PART I:
1.

INTRODUCTION

REASON FOR CHOOSING THE TOPIC:
Nowadays, English plays an integral part in our society. It appears as a

tool, a means of communication. It helps people in different cultures, with
different languages can understand one another. Not only is English an essential
means in international communication but it is also a job which can help us get
a lot of money. Estimates vary about how many people speak English
worldwide but some believe English-speakers are likely to number in the
billions. English crosses cultures, countries and industries and is often used as a
‘common tongue’ if neither person is a native speaker. This means teaching
people English can be truly rewarding – because students of English have so
many new opportunities and doors open to them thanks to their skills. With its
such high roles, English now becomes the compulsory subject in the National
Curriculum and is the obligatory subject in all examinations in Viet Nam.
With the changes in the National Exam for Upper Secondary Education
these recent years, reading comprehension covers 50 % of total content of the
exam paper. It includes 3 small parts: gap filling, reading comprehension 1,
reading comprehension 2. The content and topics of reading tasks in the exam
mostly focus on those students learn in reading passage – English 12. The
ability in doing these reading tasks depends on what they get and how they learn
from English 12 – Reading comprehension.
In National Curriculum for English – upper secondary education, 7- yearperiod, especially in grade 12, students face up to a huge amount of information,
knowledge and skills. For the teachers ourselves, we meet a lot of difficulties in
teaching a great amount of knowledge, whichever is also important and can
appear in a test. The topics in Reading text – English 12 spread over a large
number of fields such as cultures, history, science… whereas some teachers still


Students themselves in the reading period have a lot of difficulties as well:


Try to read all words appearing in the passage and translate into



Vietnamese, while there are a lot of new words.
Focus too much on the meaning of individual words, forget the main





ideas.
Do not have the skill of totalizing the main points of a reading passage.
General knowledge is limited.
Unaware of the importance of learning English. Lack of the motivation in
studying. Do not really be active, especially those from country like
Quang Xuong.
In order to overcome some of the problems above, I strongly recommend

some redesigns specially for teaching reading comprehension in English 12,
mostly focus on some changes in the tasks in each period, so that I can help my
students get better result in learning reading comprehension. My theme “ Some
ways to redesign the activities in teaching reading comprehension of the
12th English at Quang Xuong 1 High School” aims at helping students easily
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experience  observing  collecting  consulting  experimenting.







Getting experiences through the practical teaching of myself
Observing the facts and getting information: Through students’ relating
theory achievement as well as their solving relating exercises.
Collecting results through some surveys.
Studying references, materials relating. Consulting some colleagues.
Experiment: Confirming the correct answers from the mistakes students
make.
PART II: DEVELOPMENTS

1.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND:
3


-

My own teaching experiences during some years in high school.

-

The basic background of knowledge about the reading comprehension skill.

developing an awareness of the structure of written texts in English
2. THE ACTUAL SITUATION:
Different levels and intellectual abilities of learners are also real hurdle,

which make most teachers find difficult in applying methods in imparting
knowledge. This inspires us ceaselessly to try to look for solutions.
Besides, some teachers find it hard to teach some reading contents that refer
to such field they themselves are not familiar.
3.
3.1

THEORY:
. DESCRIPTION OF THE SUBJECT:

Reading comprehension is the ability to process text, understand its
meaning, and to integrate it with what the reader already knows. Fundamental
skills required in efficient reading comprehension are knowing meaning of
words, ability to understand meaning of a word from discourse context, ability
to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and references in
it, ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents, ability to identify
the main thought of a passage, ability to answer questions in a passage, ability
4


to recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage
and determine its tone, to understand the situational mood (agents, objects,
temporal and spatial reference points, casual and intentional inflections, etc.)
conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining etc. and finally
ability to determine writer's purpose, intent and point of view, and draw
inferences about the writer (discourse-semantic).

education, most of the reading passages are designed for intensive and extensive
reading. In order to get success in approaching the reading passage, both teacher
and students must have an aim clearly for it:
-

What is the aim of the reading lesson
Types of reading skill can be chosen
How to approach the content of the lesson
3.2.2. Procedure:
Contemporary reading tasks, unlike the traditional materials, involve three

phase procedures: pre-, while-, and post- reading stages. In each stage, teacher
must organize some activities in order to solve the duties.
a.

