1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale of the study
Nowadays English has become an international language because it is
widely used in many parts of the world. In the tendency of integration of the
global economy, English is one of the effective communicative tools for
everybody. The role of English is considered to be very important in the fields of
economics, politics, science, culture and education. Especially, Vietnam’s official
membership of WTO on 7th November 2006 opened a new door for integrating
into the world economy, and more and more people want to learn English for
communicating with foreign partners, tourism, study tours, etc.
In Vietnam, English has been brought into the school curriculum as a
compulsory subject, and the teaching and learning of that international language
has been recently paid great attention to. When teaching English, the teacher
teaches his students not only the English language but also its usage. And under
the right guidance, right help of the teacher, the students have to try their best to
master 4 language skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking in order to
communicate in English successfully. Among these four skills, reading plays an
important role in enriching the students’ general knowledge and in helping them
with their further study later.
Owing to the importance of reading itself, the growing interest in learning
English in Vietnam creates a wide learning environment. It can be seen that the
teaching of reading of reading comprehension has been paid in increasing
attention to its different aspects. As time goes by, many experts and
methodologists have come to an understanding that reading comprehension is
important not only at schools but also afterwards. That is reading helps students
as readers develop their language ability in general and comprehension skills in
particular at schools as well as gives them other benefits to avoid cultural and
language bias, etc. in daily communication. Recognizing the importance of
reading, I decide on choosing the theme “Using While- Reading Techniques to
Improve Reading Comprehension for the 11th Form Students at Ham Rong
School ”


2. DEVELOPMENT
I. LITERATURE REVIEW
1. Approaches of language teaching
1.1. Definitions of reading comprehension
In teaching reading, it is necessary to understand the nature of reading
comprehension. What the teacher understands about it will have a great influence
on what he or she teaches in the class. He would know what to teach and how to
make his reading lesson effectively. In fact, methodologists have been providing
different definitions of reading comprehension.
According to Grellet (1981: 3): “Reading comprehension or understanding
a written text means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as
possible.” The author means that reading comprehension is an activity which
aims at decoding the meaning of word combination in the text in the most
efficient way.
Also concerning the reading comprehension, Richard and Good (1978:9)
provide a clearer point of view:
“Reading comprehension is best described as an understanding between
the author and the reader. The emphasis is on the reader understanding of the
printed page based on the individual reader’s unique background of experience.
Reading is much than just pronouncing words correctly or simply what the author
intends. It is the process whereby the printed pages stimulate ideas, experiences
and responses that are unique to an individual”.
According to the above authors, reading comprehension is not only simply
understanding what is written, but also is what stimulates students to remember
from their experiences. That knowledge is then used to get meaning out of
printed page, but in the mind of the readers which included not only facts or
details but also emotion, belief and critical evaluation.
From these opinions, it can be concluded that reading comprehension is a
process of understanding what is conveyed in the text. It does not mean that the

to listen to the teacher’s instructions and explanations carefully to find out the
way of recognizing information and way of deducing new words or grammatical
structures.
The students must also be active and flexible readers, it is wise if they
work on their own during the reading process, make full use of the class time to
read and do the exercises to achieve a full understanding of the text. It is
necessary for them to find a suitable reading strategy and use their background
knowledge to fulfill their tasks because the significance of the text as well as the
information is not always directly stated in printed pages.
In summary, students are the key factor to decide the success of a reading
lesson. Teacher and students ate interrelated to each other during the process of
teaching and learning reading skills.
2.1. Reading activities
We read different texts in different ways. According to the way of reading,
we have aloud reading and silent reading. Depending on the purpose of reading,
we can classify reading into skimming, scanning, intensive reading and extensive
reading.
2.1.1. Skimming
Skimming is commonly used in reading comprehension. It is one of
specific reading techniques necessary for quick and efficient reading. There have
been many definitions of skimming.
Greenwood (1981:92) writes: “the reader goes through particular passage
such as newspaper article merely to get the gist”

4


In this term, Douglas Brown has the same opinion but it is clearer than that
of above author. He wrote:
“Skimming consists of quickly running eyes across the whole text for its

comprehension skills for students in reading classes.
2.1.3. Intensive reading
Intensive reading is also widely used in a reading class. Its is an effective
way to explore the text, to go deeply into the meaning and the organization of the
text.
According to Grellet (1981:4) “Intensive reading means reading short text to

5


extract specific information. This is an accuracy activity involving reading for
details.”
In addition, Nuttal (1989:23) writes: “Intensive reading involves
approaching the texts under the close guidance of the teacher…, or under the
guidance of a task which forces the students to pay great attention to the ext. the
aim of intensive reading is to arrive at a profound and detail understanding of the
text: not only of what is means but also of how the meaning is produced. ”
From the mentioned opinions, intensive reading’s aim is to achieve full
understanding of the logical arguments, attitude, and purposes of the writer as
well as his linguistic means to achieve these purposes.
Sharing the same opinion with Nuttal, Douglas (2001:312) defines:
“Intensive reading is usually a classroom oriented activity in which
students focus on linguistic or semantic details of a passage. Reading calls
students’ attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers and other surface
structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning, implication,
rhetorical relationships and the like”.
In short, intensive reading is a basic classroom activity. It is really effective
if the teacher and his students know how to fully exploit this activity in class with
the help of reading exercises.
2.1.4. Extensive reading

will focus their attention on what they are going to read. Concerning the purposes
of the pre- stage, Williams (1984:37) writes:
“What the pre- reading phrase tries to do is:
1. To introduce and arouse interest in the topic.
2. To motivate learners by giving a reason for reading.
3. To provide some language preparation for the text”
In general, in the pre- reading stage, it is necessary to set a good
preparation for students, provide them the sense of what they are going to do in
their reading lesson.
3.1.2. The while-speaking stage
While- reading stage is the main part of a reading lesson. Without this
stage, the students will lose the chance to deal with the text to understand the
writer’s purpose and clarify the text’s content in detail. Williams (1984:38) points
out the aims of the while- reading stage:
1. To help to understand of the writer’s purpose.
2. To help to understand of the text structure.
3. To clarify the text.
He also gives the teacher some questions to ask himself on order to deal
with the above- mentioned aims:
1. What is the function of this text?
2. How is the text organized or developed? (e.g.: a narrative, an
explanation with various examples, an argument and counter argument)
3. What content or information is extracted from the text?
4. What may the reader anger or deduce from the text?
5. What language may be learned from the text?
6. What reading styles may be practiced?
It is clear that, question 1 deals with the aims of understanding, the writer’s
purpose, question 2 helps to recognize the text structure and the rest help to
clarify the text content.
The answers to these questions will be a guide for the teacher in this stage.

teaching reading comprehension consisting of relationship between reading and
other skills, the role of the teacher as well as the students in the three stages of a
reading lesson have been reviewed.
II. The English teaching and learning situations at Ham
Rong high school
1. Description of the students at Ham Rong high school
The students at Ham Rong school had learnt English for seven years
before they entered Ham Rong High school. The level of English for grade 11
students is targeted at pre-intermediate level though a few actually reach the
standard. As their lower-secondary years were spent with the old text books and
the grammar translation method, most students are, to some extent, good at
grammar, but bad at listening, writing and speaking the target language.
Nowadays, together with improvements of other skills of English
learning, reading comprehension has been put into consideration at secondary

8


schools in Vietnam. As time goes by, a lot of achievements in teaching reading
comprehension can be clearly seen. It is true that quality of teaching and learning
reading comprehension in most secondary schools has been improved remarkably
in terms of the teachers’ methods and the learners’ attitudes. However, there are
still some problems facing the reading teachers a well as the pupils.
In order to fulfill this study, two survey questionnaires were conducted to
th
the 11 form pupils and eight teachers of English, especially those who are
teaching English to the 11th form students at Ham Rong high school to get more
details of the reality of teaching and learning reading comprehension at whilereading stage. This section deals with main points: Objects of the study,
objectives of the study, methods of study.
2. Settings of the study

9


1

2

3

4

5

6

7
8
9
10

comprehension?
A. Very important B. Important as other language skills
C. Less important than other language skill
D. Not important at all
What do you think about the importance of
developing reading comprehension skills?
A. Very important
B. Important
C. Not very important D. No important at all
What do you think about reading texts in English 11

Do you think classroom organization in the whilereading stage important?
A. Yes
B. No

10


2.2. Presentation of statistical results
The 100 copies of the questionnaire delivered to the students and teachers
have been responded. The data are analyzed in this part of the study in the
following table which shows sequences of the responses for the questions
available in the questionnaire.
In general, the survey of both teachers and students gives findings about their
attitudes to teaching and learning reading texts and their working methods. From
the above data analysis, it can be stated that both teachers and students have
positive attitudes to teaching and developing reading skill. Teachers have been
using different activities and exercises in the while- reading stage, but they are
not appropriate and effective enough. The teachers, in fact still apply traditional
strategies in teaching reading. Most of them focus on presenting new words and
grammatical structures rather than instruct their students to use some useful
techniques such as skimming and scanning, etc. They have not made use of pair
work and group work in the process of teaching reading. That is why their
reading lessons could not be effective. Students consequently cannot develop
their reading skills. It is the reason why the teacher of English should think of
more useful techniques that can work to get the best result of a reading lesson
Table 2:

Responds

Number



While- reading
exercises
Questions and
answers
T/F exercises
Multiple choice
exercises
Finding the topic
sentences
Finding
equivalents
Blank filling
Reordering
exercises
Completing
exercises
Matching
exercises
Finding
paragraph topics

Often
Sometimes
Never
Students Teacher
Teacher
Students
Students’ Teachers


25

20

3

0

85

85

11

15

4

0

7

15

30

20

61


61

65

13

10

35

35

56

60

9

5

27

25

61

70

10


of a reading lesson. This stage often occupies most of the time in class, and
accounts largely for the improvement of students’ reading comprehension skill.
The students must be active and do practice as much as possible. To help students
understand reading texts and at the same time develop their reading skill, the
teacher must play a role as a guiding person. He should give his students clear
purposes while reading (for example, reading for general ideas, reading for
specific information, and reading for further understanding) with clear
instructions for various kinds of activities according to each purpose.
Based on the nature of reading and teaching reading in addition to what is
found from the survey, some useful techniques are suggested to help students to
read better at the while- reading stage. All the example suggested question types
are based on reading texts in “English” textbook.
1. Questions and answers
After teaching new vocabulary or introducing the text, etc. the teacher asks
his students to read the text silently for the first time. This activity enables them
to gain the global understanding of the text, identify main ideas before going into
the details of the text.
For example, in Unit 4: “Volunteer work ” (English 11: page 46), the
students may be asked to answer the questions after skimming the text:
1. What is the main idea of this passage?
2. What do young volunteers work in the homes of sick or old people?
3. Is there a voluntary organization called Big Brothers?
For instance, in the text “Friendship” (English 11: page 13, the students
may be asked to answer the question:
Which of the choices A, B, C or D most adequately sums up the ideas of
the whole passage?
A. A friend in need is a friend indeed B. Conditions of true friendship.
C. Features of a good friend.
D. Friends and acquaintances.

comprehension. It can be used to focus on the whole text and enables students to
understand the text by giving them clues. His kind of questions certainly contains
a statement and a set of possible answers. Students’ task is to select the best one
form the answers depending on the text.
For instance, in the text “Friendship” (English 11: 13, the students may be
asked to answer the question:
Which of the choices A, B, C or D most adequately sums up the ideas of
the whole passage?
A. A friend in need is a friend indeed
B. Conditions of true friendship.
C. Features of a good friend.
D. Friends and acquaintances.
When doing the multiple choices exercises, the students need to understand
the stem of the item as well as the options. It is necessary to help the students
immediately when they have problems with the question stems.
4. Finding topic sentences
One of the useful activities which helps students understand the main
points of the text is finding the topic sentence for each paragraph in the text. That
key sentence is often at the beginning of each paragraph. The students can look
for it to get the idea of what follows.
For example, for the text “Hobbies” (English 11: 146), the teacher may ask
his students to skim the text and underline the topic sentence in each paragraph.
Paragraph 2: The hobby I like most is playing my guitar. My uncle, who is
an accomplished guitarist, taught me how to play. Now I can play a few simple
tunes. I have even begun to sing while playing the guitar, but I have not been very
successful at this. My uncle tells me that all I need is to practise regularly and I

