SỞ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO ĐỒNG NAI
Đơn vị : THPT Ngô Quyền
___________________
Mã số: …………………..

SÁNG KIẾN KINH NGHIỆM

Người thực hiện: Trần Văn Nghĩa
Lĩnh vực nghiên cứu:
Quản lý giáo dục
Phương pháp dạy học bộ môn
Phương pháp giáo dục
Lĩnh vực khác:
Có đính kèm:
Mô hình

Phần mềm

Phim ảnh

Năm học:2011-2012

Hiệnvật khác


SƠ LƯỢC LÝ LỊCH KHOA HỌC
I. THÔNG TIN CHUNG VỀ CÁ NHÂN
1.
2.
3.
4.

Teaching Grammar in Context


SỞ Giáo Dục & Đào Tạo Đồng Nai
Đơn vị: THPT Ngô Quyền

CỘNG HÒA XÃ HỘI CHỦ NGHĨA VIỆT NAM
Độc lập - Tự do - Hạnh phúc

______________
Biên Hoà. ngày … tháng …. năm…...

PHIẾU NHẬN XÉT, ĐÁNH GIÁ SÁNG KIẾN KINH NGHIỆM
Năm học: 2011-2012
Tên sáng kiến kinh nghiệm: Using Barrett’s Taxonomy to Enhance High

School Students’Reading Comprehension
Họ và tên tác giả: Trần Văn Nghĩa
Đơn vị (Tổ): Tiếng Anh
Lĩnh vực:
Quản lý giáo dục
Phương pháp dạy học bộ môn
Phương pháp giáo dục
Lĩnh vực khác
1. Tính mới:
- Có giải pháp hoàn toàn mới
- Có giải pháp cải tiến, đổi mới từ giải pháp đã có
2. Hiệu quả:
- Hoàn toàn mới và đã triển khai áp dụng trong toàn ngành có hiệu quả cao
- Có tính cải tiến hoặc đổi mới từ những giải pháp đã có và đã triển khai áp dụng

1. Introduction
2. Problems
3. Purpose of the study.
4. Barrett’s Taxonomy
5. Literature Review
6. Application
7.Anticipated Outcomes
8. Implications for teaching and learning
9. Conclusion


Introduction
The purpose of teaching English is to help the students use it as a means of
communication in real-life contexts. It is necessary for the students to make use of
English to exchange information, to state their opinions, and to express their feelings.
Nowadays, English is used as the most popular and international language, and many
people in Vietnam, especially people in Dong Nai , an industrial province need to use it
as a communicative tool at work, on business or in commercial environments.
It is recognized that the main focus of learning English as a foreign language is heavily
on communicative competence. The more opportunities students are given to practice
using English in the classroom, the more effectively and fluently they can use in real-life
situations. Therefore, as teachers of English, in order to increase communication in the
classroom, there are a number of things we need to do, for example : effective teaching
activities or methods, task adaptation , and students’ involvement, for the communicative
level of Vietnamese students, I think , is still underdeveloped. On the other hand, the
communicative needs are much more challenging than students’ communicative
competence. As an attempt to improve the students’ reading skill, my first concern would
be on questioning techniques.
Problems
In all of the high schools in Viet Nam , we have already used English 10, English 11 and

intention. These literal comprehension questions just help students to scratch the surface
of a text, while it is the responsibility of reading that helps the reader get deeper
understanding of a passage.
As a researcher, I want to improve students’ reading skills and their levels of
thinking. The research on teaching reading would be of great benefit to the students,
teachers of English and administrators in my school. It is expected that the research
findings will help teachers in other schools who are in the same teaching situation make
an innovation in English teaching for the sake of students.
Purpose of the study.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of Barrett’s taxonomy on the
development of reading skills of the ten graders in Ngo Quyen High School. The study
also aims at introducing the Barrett’s taxonomy to the teachers in my school so that they
can use this theoretical framework as a tool to maximize students’ thinking in reading
comprehension. In addition, this framework can also be used for analyzing instructional
materials and designing relevant types of questions for students of different levels. The
following questions are considered the focus of my research proposal:
- To what extent does the application of Barrett’s Taxonomy improve students’
reading comprehension skill in Baoloc high school?
- How do teachers in Ngo Quyen High school feel about question levels in reading
comprehension ?

