This study aimed at exploring difficulties of ESP (English for specific purposes) reading comprehension faced by English-majored students at one university in Vietnam. Eighty English-majored students were involved in answering a close-ended questionnaire, and three ESP teachers were invited to participate in semi-structured interview. The findings showed that students did not have much trouble in dealing with reading ESP texts; nonetheless, it was sometimes seen that two common areas of difficulties in ESP reading comprehension students were faced with were unknown words and background knowledge of subject matters. This study further revealed that students did not confront much with difficulties of text coverage, organization structure, and grammar used in ESP reading texts.

It is undeniable that listening comprehension is a fundamental skill in the process of acquiring a language and plays a crucial part in communication although it is not an easy task which requires both background knowledge and linguistic understanding. Therefore, language learners are supposed to employ listening learning strategies to facilitate the process of decoding oral input. This study aimed at examining if the eleventh graders at Duong Van Duong high school used English listening learning strategies and then exploring the frequency of the students’ using these strategies. The present study is a mixed-methods research project in which both qualitative and quantitative data were collected through closed-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interview with the participation of 425 respondents and 20 interviewees. The results of the study indicated that a vast number of the participants employed listening learning strategies at different levels of frequency which were classified into three main groups, namely high use (e.g. cognitive and affective strategies), moderate use (e.g. metacognitive and social strategies) and low use (e.g. compensation and memory strategies).

This corpus-based research aimed to compare the use of reporting verbs in TESOL research articles between non-native and native English writers. Two corpora including 30 for the non-native corpus and 30 for the native corpus were constructed for analysis. The data in the form of plain text were processed via AntConc software version 3.5.7. The findings indicated significant differences in terms of frequency, function, and position between the two corpora. Specifically, more reporting verbs were found in the non-native corpus than in the native corpus. Of four verb groups of Argue, Find, Show, and Think, Argue group was the top priority used in TESOL research articles by both non-native and native English authors. The results of the functional and positional analysis in both the corpora also showed that two most common functions of reporting verbs were (1) presentation and (2) evaluation and examination, and most of the observed reporting verbs were in neutral position.

Dạy ngôn ngữ dựa vào nhiệm vụ được xem là một trong những phương pháp hiệu quả vì thông qua phương pháp này người học có nhiều cơ hội sử dụng tiếng Anh khi họ thực hiện các nhiệm vụ. Tuy nhiên, không nhiều nghiên cứu tìm hiểu về việc áp dụng phương pháp này ở bậc trung học cơ sở (THCS) tại Việt Nam. Bài viết nhằm nghiên cứu thái độ của nhóm học sinh THCS đối với việc vận dụng phương pháp dạy học dựa vào nhiệm vụ trong lớp học đọc hiểu tiếng Anh. Đối tượng khảo sát bao gồm 33 học sinh lớp 8 tại một trường THCS ở thành phố Hồ Chí Minh. Bảng khảo sát với các câu hỏi kín được sử dụng để thu thập dữ liệu. Kết quả chỉ ra rằng đa số học sinh có thái độ tích cực đối với lớp đọc hiểu dựa vào nhiệm vụ. Trong đó, khía cạnh hành vi được nhận được nhiều sự đồng tình nhất của học sinh, tiếp theo là khía cạnh nhận thức và khía cạnh cảm xúc. Vì vậy, nhóm tác giả khuyến nghị giáo viên nên sử dụng phương pháp này trong các lớp đọc hiểu tiếng Anh.

This study aimed at investigating the frequency of autonomous learning strategies used by 173 English majors at a Ho Chi Minh City-based university. The quantitative data collected from the closed-ended questionnaire were statistically analyzed by means of SPSS 20. The results showed that there were insignificant differences in terms of frequency among three groups, namely cognitive, metacognitive, and resourse management strategies. Statistically, the resource management strategies group achieved the highest mean score (M=3.31; SD=0.59), followed by the cognitive strategies (M=3.29; SD=0.71) and the metacognitive strategies (M=3.27; SD=0.60). Turing to the details, however, the use of strategies in each group varied in degree. As for the resource management strategies, in particular, the strategies concerning learning environment management, internet-based indendendent learning, and peer learning were preferred to the strategies of teacher support and time management, whereas the participants tended to use more rehearsal and elaboration strategies than organization ones in the cognitive strategies and more critical thinking and monitoring strategies than goal setting ones in the metacognitive strategies.