESP Vocabulary Learning
for the students at Hanoi Community College. It focuses not only on the factors that affect the
second-year students at the college but also on words, expressions and terms of the book “English
for Finance and Accounting” edited by a group of authors at the college. This book is now being
used as the textbook in class for the targeted students.
There are two levels of training at HCC: College level and Vocational Training level. Within its
scope, the study is limited only to the ESP for Vocational students.
The results should be interpreted within the college teaching context. The investigation primarily
deals with reading in an ESP course-“English for Finance and Accounting”.
5. Method of the Study
The methodologies adopted for this case study are
- a survey questionnaire with 100 students and
- informal interviews with teachers and students during the course.
The questionnaire consisted of 30 questions grouped into 3 main parts which help to seek for
information concerning students’ background, students’ attitudes to ESP vocabulary learning, the
area of their difficulties in ESP vocabulary learning and their expectations of ESP material and
teachers’ methodology.
6. Design of the Study
The thesis is composed of three parts.
Part A - introduction.
This part provides the rationale, aims, scopes, and methodology of the study, which offers
readers an overview of how the research idea is generated, what its goals are, and what research
methodology is adopted.
Part B - development
This part is divided into two chapters.
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the bilingual lexicon, vocabulary acquisition, lexical storage, lexical retrieval, and the use of
vocabulary by second language learners.
McCarthy stated that “the biggest component of any language course is vocabulary” (McCarthy,
1990: viii). “No matter how well the student learns grammar, no matter how successfully the sounds
of L2 are mastered, without words to express a wide range of meanings, communication in an L2
just cannot happen in any meaningful way.”
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Vocabulary is an essential component of language. “Vocabulary is central to language” and
“words are of critical importance to the typical language learner.” (Coady and Huckin, 1997: 1).
Nowadays vocabulary is considered an important aspect of teaching and learning a foreign
language. Second language vocabulary acquisition has become an increasingly interesting topic of
discussion for researchers, teachers, curriculum designers, theorists, and others involved in second
language learning and teaching.
1.2. Vocabulary learning
1.2. 1. Vocabulary learning - What is involved in knowing a word?
There have been many definitions as to what it is exactly to know a word. “knowing” a word
does not simply mean being able to recognize what it looks and sounds like or being able to give the
word’s dictionary definition. Knowing a word by sight and sound and knowing its dictionary
definition are not the same as knowing how to use the word correctly and understanding it when it is
heard or seen in various contexts (Miller & Gildea, 1987).
Penny Ur (1996) said that when vocabulary is introduced to learners, what need to be taught are
form-written and spoken; grammar; collocation; aspects of meaning: denotation, connotation,
appropriateness, meaning relationships; and word formation.
According to Nation (1990:30-33) and Taylor (1990:1-4), knowing a word incorporates a large
amount of information. It involves not only knowing its spelling, morphology, pronunciation,
meaning, or the equivalent of the word in the learner’s mother tongue but also knowing its
collocations, register, polysemy, and even its homonym. There is also the issue of precision with
which we use a word, how quickly we understand a word, and how well we understand and use
words in different modes, receptive or productive; and for different purposes (e.g., formal vs.
informal occasions) (Beck & McKeown, 1991; Nagy & Scott, 2000). In addition, it is important to

It is the learning of new words as a by-product of a meaning-focused communicative activity, such
as reading, listening, and interaction. It occurs through “multiple exposures to a word in different
contexts” (Huckin and Coady, 1999).
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In implicit vocabulary learning, learners are able to pick up vocabulary through extensive
reading, through communicative interactions, through exposure to natural input such as movies, TV.
However, for implicit vocabulary learning to be successful, the learners should have a sight
vocabulary of 2,000 to 3,000. As well, the input should be comprehensible and interesting to the
learners; unknown words should be no more than 2%. Besides, input enhancement may be beneficial
and guessing should be encouraged and guessing strategies should be trained.
If exploited in a suitable way, implicit vocabulary learning will have many advantages. Firstly, it
is contextualized, giving the learner a richer sense of a word’s use and meaning than can be provided
in traditional paired-associate exercises. Secondly, it is pedagogically efficient in that it enables two
activities – vocabulary acquisition and reading – to occur at the same time. Thirdly, it is more
individualized and learner-based because the vocabulary being acquired is dependent on the
learner’s own selection of reading materials. Lastly, presentation, consolidation and lexical/semantic
development occur at the same time.
In summary, at the beginning level, explicit learning seems more important than implicit
learning, and the more advanced students become, the more the implicit learning becomes practical.
It is also important to consider what Schmitt (2000) declares, “ for second language learners, at
least, both explicit and incidental learning are necessary, and should be seen as complementary”.
In fact, many students at Hanoi Community College tend to acquire vocabulary through explicit
learning rather than implicit learning. They have not reached the language level high enough to
guess words from contexts; they want to get explanations and meanings directly from teachers.
Instead of trying to understand new words in English with both meanings and sense, they always
attempt to translate the whole phrases and terms into Vietnamese and feel satisfied when they
succeed in doing this. They spend little time on self-study. That means they neither read more, write
more, nor translate or communicate in English outside the classroom. In short, they do not practice
using English as much as they should. This results in their inability to guess words or involve in the
implicit learning process.

