VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES
*********************

CAO THỊ THẮM

DEVELOPING SUPPLEMENTARY READING MATERIALS
TO IMPROVE READING COMPREHENSION
FOR GRADE 10th STUDENTS AT A HIGH SCHOOL
IN BAC NINH PROVINCE
(Phát triển tài liệu đọc nhằm nâng cao kĩ năng đọc cho học sinh lớp 10
tại một trường Trung học phổ thông ở Bắc Ninh)

M.A MINOR THESIS (Type I)

Hanoi – 2019


VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES
*********************

CAO THỊ THẮM

DEVELOPING SUPPLEMENTARY READING MATERIALS
TO IMPROVE READING COMPREHENSION
FOR GRADE 10th STUDENTS AT A HIGH SCHOOL
IN BAC NINH PROVINCE
(Phát triển tài liệu đọc nhằm nâng cao kĩ năng đọc cho học sinh lớp 10

support that help me to complete my work.

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ABSTRACT
This thesis reports the findings of an action research study to improve
reading skill for grade 10 students at a high school in Bac Ninh province. It
attempts to find students‟ opinions of the current textbook, their difficulties in
learning reading skill in order to provide suitable supplementary reading materials
to improve students‟ reading competence. The data was collected via questionnaires
with 40 students at a high school in Bac Ninh province, diagnostic and final test
and classroom‟s observation. The findings of this study have shown that most of the
students find the reading texts in the current textbook interesting and relevant with
suitable reading tasks. However, they find it hard to improve their reading skills
because they lacked reading strategies and suitable supplementary reading
materials. The research also gave some suggestions in suitable reading materials
and reading strategies to help the students improve their reading comprehension.
Surprisingly, her students make great progress in reading skills after the
supplementation time.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
DECLARATION ....................................................................................................... i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................... ii
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................. iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................ iv
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS................................................................................ vii

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY .........................................................................19
3.1 Setting..............................................................................................................19
3.2 The participants ...............................................................................................19
3.3 The course book ..............................................................................................20
3.4. Research Design .............................................................................................20
3.4.1 Diagnosing .......................................................................................................23
3.4.2 Action planning ..............................................................................................23
3.4.3. Taking action ..................................................................................................24
3.4.4 Evaluating........................................................................................................25
3.4.5. Specifying learning ........................................................................................25
3.5 Data collection instruments .............................................................................26
3.5.1. Dianogstic test và Final test ...........................................................................26
3.5.2 Questionnaire ..................................................................................................26
3.5.3 Teacher’s observation .....................................................................................26
CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION ...................................................28
4.1. Phrase 1: Diagnosing the Research topic .......................................................28
4.1.1 The result of the dianogstic test ......................................................................28
4.1.2. The result of the survey questionaire ............................................................29
4.2. Phrase 2: The effects of using supplementary reading materials on improving
students‟ reading comprehension. .........................................................................35
4.3 Phrase 3: Evaluate results................................................................................39
4.4.Phrase 4: Discussion .......................................................................................40
4.5 Findings ..........................................................................................................41
4.5.1 The students’ evaluation of the current text book for year tenth students.... Error!
Bookmark not defined.
4.5.2. The reasons for students’ low level of reading comprehension ...................42

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Table 1: Exercises believed to be suitable to develop reading skills ..........................8
Table 2: The result of the diagnostic test .................................................................28
Table 3: The students‟ opinion on level of difficulty, content and length of the
reading texts in the textbook ......................................................................29
Table 4: The teachers‟ and students‟ opinions on reading exercises ........................30
in the textbook. ..........................................................................................................30
Table 5 : The frequency of doing reading practice outside the classtime .................31
Table 6: The reasons for students‟ lack of reading practice .....................................32
Table 7: The students‟ expectation of the supplementary reading materials ............34
Chart 1: The kinds of exercises that students prefer .................................................33
Chart 3: The result of Unit 7 .....................................................................................36
Chart 3: Test score of dianogstic test và final test. ...................................................39
Figure 1: Action research spiral (adapted from Kemmis, 1983) ..............................22
Figure 2: Detailed Action Research Model (adapted from Susman, 1983) ..............23

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CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale for the study
Nowadays, English has become increasingly important as a means of global
communication and a bridge to mankind‟s knowledge. In the process of global
integration, the teaching and learning English has become a great concern in Viet
Nam. Among the language skills, reading is at the core of language learning
instruction. It is reading that provides the foundation for success in language
learning and academic learning.
According to Carrell (1981, p.1), “reading is by far the most important of the
four macro-skills, particularly in English as a second foreign language”. Reading
involves the integration of various bottom-up and top-down skills in order to reach
the goal of comprehension. However, teaching and learning reading skill at high