Pre – reading activities:

The pre-reading stage helps in activating the relevant schema. Most teachers
tend to neglect the pre-reading procedure claiming that there is not enough time.
In fact, pre-reading activities motivate students before the actual reading takes
place. For example, teachers can ask students questions that arouse their interest
while previewing the text. Drucker (2003) suggests the following procedure
teachers can take before reading a text:
“…relate the passage students are going to read to something that is
familiar to them. Next, provide a brief discussion question that will engage the
students and, after that, provide an overview of the section they are about to
read. Name the selection, introduce the characters, and describe the plot (up to,
but not including, the climax). Last, direct the students to read the story and
look for particular information.”
Similarly, Abraham (2002) states that an interactive approach “demands that

Pre-teach structures, new words
Introduce briefly the topic, content
Eliciting, guiding questions
Predict the context
Give expectation
While – reading activities:

The aim of while-reading stage (or interactive process) is to develop
students’ ability in tackling texts by developing their linguistic and schematic
knowledge. This phase is the most important one because it is the most active
one among the three stages. Therefore, Shahidullah (1995; 1996) suggests the
following while-reading activities :
1. Guessing meaning from context,
2. Analyzing sentences,
3. Surveying text structure,
4. Extracting specific information,
5. Getting detailed information,
6. Answering pre-set questions,
7. Matching text with pictures diagrams etc.,

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This stage is to check students whether they understand the lesson or not
through some tasks, which are done during the reading activity or after that. The
tasks in this stage are various:


Choose the sentence A,B, or C that is nearest meaning to the given
sentence.

After finishing the tasks, the teacher can check up students on whether

they understand the whole reading passage, whether they can apply what they
have just read to the new task…
Haller (2000, p. 21-24) modeled a number of school-based post-reading
activities which enhance learning comprehension through the use of matching
exercises, cloze exercises, cut-up sentences, and comprehension questions. For
the cloze activity, the teacher puts blanks in the story in place of some of the
words, usually every fifth word but not the first or the last words in the text. A
cut-up sentence activity uses sentences from the given text and helps learners to
gain confidence by manipulating the text in various ways. The use of lines in
matching can be sometimes confusing for beginners. Haller proposes the use of
“paper strips” at the beginning where a student is given the strips and asked to
match for example a name with its corresponding activity. Later students can
work in pairs as they understand the concept of matching and, finally, the
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teacher can introduce matching through lines. For extra practice students can
copy their matching word slips onto another sheet of paper.
The activities in this stage include:
+ Summarize the passage, based on the years: 1967, 1998,…
+ Summarized the reading passage by writing ONE sentence for each
paragraph.
+ Fill in each space of the following paragraph with a suitable word.
+ Make a comparison between……
+ Discuss the advantages of….
+ Scan the passage and make brief notes.
+ Discuss the questions.
3.3. DATA ANALYSIC

When asked about the main reasons behind reading problems, (40%) of
learners agree that they do not have the habit to read, while (24%) of them
considered that the main reason behind their reading problems is due to the
lack of time and (20%) of the answer relate reading difficulty to the kind of
texts that they read. Lastly, the remaining (16%) agree on the difficulty of the
reading skill itself.
3.3.2. Conclusion
The present practical part provides a practical analysis case study that was
done both qualitatively and quantitatively by using two research tools. In fact,
from the data analysis phase, the finding showed that 12 th grade learners cannot
read fluently, because they face a number of difficulties in reading
comprehension. The results reveal that teachers related the learners’ reading
comprehension achievement mainly to their lack of reading habit; learners do
not often read and this is due to the globalization age and under the use of
Information and Communication Technologies, that is why the following
writing seeks to present some suggestions and solutions in order to expand the
learners’ vocabulary knowledge, and thus to lead to a better comprehension
while reading. 4. SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS TO IMPROVE
STUDENTS’ ABILITIES IN READING COMPREHENSION SKILL:
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4.1.

Before - you - read activities:

These tasks are important for both teachers and learners, because they
prepare students for the text they are going to read. In this respect, Abraham
(2002) maintains that an interactive approach demands that the teachers should
activate the students’ schemata during the pre-reading phase by helping them

Take out the garbage
…….
This change of task helps students know exactly what they are going to deal
with in the reading text, rather than try to answer the questions that they don’t
really know how to do.
Example 2:

Unit 6: FUTURE JOBS – Part A: READING

By the end of the lesson, students can get for themselves some tips to
help them have a successful interview for a job in the future.
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The hand-out activity helps students have an overlook of what they are
going to deal with, so that they can prepare the background knowledge, and
approach the reading text more easily after that.
Handout: Match a question in column A with an appropriate answer in
column B:
Questions
1. What are you going to do after
finishing university?
2. Where can you find out the
information about jobs?
3. What do you find out at the job
center = an employment agency?
4. What kind of paper do you need to
apply for a job?
5. What do you bring with you to an
interview?

quite difficult. To teach new words, teacher can use the following activity:
Handout: What will our life be like in the future? Put a tick () in the right
column if you agree or disagree with the ideas below.
Ideas
1
2

agree

The whole world will experience a period of
economic depression (kinh tÕ tr× trÖ )
Many large coporations will be wiped out (bÞ xo¸
sæ) and millions of jobs will be lost.
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disagre
e


3
4

5

6
7
8

9


READING
By the end of the lesson, students can know exactly about school education
system in England.
Handout: Read the passage again and decide whether statements are true (T)
or false (F):
1.