Barrett's Taxonomy
Of the many taxonomies which have tried to categorize reading comprehension,
Barrett' s taxonomy of reading comprehension (Clymer,1968), designed originally to
assist classroom teachers in developing comprehension questions and test questions for
reading, is widely accepted as a useful tool for classroom questioning. This taxonomy
consists of five categories presented as follows,


appreciation

of thinking help our students begin to think critically and intelligently.
We know that reading is an interactive process in which the reader constructs
meaning with the text. We need to help our students learn to do this. This means going
beyond a literal understanding of a text, and allowing our students to use their own
knowledge while reading. According to Crisp (1978) when questions is beyond a literal
understanding, students' answers have to be motivated by information in the text.
Inferential questions can have clearly correct responses. In contrast, prediction and
evaluative answers may be correct or incorrect as long as they depend primarily on
students' reactions to what they read. Evaluative answers not only depend primarily on
students' reactions to what they have read, but they need to reflect a broad understanding
of the text.
Another reason for using a variety of questions is that they involve different types
of comprehension. Guszak (1967, cited in Pearson and Johnson, 1972, p.154) stated that
students could perform best when answering questions of factual recall, which is the type
of question that their teachers ask most often. This means that students can do best at
what they have been taught and practiced. Thus, if we want our students to be able to
reach deeper understanding of a text, then it is necessary to teach them how to do this and
to give them opportunities to work with different types of comprehension.
Barrett’s Taxonomy of comprehension types is an overview of types of
understanding that foreign language learners need to have if they are to read a text with
more than a literal understanding.
The taxonomy of the types of comprehension questions may also be used as a checklist
for language teachers to make their own comprehension questions for texts that their
students read to help them understand better what they read in reading comprehension
lessons in school. In addition, they can be used to develop materials to ensure that the
various levels of questions are used to help students improve their reading skills as well
as respond to a variety of types of comprehension.
Barrett’s Taxonomy has also been very useful to teachers by helping them to focus on
specific learner outcomes which they can emphasize in class. It also serves as a guide in
the preparation of tests which can be incorporated into future exams. Hence, it should be

3
4
5

Questions
What is Mr.Vy’s occupation?
What time does he get up and what does he do after that?
What does he do in the morning?
What do Mr.Vy and his wife do in theafternoon ?
Are they happy with their lives or not? Why?


APPLICATION ( Questions designed for enhancing students’ critical thinking)
N0

Questions

1
2
3
4
5

What is Mr.Vy’s occupation?
What time does he get up and what does he do after that?
What does he do in the morning?
What do Mr.Vy and his wife do in theafternoon ?
Are they happy with their lives or not?Why?

6

Language)

9

What words will describe the feelings of happiness?

Appreciation

(eliciting responses

from the reader

who demonstrates
his or her sensitivity to, sympathy
for, and empathy
with characters or happenings).

10

Tell Mr.Vy’s day of working in your own words.

Reorganization
( using direct or paraphrased
statements from the selection)

Anticipated Outcomes
The research is in the hope that he will find out the positive effects of applying
Barrett’s Taxonomy into teaching reading comprehension First, it may reveal that the
question levels in reading lessons are commonly at literal and reorganization
comprehension, which may discourage some good students from learning reading

teaching reading by focusing on meaning is more effective than teaching teaching reading
with regard of vocabulary and translation techniques.
In final analysis, we emphasize that communication in the classroom requires the
three main components of effective methods, relevant tasks, questioning techniques, and
suitable activities. The above analysis indicates that only in teaching situations that
follow this way of such a combined technique, can we promote and achieve the
communicative goal in the classroom.

REFERENCES


Crisp, F.M. (1978). Questioning children’s reading – an application of Barrett’s
Taxonomy. Journal for the study and improvement of reading and related skills,
Volume 12, Issue 1,(pp 36 – 43).
Everson, M.E., & Ke, C. (1997). An Inquiry into the Reading Strategies of
Intermediate and Advanced Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language. Journal
of the Chinese Language Teacher association, 32, 290 – 299.
Goodman, K.S. (1976). Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game. In H. Singer &
R.B. Ruddell (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Process of Reading, Newark, DE:
International Reading Association, (pp. 450-497).
Grellet, F. (1981). Developing reading skills: A practical guide to reading
comprehension exercises. Cambridge University Press.
Kamil, M.L. (1986). Reading in the Native Language. In B.H. Wing (Ed.), Listening,
Reading, and writing: Analysis and Application, Middlebury, VT: Northeast
Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (pp. 71-91).
Robert, J.M., & John, S.K. (2008). Designing and Accessing Educational Objectives,
Corwin Press.
Rumelhart, D.E. (1977). Toward an Interactive Model of Reading. In S. Dornic
(Ed.),Attention and Performance VI, (pp. 573-603). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbau