The current study attempted to investigate English collocations used in written translation among fourth-year English majors at a university. The participants included forty-one fourth-year English-majored students and three translation teachers who are teaching English – Vietnamese translation courses in the university. To gather data, the researchers used two instruments: a test of English collocations including five types of collocations: an adjective going with a noun, a verb going with a noun, a noun going with a verb, a noun going with a noun and a verb going with an adverb. After data analysis, it revealed that just slightly over half of the student participants were able to find the correct collocations in written translation. Furthermore, a noun going with a verb and a noun going with a noun are the two main lexical errors made by most of the students. The interview was also used to seek translation teachers’ perspectives on students’ ability to translate texts in general and strategies of translation in particular. They perceived that most of their students were not aware of collocations in written translation and still had difficulties in both grammatical and lexical collocations. Finally, some recommendations on improving English collocations in written translation were also made based on these findings.

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Self-assessment with corrective training has been long seen crucial in helping learners improve their own work. This study investigates a group of 28 Englishmajored students' self-assessment of their Speaking performance at the end of a Speaking course at a university. First, the study explores their knowledge of the speaking test and then it provides them with 11 meetings of training on and practising using a speaking rubric which centres on the four grading criteria: Fluency and coherence, Pronunciation, Grammatical range, and Lexical resources. The participants' perception about their speaking performance after they took the speaking test is also explored. Finally, two examiners are employed to rate these students' speaking performance. The results revealed that the participants were found to be knowledgeable about the requirements in doing the test. Then, for their self-assessment on their test performance, they used the trained rubric to help them rate their work quite well, which highly correlated with the result of the teachers' rating which was also correlated with the average score of the two raters. The students' perceptions about their ability to perform these four Speaking grading criteria after taking the test also unveiled a strong connection to their overall selfassessment result.

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Reading can be a crucial skill in studying a language as it helps record a plethora of knowledge in the world. Reading can be an entertaining activity or it can be a task. This study aims at investigating the task as this is commonly seen in studying a language. More specifically, the study targets three different objectives and 30 first-year English majors were recruited to answer the survey questions. They were asked about the factors that they thought to have the greatest effects on reading comprehension. The second section asked them about their opinion about difficult reading comprehension task-types. The third section elicited their opinion about reading comprehension strategies which they thought to be difficult to apply in doing comprehension tasks. The results revealed that most of the participants posited that they had obstacles in vocabulary, grammatical structures and unfamiliarity of the topic and vocabulary was seen as the most problematic. Then, grammatical structures were seen as the second most difficult. Furthermore, they thought that true/false questions, sentence completion questions; tasks like summary/table completion; and multiple-choice questions hindered them from understanding the reading comprehension tasks. Next, guessing the meaning from the context was found to be the most difficult strategy while spotting the specific information to answer the questions was seen as the second difficulty. Some limitations of the study were also concluded.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0926/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>