Schooling is compulsory for all English children under the age of 16.

2.

The academic year begins in September and ends in July.

3.

A school year consists of two terms.

4.

The state school system is free for all students.
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5.

The “independent” or “public” school system is also free for all students.

6.

English, Maths and Science are not compulsory in the national education.

After reading activities
Example 1:

Unit 1: HOME LIFE – Part A: READING

The task in this lesson is answering three questions. For me, this task is
not really well- made, as the answers may be very long. It’s the reason I replace
it with the following task. To do this task, students just read the whole passage,
get the main points and then answer by taking note, not the whole sentences.
Handout: Read the text again and find out details that prove that:
1. The mother is a caring person.
………………………………………………………………………………….
2. The father is a helpful man.
………………………………………………………………………………….
3. The daughter is a good child.
………………………………………………………………………………….
4. This is a close-knit family.
………………………………………………………………………………….
Example 2:

Unit 2: CULTURAL DIVERSITY - part A: READING
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After reading the passage, it is not really difficult for students to answer
the questions in Task 3. However, answering the questions is the traditional
method to check the understanding, which may make students feel repeated and
bored. Instead, I give them a new way of checking. This type of task helps
students practice summarize the main ideas from what they have just read.
Handout: Fill in the table with the missing information:

Handout: Give missing information to talk about school education system in
England. And then give information to talk about school education system in
Vietnam.
School education system in England

School education system in
Vietnam
1. Children start Primary School when they 1. Children start Primary School
are……………….
when they are 6.
2. A school year consists of……… terms.
2.
They are………
…………………………………
3. The school year starts… and ends…
3. ………………………………
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4. There are………school systems.
4. ………………………………
5. Schooling is compulsory from at the age 5. ……………………………
of…………
6. English, Maths and Science are ……in
6. ………………………………
the national examination
Example 4:
Unit 6: FUTURE JOBS – Part A : READING
This task asks students to read carefully the passage once again. If they really
understand the passage, they can get the information to finish the task.

Education
Politics
Unequal
Power
Liberation
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Women in the old society were considered to be (1)…………….. to men.
They played the roles of mothers and (2)……………….. only. They weren’t
allowed to work in business and (3)………. Therefore it was men who
controlled most positions of employment and (4) ………. In society.
Thanks to women’s (5)……….since the 18th century, women nowadays have
gained many legal rights equal to men. Among them, the most important are
the right to vote, the right to gain (6)……… and the right to get equal
payment in work
5.

RESULTS
After a period of applying the suggestions mentioned above to my own

teaching process the reading comprehension in grade 12, at Quang Xuong 1
High School, I find many advantages:
-

Learners get enjoyable more with the lessons, as they understand the real
essence of it.

-


learners‟

vocabulary

knowledge,

and

better

reading

comprehension achievements.
Reading skill, with a lot of relating knowledge, is always difficult to
teachers ourselves. To find out a way to transfer this mass of knowledge to
students with high result is always a mission to us. Each teacher will find out for
herself a particular method. But the final aim is to help students understand and
apply what they have learnt to the real situations.
For me, after 10 years being a teacher of English at Quang Xuong 1 High
school, with a lot of students having been growing up, I finally find out one of
the ways to solve the problem of teaching reading skill in textbook English 12
that I have just presented above. I hope my above experiences can, more or less,
help my colleagues with their teaching, as well as learners who care for, with
their study.
Much as I tried, it’s impossible for me not to have some disadvantages
during my presentation in this study. I really hope to receive the sincere
contribution from the colleagues, as well as from the leaders in our teaching
branch, so that I can improve my experience and my teaching in the future.
2. PROPOSAL:
From the results I have got, I sincerely suggest some ideas:

Aims of the study ……………………………………………
Scope of the study…………………………………………...
Methods of the study……………………………… ..………

1
3
3
3

Part II: CONTENTS

4.

Theoretical background…………………………………………
The actual situation …………………………………………….
Patterns of the study ……………………………………………
3.1.
Description of the subject ..................................................
3.2.
Data collection and procedure …………………………..
3.3.
Data analysis ……………………………………………
Suggestions for teachers to improve students’ ability in reading

5.

comprehension skill…………………………………………… 11
Results ………………………………………………………... 18

1.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Hướng dẫn Đọc hiểu Tiếng Anh
Vũ Thùy Linh
Gợi ý thiết kế bài dạy Reading – English Phạm Minh Trang
12
Reading in a second language :Process, London. Longman.
Product and Practice.
Reading in the language classroom. Williams, E. (1996).
Modern English Publications.

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