This study was carried out to design extra reading materials in order to
develop students‟ reading comprehension skills. Its findings hopefully would help
the 10th-form students find out the suitable materials for improving their reading
comprehension skills. Regarding teachers, the study would raise their awareness
concerning the topic and provide them with useful materials to better develop their
learners‟ reading comprehension skills. Finally, with regard to researchers, those
who happen to share the same interest in the topic could certainly rely on this
research to find reliable and useful information for their related studies in the future.
1.5. Methods of the study
To achieve the aims mentioned above, the author used action research to find
out the students‟ opinion of the currently used textbook and the problems that
students face when learning English with a view to finding the solutions to their
problems based on the results of survey questionnaire for the students, teacher‟s
observation sheets. These will be discussed in detail in chapter 2, methodology.
1.6. Design of the Thesis
The study consists of five chapters as follows:
Chapter 1: Introduction – includes the rationale, aims, scope, significance and
methodology of the study.
Chapter 2: Literature review – presents literature related to the study. The focus of
this chapter is definitions of reading, reading comprehension, the place of reading

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skill in teaching a foreign language, strategies for reading comprehension and
problems in reading comprehension of English foreign language learners. This part
also mentions some criterion for developing comprehension materials.
Chapter 3: Methodology - describes the participants, data collection procedures
and data collection instrument.
Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion - offers some major findings, some

to determine what that meaning is. So far reading has been defined differently by
lots of scholars, however no single definition is acceptable to everyone.
Goodman (1971, p.135) stated that reading is “a psycholinguistic process by
which the reader, language user, reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which
has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display”. In his opinion, readers not only
learn how to read the text, to master grammatical structures…but also understand
the content expressed in the text.
Having the same point with Goodman, William (1990, p.2) says that
“reading is a process whereby one looks at and understands what has been written”.
Accordingly, in the reading process, there are also two parallel activities: looking

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and understanding. Therefore, readers have to “encode” meanings of a word depend
on the context in which it appears.
One more definition offered by Harmer (1991, p.153) shows us his opinion
and two above authors have a lot of things in common “reading is an exercise
dominated by the eyes and the brain. The eyes receive messages and the brain then
has to work out the significance of these messages”.
According to Richard and Thomas (1987, p.15), reading is best described as
“an understanding between the author and the reader. Reading is much more than
just pronouncing words correctly or simply knowing what the author intends; it is
the process whereby the printed page stimulate ideas, experiences and responses
that are unique to an individual.
In short, each person can have a different definition of reading and we cannot
tell which is better because each of them focuses on one important matter of
reading. However, we find that there is a close relationship between reading and
understanding. Therefore, being a language teacher, we must understand the nature
of reading thoroughly to help our students read effectively.

impression of the content of a text. An example would be previewing a long
magazine article by reading rapidly, skipping large chunks of information, and
focusing on headings and first lines of the paragraph”.
To sum up, although expressing their ideas in different ways, both authors share
the view that skimming is a process of reading in which readers go through the reading
materials quickly so that they can get the main ideas of the reading materials.
- Scanning
Scanning occurs when a reader looks quickly through the text searching for a
specific piece of information or to see if the text is suitable for a specific reading
purpose. Hedge, T. (2000, p.195) suggest that “Scanning involves searching rapidly
through a text to find a specific point of information, for example, the relevant times
on a timetable, items in a directory, or key points in academic text”. Scanning is the
reading skill we use when we want to find the answer to a specific question.
Scanning is an useful reading skill that may at first strange to a learner who is used
to reading everything in foreign language with the same degree of attention.
- Predicting

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This is an important skill of efficient readers. Predicting uses knowledge of
the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check
comprehension as well as knowledge of the text type and purpose to make
prediction about discourse structure. Next, it uses knowledge about the author to
make predictions about writing, style, vocabulary and content.
- Inferencing
Inference means making use of syntactic, logical and cultural clues to
discover the meaning of unknown elements. If these are words, then wordformation and derivation will also play an important role. When dealing with a new
text, it is better not to explain the difficult words to the learners. Students should be
encouraged to make a guess at the meaning of the words they do not know rather

Reading techniques Form analysis

Understanding of the meaning Assessement

of the text

in the text

of the text

Inference using

Chronological

Ordering sequences of

Deciding

contextual

sequence

pictures

fact or

Linking sentences

Analogy and


Anticipation

tables

Skimming

Comparing several texts:

Scanning

note-taking

Inference using

Question- types;
Multiple choice
True/Fasle
Completing summary
Completing sentences
Finding errors

