VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST - GRADUATE STUDIES PHẠM LAN ANH A STUDY ON USING SHORT STORIES IN TEACHING READING SKILL AT NGUYEN KHUYEN SECONDARY SCHOOL (Nghiên cứu việc sử dụng truyện ngắn giảng dạy kĩ đọc trường trung học sở Nguyễn Khuyến) M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 HANOI – 2016 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST - GRADUATE STUDIES PHẠM LAN ANH A STUDY ON USING SHORT STORIES IN TEACHING READING SKILL AT NGUYEN KHUYEN SECONDARY SCHOOL (Nghiên cứu việc sử dụng truyện ngắn giảng dạy kĩ đọc trường trung học sở Nguyễn Khuyến) M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 Supervisor: Mai Thị Loan, PhD HANOI - 2016 CANDIDAT’ES STATEMENT I certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled:A STUDY OF USING SHORT STORIES IN TEACHING READING SKILL AT NGUYEN KHUYEN SECONDARY SCHOOL is the result of my own work for the Degree of Master of Arts at University of Languages and International Studies, Hanoi National University The material in this thesis has not been submitted for assessment in any other courses of study Hanoi,2016 Signature Phạm Lan Anh 23 ACKNOLEDGEMENT First of all, I would like to express my deep and faithful gratitude to my supervisor, Ms Mai Thi Loan, PhD for her whole hearted and valuable guidance, significant suggestions and useful materials in the process of writing this thesis Thanks to her noble devotion, the research report has been successfully completed My sincere thanks were also presented to my classmates for their support and recommendations in choosing necessary materials so that I can fulfill this study Their sincere friendship has encouraged me a lot I would like to thank to teachers and students at Nguyen Khuyen secondary school for their constructive suggestions and important help Without their support, there would not be a completion of this thesis I also thank our university library for their sources of books and documents about methodology studies In addition, I was grateful to researchers, authors and teachers whose materials suggest necessary information for my reference My true family deserves my gratefulness for their long lasting help and encouragement so that I have been able to complete this study 24 ABSTRACT Reading comprehension has been highlighted as a problem among secondary school students This study examined the effects of short stories on 80 seven grade students to show if the method had an impact on students’ reading comprehension Besides, this research also figured out the suitable methods teachers used to exploit short stories in teaching reading skill To serve this purpose, some instruments were used: pre-test, post-test; questionnaire for teachers and questionnaire for students Although the findings revealed some limitations, the use of short stories helped students to improve their reading comprehension The result in reading test showed a slight improvement on the students’ average score In addition, the result from questionnaire and interview indicated both teachers and students had difficulties when teaching and learning reading through short stories However, many suitable methods had been applied to help students and teachers overcome these obstacles and ensure the better use of short stories in teaching reading skill It is thus recommended for further studies to minimize the challenge found in this study and vary kinds of short stories used in teaching English skills 25 PART I: INTRODUCTION Rationale of the study Reading comprehension, as a fundamental language skill, requires a complex acquisition process which can account for the way that learners comprehend what they read Many of the Vietnamese students are suffering from the weakness in reading comprehension Especially, based on individual teaching experience, the researcher finds out that the capability of understanding English text of students at Nguyen Khuyen secondary school is very poor The problem is that the 7th graders in this school lack the ability of reading comprehension, so because of misunderstanding the meaning of the text, they find it difficult to answer questions related to the specific text and get bad scores in reading tests It is the reason why many students dislike, even fear of English classes One of the main causes of this problem is because of the boring and unattractive traditional method most of teachers use in teaching reading comprehension This fact raises a question of how to make the students interested in reading English text and how the teachers choose the suitable materials that motivate students to read In fact, many researchers and educators have made untiring attempts to find more efficient ways of enabling the learners to become more proficient readers Teaching English through literature has become the fashionable phenomenon Some researchers believe that teachers provide students with heavy, boring and somewhat redundant literature which has no use to solve students’ problems and provides no room for creativity The students are taught literary terms, the meaning of words and the process of analysis; therefore, they take the form of repeating the material understanding mostly by memorization The idea of using short stories in teaching comprehension may come as an effective way to deal with this problem It helps students to cope with original texts, use the language creatively, improve their 26 language level, loose themselves from the barriers of instructional texts and even learn some literature Based on the explanation above, the researcher decides to conduct a study on using short stories in teaching reading skill for the 7th grade students at Nguyen Khuyen secondary school 2.Aims and objectives of the study The study aims at investigating the use of short stories in teaching reading skill for the seventh graders at Nguyen Khuyen secondary school To be more specific, the objectives of this study are to: - find out the degree of effectiveness of using short stories to teach reading skill for the 7th grade students at Nguyen Khuyen secondary school - propose some suggestions to teach reading skill for students with the use of short stories Research questions In order to reach the above aims and objectives, the study is going to seek answers for the following research questions: a To what extent can reading short stories affect students’ reading skill? b What are methods of using short stories in teaching reading skill? Scope of the study In this study, the writer intends to deal with the questions that how effectively short stories are used in teaching reading comprehension for students, and what suitable ways of using short stories to teach reading skill are The short stories used in this research are one page long with simple contents and various topics such as friendship, love and moral lessons Significance of the study By looking into the perception of the use of short stories in teaching reading comprehension and the satisfaction of students about their achievement and improvement in reading skill, the study is hoped to raise teachers’ awareness, 27 REFERENCES Abrams, M H (1970) A Glossary of Literary Term New York: Rinehart Aebersold, J A and M L Field 1997 From Reading to Reading Teacher: Issues and Strategies for Second Language Classrooms Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Aiptekin,C (2006) Cultural familiarity in inferential and literalcomprehension in L2 reading.System,34, 494–508 Celce-Murcia, M Dornyei, Z., & Thurrell, S (1995) Communicative competence: A pedagogically motivated model with content specifications.Issues in Applied Linguistics, 6, 5-35 Collie, J & Slater, S (1987) Literature in the Language Classroom Cambridge University Press Collie, J & Slater, S (1991) Literature in the language classroom (5th ed.) 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Wallace, C (1992) Language Teaching: A Scheme for Teacher Education New York: Oxford University Press 38 Webster’s New World College Dictionary (2010) University of Liverpool 39 Williams (2002) Learning Strategies Resource Guide University of south Florida: Litton/PRC, Inc 40 Wisker,G (2001) The post graduate research handbook London: Palgrave 41 Widdowson, H.G (1983) Talking Shop: H G Widdowson on. .. Literature and ELT ELTjournal 37, 1 42 Wisker, G (2007) The Postgraduate Research Handbook: Succeed with Your MA, MPhil, EdD and PhD Palgrave Macmillan 43 Wright, A (1995).Storytelling with Children Oxford University Press 44 Carrier, G (2006) Comprehension Retrieved May 10, 2007, from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/12376 45 Erkaya, O R (2005) Benefits of using short stories in the EFL context.Asian... comprehension through short stories in Iranian EFL learners.Theory and Practice in Language Studies.Vol.2 No2 240-246 http://academypublisher.com Current as of January 15th, 2013 48 http://shortstoriesshort.com/story/ 49 http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/mff/index.htm 31 I