script correspondence in a word is a facilitating – or difficulty – inducing factor. A Vietnamese word
encountered in reading presents no pronunciation mystery to the learner, provided the learner knows
which letter combinations represent which sounds and drops the final consonants in speech. An
English written word, however, may provide no clues to its pronunciation (e.g. different
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pronunciation of the letter ‘e’ in accounting terms pledge and retire or the letter ‘o’ in mortgage and
open note or the letter ‘u’ in current assets and security). Words characterized by such sound-script
incongruence are good candidates for pronunciation and spelling errors.
-length
Intuitively, it would seem that longer words should be more difficult simply because there is
more to learn and remember. Learners of English might memorize more easily one-syllable words
than two-syllable words, two-syllable words more easily than three-syllable words, especially for
Vietnamese learners as the Vietnamese language is a monosyllabic language. Some learners may
have more difficulty in learning longer words than shorter ones and it decreases with the increase in
the learner’s proficiency.
If the length factor could be properly isolated we might find longer words more difficult to learn
than the shorter ones. In a learning situation, however, it is hard to attribute the difficulty of learning
a particular word to its length rather than to a variety of factors. Sometimes it is not the word’s
length that affects students’ learnability but the learner’s frequent exposure to it. In other words, it is
the quantity of input that may contribute to the successful learning of the short words, not their
intrinsic quality.
-morphology:
+ inflexional complexity
Features such as irregularity of plural, gender of inanimate nouns, and noun cases make an item
more difficult to learn than an item with no such complexity, since the learning load caused by the
multiplicity of forms is greater.
+ derivational complexity
The learner’s ability to decompose a word into its morphemes can facilitate the recognition of a new
word and its subsequent production. For example, familiarity with meaning of the suffix –re and the
word invest will enable him or her to recognize the meaning of reinvest.

in another. General and neutral words, which can be used a variety of contexts and registers are less
problematic than words restricted to a specific register, or area of use. Foreign learners tend to use
words set up as superordinates (general terms) while the majority of the native speakers use co-
hyponyms (more specific terms).
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Idiomatic expressions are much more difficult to understand and learn to use than their non-
idiomatic meaning equivalents. E.g., trade-in-allowance, net-worth, import-export cover rate, joint-
account, cheque-to-bearer, cheque-to-order, cheque-with-funds.
Multiple meaning: one form can have several meanings and one meaning can be represented by
different forms. This is one of the most difficulties for learners to understand ESP texts, especially
those at low level (elementary or pre-intermediate). For example, the word bank means a financial
institution or bank of a river; the word capital in the capital of Hanoi or the wealth that can be used
to produce more wealth.

1.3.2. Person-dependent factors:
Lightbown and Spada (1999) state that these factors include age, language aptitude, intelligence,
attitude and motivation, personality. Rubin and Thomson (1994) share the same ideas about the
factors including age, aptitude, attitude, personality, learning style and past experiences.
Ellis (1994) explains those factors as individual differences that affect different aspects of second
language learning. His report on the effect of age shows that learners who start as children achieve a
more native-like accent than those who start as adolescents or adults. The younger is better in the
case of phonology but not in the acquisition of grammar. There is no clear evidence that age has
great impact on vocabulary acquisition.
Caroll (1965) identified four factors in language aptitude: phonemic coding ability, rote learning
ability, inductive language learning ability and grammatical sensitivity; of which the first three are
hypothesized to be involved in vocabulary learning.
Ellis (1994: 507-522) analyses a number of learning styles used by adult ESL learners such as
concrete learning style, analytical learning style, communicative learning style and authority-
orientated learning style (based on Willing, 1987), etc. He eventually concludes that “Learners
manifest different learning styles but it is not yet clear whether some styles result in faster and more