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The four types of exercises suggested in this book have served different
purposes. The first one relates to reading skills and strategies that play an
important part in acquiring a basic reading competence. The three other parts that
follow aim at illustrating different ways of helping students reach a better
understanding of a text, which start from overall comprehension (Function and
organization of the passage), and then move towards a more detailed one


are

generally

used

interchangeably. For example, Stevens (1982) defines background knowledge quite

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simply as what one already knows about a subject. Dochy et al., (1995) provide an
elaborate definition, describing prior knowledge as the whole of a person‟s
knowledge, including explicit and tacit knowledge, metacognitive and conceptual
knowledge. As a matter of fact, readers use background knowledge to integrate new
information from a text into their previous information. The reader brings
information, knowledge, emotion, and culture – that is schemata, to the printed
word (Brown 2001). Reading is only incidentally visual. More information is
contributed by the reader than by the print on the page. This indicates that our
understanding of a text depends on how much related schema we, as readers,
possess while reading. Consequently, readers‟ failure or confusion to make sense of
a text is caused by their lack of appropriate schemata that can easily fit with the
content of the text.
2.4.3 Motivation
It can not be denied that readers‟ motivation has effects on their reading
achievement. If readers are not interested in the topic they are reading, they may fail
to read. Alderson (2000) made a suggestion that motivation of readers can affect the
outcome of reading. In fact, readers who lack motivation to read or improve reading
abilities cannot make progress in reading comprehension. However, it has been

While they look at the print text, readers are decoding it, deciding what it means,
how parts relate to each other, or to things they know, predicting what to come next,
and expecting which purpose to read for. In fact, the more reading a reader does, the
more reading comprehension will improve. According to Fielding and Pearson
(1994), allocating ample time for actual text reading and ensuring that children are
actually reading text during that time are among the teacher‟s most vital tasks in
comprehension instruction. Through extensive reading, students‟ vocabulary and
background knowledge improve, which results in improved comprehension.

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2.5. Material development in language teaching
2.5.1 Definition of language teaching materials and types of materials
According to Tomlinson (1998, p.2), “language teaching materials” are
defined as anything which is used by teachers or learners to facilitate the learning of
a language. In this sense, language teaching materials consists of not only course
books or grammar books but also videos, CD-ROMS, cassettes, dictionaries,
pictures, photocopied exercise.
He categories language teaching materials into two types: published
materials and prepared materials. Crawford (2002) shares the same point of view on
talking about classification of materials that there are two different types of
materials: pre-prepared and self-prepared materials.
According to Tomlinson (1998), materials have always been considered as
the only way to supply enriched input in the language classroom, but nowadays,
there are many changes relating methodological and other theoretical trends.
Therefore, Course books, because of their universal nature, cannot fit all
circumstances. As a result, teachers should be helped to develop the reflecting,
analyzing and evaluating powers to create successful lessons for all the students,
needs and personalities there could be in any given situation.

Nunan (1998) states that evaluation is “a process not a final product” that
means it takes place at any time of the material design. The first emphasis of
evaluation is to determine whether the goals and objectives of s language program
are being gained.
From the above definitions, it can be inferred that materials involve the
determination of the objectives and requirements for the materials, and the
judgments of the value of the materials being evaluated in relation to the objectives
and requirements determined.
2.5.2.2 Types of materials evaluation
When talking about types of materials evaluations, Tomlinson (1998)
classified materials evaluation into three types namely pre-use evaluation, whileuse evaluation and post-use evaluation.
Pre-use evaluation is a process of making predictions about the potentials
value of materials for their uses. In fact, it is making an evaluation criterion-

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referenced that can reduce subjectivity and can certainly help to make an evaluation
more principled, rigorous, systematic and reliable.
While-use evaluation involves measuring the value of materials while using
them or while observing them being used. It can measure short-term memory
through observing learner performance on exercise but it cannot measure durable
and effective learning because of the delayed effect of instruction.
Post- use evaluation is probably the most valuable type of evaluation because it
can measure the actual effects of the materials on the users. It can measure short-term
effect as regards motivation, impact, achievability, instant learning, etc., Post-use
evaluation can measure the long-term effects as regards durable learning and application.
2.5.2.3 Criteria for material evaluation
Criteria for materials evaluation is one of the most important issues that
evaluators must take into consideration before any evaluation can take place.

It is obvious that materials play a crucial role in language teaching, so
selection of criteria of extra materials should be considered carefully.
According to Nuttall (1996, p. 170), there are three major criteria influencing
the selection of texts: suitability of the content, exploitability and readability. In his
point of view, suitability of the content means the text‟s ability to address the
student‟s needs and the course‟s objectives. Reading texts should interest the readers
by providing new interesting information that suit the course‟s objectives. A text with
interesting content makes the learners‟ task far more rewarding and the classroom
more effective. This requires the teachers of English to find out what their students
like reading and select text for classroom study. Some classroom texts should
represent the kinds of materials students need to handle after they leave the foreign
language class. It is better to begin on materials chosen chiefly for enjoyment.
Exploitability means facilitation of learning. When you exploit the text, you
can make use of it to develop the students‟ competence as readers. A text which
cannot be exploited is no use for teaching even if the students enjoy reading it.
Therefore, different kinds of tasks should be designed to best exploit the text so that
the course‟s objectives could be obtained. Also, the focus in the reading lesson is

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