Phản hồi của sinh viên về phương pháp đọc và nghe song song Graded Stories

 
from 25-30 minutes. It is an in-class activity. 
The session will start with a warm-up activity 
that briefly introduces the theme and context 
of the stories. This introduction give students 
the story’s background information which 
will help them to understand and engage with 
it. Students then read the story for 5 to 10 
minutes with the audio file along. Then, 
students will work in groups to discuss and 
check their understanding of the story. Then 
come the follow up activities varying from 
retelling the story in their own words, 
inventing another ending, discussing the 
differences between the book and the movie 
(if available) or enacting a scene from the 
story. There was a principle for the follow up 
activities that they are not a kind of exercise 
or assessment and let students enjoy reading 
without worrying about the evaluation. 
The interviews took place in the final week 
with one group interview and 10 individual 
interviews. The interviews were conducted at 
their daily classroom so that students felt 
familiar and safe. Pseudonyms from S1 to 
S15 were used in all sets of data with the view 
to maintain students’ confidentiality. Some 
times, informal interviews were conducted to 
clarify students’ behaviors during 
observation. This type of interview gave thick 
descriptions of occurrences since the memory 
was still fresh. 
The analysis of data began as soon as the data 
was collected. The data was analyzed 
thematically. While searching the data, the 
author looked for the common themes and 
patterns among observation, group and 
individual interview responses which recurred 
and became emergent categories. When 
analyzing data, similar response were 
highlighted with the same colors, emergent 
themes were identified and labeled. For the 
observation, I study the observation notes to 
look for common themes and patterns. The 
observation were divided into two chunks 
namely the reading while listening part and 
the follow up activities. On –task and off-task 
behaviors as well as students’ emotional 
behaviors were three categories. On-task 
behaviors included finger pointing or looking 
at the screen, writing down, paying attention 
to friends’ performance, participating in-
group activities and asking and/or answering 
question. Off-task behaviors included looking 
to other places, playing with objects, laying 
heads on desks, fidgeting, talking to friends. 
Emotional behaviors were verbal languages, 
facial expressions and body languages such as 
smiling, nodding, head shaking, yawning, 
frowning, and pouting. During the process of 
analyzing data, the author worked with each 
set of the data separately and across the data 
to ensure triangulation to occur. Students’ 
responses in the interview were compared 
with their behaviors during the observation. 
Then axial coding was used to seek patterns 
on each data set as well as across data sets. 
Nguyen Thi Hue et al TNU Journal of Science and Technology 199(06): 119 - 126 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 123 
During this process, I will keep asking myself 
questions suggested by Dahlberg & McCaig 
[20]: “Are there any dominant theme that exist 
across all the data? Can you identify any 
connections between your categories? How 
does what you have found compare to what had 
already been written in the literature?” (p.156). 
3. Results 
Theme 1: Students’ engagement 
Figure 1. Students’ engagement 
The data from my interviews and 
observations were consistent on this issue. 
80% of the students showed preference to 
listening while reading activity. S3, S4, S8, 
S11 agreed that the stories were interesting 
and easy to understand. In the focus group, 
S11 explained that she was attracted to the 
story because “the language was not too 
complicated I could concentrate more when 
followed the listening.” This was totally new 
activities for all the students. S15 stressed that 
“I like it. It sounded like the karaoke, the 
story karaoke. I can feel the melody” (the 
narrative sound). However, the observation 
notes showed that S15 often close her eyes or 
looked outside during the stories. I can infer 
that she was focusing on the “melody” of the 
story and preventing herself from distracting 
text. “It was good to see and listen to the 
word at the same time” said S10. I often 
introduced the activity at the beginning of 
third period when students’ energy came 
down. S1 admit that “no drowsy at all”. 
Normally, at that time of the day, there were 
students who put their head on their desk. 
However, in my observation, S1 still yawned 
several times. He yawned and sighed the most 
in the class. In the informal interview after the 
class, he explained that he was so tired 
because of the night shift that week. S3, a 
proficient girl, showed some off-task 
behaviors like playing with the pen or 
preparing her hair in the class. In the 
interview, she said, “the stories I know before 
so they are not as interesting as the new one. 