1.3.3. Learning task: materials, goal
The traditional, broader understanding of task as in Flavell (1979), Wenden (1987), and Williams
and Burden (1997) stated that the learning task includes the materials being learned (such as the
genre of a piece of reading) as well as the goal the learner is trying to achieve by using these
materials (such as remembering, comprehending, or using language).
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As Crookes (1986) defined, task is a piece of work or an activity, usually with a specified
objective, undertaken as part of an educational course, or at work.
In practice, it appears to refer to the idea of some kind of activity designed to engage the learner
in using the language communicatively or reflectively in order to arrive at an outcome other than that
of learning a specified feature of the L2. A task can be a real-world activity or a contrived,
pedagogic activity (Nunan, 1989), as long as the process of completing the task corresponds to that
found in discourse based on the exchange of information. (Ellis, 1994: 595)
Tasks are specific language-learning activities that may facilitate optimal conditions for second
language learning. (Fluente, 2006) Tasks should be structured in reference to desirable goals. The
goal of L2 vocabulary tasks should be acquisition of words and expansion of word’s knowledge, not
only the meanings but also the forms. In her research on “the role of pedagogical tasks and form-
focused instruction” Fluente has concluded that “task-based lessons seemed to be more effective
than the Presentation, Practice and Production lesson”. The analysis also suggests that a task-based
lesson with an explicit focus-on-forms component was more effective than a task-based lesson that
did not incorporate this component in promoting acquisition of word morphological aspects. The
results also indicate that the explicit focus on forms component may be more effective when placed
at the end of the lesson, when meaning has been acquired.
Different types of task materials, task purposes, and tasks at various difficulty levels have
various effects on the learners’ vocabulary acquisition. For example, learning words in a word list is
different from learning the same words in a passage. As well, remembering a word meaning is
different from learning to use the same word in real life situations.
1.3.4. Learning context:
The learning context refers to the socio-cultural-political environment where learning takes
place. The learning context can include the teachers, the peers, the classroom climate or the

2.1. Current situation of the teaching and learning of ESP at Hanoi Community College
Hanoi Community College (HCC) has been established since 2005, based on Hanoi Technical
High School of Civil Engineering (founded in 1987 after the incorporation of 4 Hanoi Builders’
Training Schools founded in 1973). Hanoi Community College has a long standing tradition in
training technicians and workers in the field of economics, technology, construction and
architecture.
Therefore, at HCC, ESP covers courses in several areas such as English for Construction and
Architecture, English for Building Materials Technology, English for Finance and Accounting,
English for Computer Science and English for Electricity.
This is a technical college, so foreign language is not considered the main subject. It serves as a
means that help students to read documents and machine manuals in English, but not to
communicate with English native speakers.
2.1.1. Why English for Finance and Accounting?
As mentioned before, this study investigates a group of students who are being trained to be
accountants in the future. The accounting career is now in high demand. The number of students
coming into the college to study Finance and Accounting is increasing quickly in recent years. They
account for approximately 60% of the total number of students at the college.
The learning program was designed by the teachers of English ten years ago. This is one of the
two ESP syllabuses firstly applied at the college. The organizers of the course aimed at providing
students a means to get access to the available English materials in the field. The syllabus focuses on
the subject matters of Finance and Accounting through reading comprehension texts.
Since vocabulary learning is believed to have “a synergistic association” with reading (Coady
and Huckin, 1997:2), the investigation of this study was carried out to find out factors that affect
vocabulary learning and thus give suggestions to improve students’ vocabulary learning and the ESP
course as well.
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2.1.2. The learners
The learners of English at HCC are approximately from 19 to 24 in age. They come from
different provinces of the country and bring with them different levels of English background.
Almost of every student started English at the high school; although some of them learnt Russian,