14



Filling in the blank is generally used in the section of scanning for detail in
the textbook English 11. For example, in “Sources of energy” (English 11: 124)
one
environment
alternative
limited
unlimited
sources
energy
fuels
We need energy to live and work. Our major source of (1)........ is oil. Oil is
(2)........ kind of fossil fuel. The amount of fossil (3)........ in the world is (4)........
Therefore, we must save it, and at the same time, we must find new sources of
energy. Geothermal heat and nuclear power are (5)........ sources of energy. They
can give us electricity. Other alternative (6)........ are the sun, waves and water.

15


These sources are not only (7)........ and available but also clean and safe for the
(8)........ People should develop and use them more and more in the future.
7. Reordering information or events
This type of activity can be most commonly used with the text organized in
chronological sequence.
For example, with the text “Celebrations” (English 11: 90), it is useful to
ask the students to put the following things in the right order.
1. Homes are often decorated with plants and flowers.
2. Many people go to the pagoda to pray for a happy year for themselves and
their family.
3. Tet marks the beginning of spring and, for a agrarian people, the start of a new

B. The lift- off

16


Paragraph 3
C. Congratulations
Paragraph 4
D. A view on Earth
Paragraph 5
E. Uncertainties
In itself, this is not entirely an exercise in skimming because the students
sometimes need to read some paragraphs carefully to choose an appropriate
heading. However, the students should be encouraged to do it as quickly as
possible to see how quickly they understand the gist of the text. To avoid the
obviousness of the final item, it would be better if the teacher give more headings
than needed. The students, as a result, will read more carefully to find out the
correct title for the last paragraph.
10. Finding paragraph topics
Finding paragraph topics is more difficult than the previous activities.
Instead of finding the topic sentences and underlining them or looking at a list of
headings and matching to suitable paragraphs, the students have to read the whole
paragraph and figure out the topic revealed in each.
For instance, in the text “Nature in danger” (English 11: 115), the teacher
may ask students to skim over the text and write down a phrase that expresses the
topic of each paragraph. Paragraph 1 was done as an example.
Paragraph 1:.......................................
Paragraph 2:.......................................
Paragraph 3:.......................................
Paragraph 4:.......................................

understanding. All these techniques and activities are suggested basing on the
theory of reading and teaching reading comprehension. It is also based on the
present situation of teaching and learning reading in the secondary schools at
Ham Rong high school, especially in the while- reading stage. The actual
teaching and learning status was clarified through the two survey questionnaires
and some class observations at Ham Rong high school. The statistics indicate that
both students and teachers have positive attitudes toward teaching and learning
reading, but in the while- reading activities the teachers should apply more
techniques in their reading lessons to develop the reading skills.
There are actually a lot of activities in the while- reading stage but teachers
must be flexible in using them. They should depend on the reading texts, their
students’ level or the learning condition to provide their students with suitable
and useful activities to exploit the text efficiently and develop their effective
reading skills.
In conclusion, from what have been presented, the study is hoped to be
useful and referred to by secondary school teachers for the while- reading
activities in their reading lessons.
II. Suggestion for further study
Due to the shortage of time and the lack of practical experience, all the
issues of the teaching process cannot be covered as a whole. It is expected that
the further studies will be the continuance for this one, which suggest techniques
to the remained stages, the pre- reading and the post- reading stage. The quality
of teaching and learning reading in English as a result can be step by step

18


improved. Furthermore, mistakes are also inevitable in the study because of the
limitation of time, references and ability. Comments and recommendations would
be highly appreciated to better the study both in content and in the form.