เสนีย์ สืบสายชล. The Students' Reasons for Choosing the Words to Learn from Graded Readers. Master's Degree(Applied Linguistics for English Language Teaching). King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi. : King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, 2005.
The Students' Reasons for Choosing the Words to Learn from Graded Readers
Abstract:
The aim of this study is to survey the students' reasons for choosing words to learn from graded readers. The subjects involved in this study were 10 female first-year undergraduate students from the Faculty of Science majoring in Chemistry and Microbiology at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi. The instruments used were the record sheet and the semi-structured .interview. The subjects used the record sheet to record the interesting words and the reasons for choosing them while reading graded readers. The semi-structured interview was conducted after the students had submitted the record sheet to the researcher. The findings of this study revealed that the main reasons for choosing words were the following; not knowing the word meaning and wanting to know it, the words having same meaning as the known words, and the words that should be memorized because they have been seen. The reasons reflected the main types of chosen words which were the following; unknown words, words that have the same meaning of known words, forgotten words, frequentlyoccurred words (in the story), and guessing-problemed words. Most of the subjects were not successful in guessing word meanings. All of the subjects used eIectronic dictionaries to find the meaning of almost all of the chosen words. Most of them had good attitudes towards reading graded readers. The overall findings of thh study imply that the teachers should teach reading by focusing on reading comprehension including training the students word guessing strategies. The teachers should also teach them how to use monolingual dictionary effectively in both productive and receptive skills. The graded readers are the good
sources for practicing reading outside classroom and learning vocabulary. The
educational institutions should provide a variety of titles of graded readers for students to choose according to their interests and the teachers need to help them select the books appropriate for their levels of English proficiency.