and grammar exercises. Five texts out of the total nine have got one vocabulary exercise each. All of
the vocabulary exercises are blank-filling, one word for each blank in separate sentences. There is a
list of new words and their meanings in Vietnamese at the end of each unit. The teaching syllabus is
designed in the form of a form-focused instruction. Less attention is paid to vocabulary in the
specific area.
2.1.4. The teachers and their methods of teaching
Six English teachers have been working at our English Division, aged from 30 to 45. All of
them have graduated from a formal ELT training course from different tertiary institutions in
Vietnam. The oldest teacher has more than 25 years of teaching experience and the youngest one has
got 3 years. Nevertheless, none of us has had any chances to participate in refreshment courses
abroad. Five of us have the responsibility to teach both GE and ESP. None of us, however, has been
trained in teaching ESP. So we are facing with many difficulties in teaching process, of which the
lack of the specific knowledge and the choice of appropriate teaching materials and methodologies
seem to be the major concerns.
For most of the ESP teachers at HCC, the common method of teaching in ESP reading lessons is
the traditional teacher-centered, especially to Vocational students. In classes, explanation,
translation, asking and answering questions are the main class activities. The teachers are often
asked to explain every new word, new structure and even to translate the text into Vietnamese. Our
students are usually passive in the learning process.
The major interaction patterns in the classroom are:
- Teacher-whole class (most of the time)
- Teacher-student interaction (sometimes)
- Students initiating interaction: pair work, group work, questions and comments (occasionally).
Through class observation and small talks to ESP teachers and learners, it is obvious that most of
the teachers teaching ESP at HCC are deeply influenced by grammar-translation method. Therefore,
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their lessons focus on grammatical structures and translation, and they do not pay much attention to
vocabulary teaching. There are no language activities for vocabulary learning. This may be one of
the reasons why the learners find it hard to acquire the vocabulary in the specific field.
2.2. Research methodology

2.2.3. Data collection instrument:
The questionnaires were constructed based on the literature on ESP vocabulary learning, the
researcher’s observation and experience got during her 10 years of teaching at HCC, and the
discussion with the other five English teachers at the college.
The questionnaire was written in Vietnamese to make sure that the participants could fully
understand the questions before giving their answers. The question items were multiple choice,
rating-scale, agree/disagree and both close-ended and open-ended.
The questionnaire consists of three main parts:
- Part one: collect information about the students’ background – place of domicile, number of
years they have been learning English, their proficiency levels in English.
- Part two: collect information about the factors affecting ESP vocabulary learning. This part
includes three subparts: Part A - students’ attitudes towards ESP vocabulary learning (finding about
person-dependent factors); Part B – the reading material, their difficulties and the causes
(investigating intralexical factors, learning context); Part C – the teachers and teaching method
(finding information on input/output opportunities, etc.).
- Part three: their expectations of ESP material and teachers’ methodology.
The sample of the questionnaire is presented in the appendix.
2.2.4. Data collection procedure:
To obtain the data for the investigation, the questionnaires were delivered to 100 students during
the class time. The students were given clear instruction before each question so that they could
respond appropriately to each question.
After the questionnaire was administered, the respondents were encouraged to read it thoroughly
and answer frankly and truly. Then they will be instructed to take as much time as they need to
complete the questionnaire.
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2.2.5. Data analysis
Data from the questionnaire was classified into different categories such as students’ attitudes
and motivation to ESP vocabulary learning; their difficulties in intralexical area, the reading
materials (goal, learning task), the teachers (the availability of input or formal instruction), learners’
background knowledge about the topic and their expectations of ESP material and teachers’

45% of them just passed at the level of satisfactory, 18% got the good scores and 11% won the
excellent marks. Studying results of the general English course revealed the fact that it was rather
hard work for both of the students and the teacher to run the English course of finance and
accounting.
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2.3.1.2. Learners’ attitude towards ESP vocabulary learning
It should be taken into account students’ belief and attitude toward role of ESP vocabulary.
When they find it necessary to learn ESP vocabulary for their future job, they would be highly
motivated in learning process.
Question 1
This question aimed at investigating the students’ beliefs about the necessity of English after
graduation. As can be seen from figure 2 that they showed a very high demand in using English as a
means for ESP reading, 30% believed that they would need English to deal with a lot of ESP reading
for their profession or further study. Another 45% believed that they would use English to read ESP
materials (option E) as well as a means supporting for their future work (option C) and
communicating with foreigners (option D). Surprisingly, no one thought that they would no longer
use English after graduating and a small number 5% showed that English would be mostly used for
entertainment. Therefore, it is clear that almost of the participants were aware of the important role
of English especially ESP for their future job.
A: I don’t need to use English any more
B: I may use English mostly for entertainment
C. I may use English as a means supporting for
future work
D. I may use English to communicate with
foreigners
E. I may use English to read finance and
accounting materials
Question 2
Since the students had expressed their need for ESP reading as the results from the previous
investigation, the purpose of this question was directly to investigate what is the most important