With the story I do not know, I have to keep 
concentration to follow the plot. It is more 
challenging and interesting”. In contrast, 
after the class one day, some students asked 
me informally to select famous stories like 
“the little red riding hood” for the next 
session because with the familiar plot, they 
can learn how to express in English. During 
my observation, it was noticeable that their 
face lit up with smile and hand gesture when I 
declared “story time.” This confirmed their 
strong interest in the innovation, which is in 
line with Chang [13] and Brown & 
Donkeabua [14]. 
Theme 2: Reading while listening helped 
students in language learning 
This theme focused on the benefits brought in 
by the innovation. 73.3% of students agreed 
that the activities help improve at least one 
language aspect or skill development. 
Pronunciation, vocabulary and listening skill 
were the most prominent with 10, 8, 7 
students referred to respectively. 
Figure 2. Language improvement 
In the observation, I specially paid attention 
to S6, a boy sitting in the front row. In the 
first observation, he often raise his eyebrows 
with surprising face, sometimes he shook his 
head and smiled then wrote down something. 
Nguyen Thi Hue et al TNU Journal of Science and Technology 199(06): 119 - 126 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 124 
In final sessions, he did less. I inferred that he 
might be surprised by the story; however, in 
the interview he revealed it was the 
pronunciation that caught his attention 
because he realized that he mispronounced 
some very common words. Similarly, S13 
reported that “I find it interesting with the 
connected speech where in the text I can 
separate words but in the audio, I can not 
detect word boundary. But later on, things go 
better.” The focus group also listed 
pronunciation as the most advantages of 
reading while listening. This is in line with 
responses of students from Chang [13]. 
Another feature that came out from the data 
was the consolidation of previous grammar 
and structures. S12 told me “it is easier for 
me to remember grammar rules or sentence 
structure when I saw them and hear them in 
the story context”. Additionally, the 
innovation also helped improve students’ 
confidence and motivated them to read more. 
They feel more confident to say some full 
sentences now because they listened to them 
and know how to speak naturally. In the 
group interview, students said that they used 
to think they were not able to read stories in 
English since there were numerous new 
words. With the graded stories in which 
interesting scenario is presented by simplified 
language, it is much easier and they are eager 
to read more. S8 said: “Being exposed to this 
kind of activity make me love English, which I 
used to think of as a nightmare. I have never 
read so many English stories before and I will 
continue to read more”. 
However, no one referred to accidental 
vocabulary acquisition like in Chang [13], 
Brown and Donkeabua [14]. It can be 
explained that, accidental vocabulary 
acquisition only occurs when the word recurs 
often enough with more sessions. 
Theme 3: Problems with follow up activities 
The data from my observation showed that 
things totally went wrong with follow up 
activities. 33.3% of the students find it 
difficult to fulfill the follow – up tasks. When 
it came to the story summary activities, the 
groups often send the same person to the 
board. Also, this was that person who worked 
the hardest. I also noticed that there was non-
contribute participant who did nothing. 
Moreover, different groups acted differently 
while fulfilling the task. The group with better 
students often finished earlier then gossiped 
while the weaker one often asked for more 
time. In the interview with a group leader, she 
expressed her dissatisfaction when she “had 
to do most of the work”. As for the summary 
task, students did not really work even when 
the teacher set the time limit. During the task 
time, students seemed to be distracted. Some 
looked at friends’ paper, some looked outside, 
some yawned and put their head on their 
hand. Finally, they asked me to set it 
homework. The next day, they handed in 
nearly the same copy. For the role play, there 
were still uneven parts between group 
members. Often, the best one would always 
be the one who acted the most while the weak 
one even said nothing or just performed some 
body languages. The role play had variety of 
complaints from students. S9, S4, S8 and S11 
agreed that “it is really difficult to create a 
play from such short stories within 10 or 15 
minutes”. As I observed, S4 and S11 were less 
active participants who often gossiped or 
teased others. The group interviewees 
suggested that “the follow up activities should 
be assigned as homework and performed on 
the next lesson, that way we have more time to 
prepare”. Furthermore, time allocation was 
another source of problem. According to data 
from the interviews, the follow up activities 
were time-consuming; however, the primary 
problem might be inefficient group work, in 
which students did not know how to interact, 
cooperate and allot work for each member. 
4. Discussion 
The first point to take into consideration 
would be students’ engagement. It is 
understandable because this is the first time 
Nguyen Thi Hue et al TNU Journal of Science and Technology 199(06): 119 - 126 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 125 
reading while listening has been introduced in 
my class, so students might welcome it as a 
novelty effect. Though most of the students 
were engaged in the reading while listening 
activity, the taste varied among groups of 
students. The competent ones preferred the 
unfamiliar stories for more challenges 
whereas the weaker ones favored the common 
ones. Boys insisted that the stories were too 
childish; they preferred thrilling ones. 
Moreover, this mode also gave students 
autonomy, which means they can manage 
their own learning preferences. They can 
decide to listen to the audio only until they 
hear incomprehensible utterances and then 
consult the text or reading while listening. 
Normally, at the very first sessions, students 
follow both the text and the audio, then 
afterward they could just ignored the text. S2 
even created her own way to employ the 
method. She said, “When I get used to the 
mode, I challenge myself by listening to the 
audio and wrote down the story like a 
dictation exercise.” 
4.1. Benefits of reading while listening 
Obviously, data from different sources 
confirmed that reading while listening 
brought in positive results. Word 
pronunciation gains were stressed by group of 
weaker students, who mainly come from rural 
and suburban areas where students have less 
chance to expose to authentic English. 
Stronger students reported that they were 
more confident with sentence intonation and 
vocabulary consolidation. It is easy to 
understand that more competent students 
already master the pronunciation so it does 
not bother them and their brain automatically 
shift the attention to other aspects like 
vocabulary. Actually, there are not many new 
lexical items in the graded stories, thus, “new 
vocabulary” may mean the passive 
vocabulary, which students rarely use but 
they already know. 
Actually, my class is a mixed ability class 
where students’ language proficiency varies 
deeply. Therefore, it seems impossible for a 
certain story to be suitable for all students. 
Also, the weak students said that the stories 
become easier to understand when being read. 
This feature was also reflected by students in 
[13]. She explained that learners of foreign 
language tend to read word by word. As a 
result, sentence integrity is broken down 
making it difficult to understand. With 
reading while listening mode, the text is 
presented in larger semantic unit, which in 
turn leads to better comprehension. In 
general, in terms of benefits for students, the 
innovation was a success to some extend. 
4.2. Unsuccessful follow up activities 
It is obvious from the data that insufficient 
teamwork skills are fundamental reason for 
the failure. Most of the tasks are in the form 
of group work with the primary aim to foster 
cooperation between students. Initially, I 
supposed that group work would help me 
save time because “three heads are better than 
one”. But in fact, inefficient group work 
waste the class time. At high schools in 
Vietnam, especially in rural and remote areas, 
where teaching methods often focus on test 
oriented, students had little chance to develop 
teamwork ability thus led to students’ lack of 
such basic skills. Furthermore, the students 
were in their first year at a completely new 
learning environment, they preferred to work 
with their close friends instead of the ones 
they were not so acquainted. Actually, during 
the project, I kept the same groups (I group 
students sitting next to one another) due to the 
crowded class and small classroom, it was 
inconvenience for students to move around to 
form new groups. This created chance for 
passive group member as they became more 
dependent in groups with dominant member. 
At the beginning of the study, I did not think 
of these situations, I expected that students 
would be involved in the group work 
activities because I assumed that they at least 
had some experience working in a team. For 
the next cycle, I will deliver a test to clarify 
students reading ability and vocabulary size 
so that I will be able to select more 
appropriate level of graded stories. I will also 
spend some time training students on group