INTRODUCTION 1.1. Rationale Internationally, within the field of education over the last few decades a gradual but significant shift has taken place, resulting in less emphasis on teachers and teaching and greater stress on learners and learning. This change has been reflected in various ways in language education. Teaching English as a second or foreign language (TESL/TEFL) has also changed tremendously. Most significantly, the traditional teacher-centred approach has been replaced with the learner-centred one, which reflects a desire to explore ways of making teaching responsive to learner needs and interests and allowing learners to play a fuller, more active and participatory role in the day-to-day teaching and learning processes. Inherent in this approach is a shift in the responsibilities of both teachers and students in the foreign language classroom. No longer does the teacher act as the centre of all instruction, controlling every aspect of the learning process. Learners themselves now, more than ever, are sharing the responsibility for successful language acquisition and, in doing so, are becoming less dependant on the language teacher for meeting their own individual language learning needs. By giving students more responsibility for their own language development, language programs are inviting learners to become more autonomous, to diagnose some of their own learning strengths and weaknesses and to sift-direct the process of language development. Then, for all L2 teachers who aim to develop their students' communicative competence and language learning, an understanding of language learning strategies is crucial. As Oxford (1990) puts it, language learning strategies" . are specially important for language learning because they are tools for active, self-directed involvement, which is essential for developing communicative competence" (p.1). According to Nunan (1999), learner-centeredness does not mean that teachers should devaluating their own professional roles or handling their duties and responsibility to the learner. Learner-centered instruction "is a matter of educating learners so that they can gradually assume greater responsibility for their own learning" (Nunan, 1999: 12) and research suggests that training students to use language learning strategies can help them become better language learners. In the field of second language acquisition, focus has been shifted away from finding perfect teaching methodologies to investigating why some learners are very successful in their language learning while others are not although they have made as much effort learning the language. Several studies that have been carried out by Oxford (1990), O'Malley and Chamot (1990), Nunan (1991), Rubin and Thompson (1994) and Cohen (1998) have shown that one of the most important factors that distinguish successful learners from unsuccessful ones is their learning strategies. In other words, successful learners do use some effective learning strategies to deal with problems that emerge during their learning process while unsuccessful ones employ inappropriate or ineffective strategies resulting in their failure in their language learning. This finding has provoked interest among researchers and teachers in identifying learning strategies employed by good language learners with a view to training bad learners to use such effective learning strategies. In Vietnam, learning strategies have also become a topic of interest in recent years when the concepts of "self-learning" and "life-long learning" have been familiar to the ears of both Vietnamese teachers and learners. Several studies into this field have been conducted with different type of learners to find out particular strategies employed by effective and ineffective learners such as Huyen Tran study (2004) on vocabulary learning strategies used by students of English at Quy Nhon University or Mai Duong's (2005) on writing strategies employed by first-year students at Hanoi National University or Nguyen Thi Thu Ha's (2006) on reading strategies employed by second-year bridge and road students at the University of Transport and Communications or Mai Van Binh's (2007) on vocabulary learning strategies preferred by students at College of Finance and Business Administration. However, studies as such are still scarce, thus, more research should be done in order to clarify particular strategies used in different settings and by learners of different levels. At Tay Bac University (TBU), reading is regarded as an important skill to the students because these students need to read a lot of English books and documents to support their professional studies. However, apart from some students who are quite good at English reading, most students especially ethnic minority junior ones find reading difficult. They often complain that they have little understanding of the text they have read and hardly finish their reading exercises and exams successfully. Having taught English majored students at TBU for several years, I am aware of their problems and very much want to help them to improve their reading ability. Therefore, I intend to examine their reading strategies to find out the reading strategies used by students of lower reading ability. Based on the findings, I am going to make some implications to improve TBU students' reading proficiency. 1.2. Scope, aims and significance of the study 1.2.1. Scope of the study The present study investigates the reading strategies used by readers among ethnic minority junior first-year English-majored students at Tay Bac University (hereafter TBU). The study of learning strategies in other English skills would be beyond the scope. 1.2.2. Aims of the study The major purposes of this study are: (1) to identify the reading strategies utilized by readers among ethnic minority junior first-year English-majored students at Tay Bac University; (2) to inform the concerned teachers so that they can find ways to improve their students' reading proficiency. In order to achieve the above aims of the study, the following major research question will be addressed: - What are the reading strategies employed by readers among TBU ethnic minority junior first-year English-majored students? 1.2.3. Significance of the study The study is the first one to be carried out in the field of reading strategies research at TBU. It helps give a detailed description of reading strategies used by readers among first-year English- majored students at junior grade at the university. More importantly, the findings of their reading strategies can help teachers to understand more about their students and they can serve as the foundation for some recommendations on how to improve the students' reading proficiency. They are also an important basic for reading strategy based instruction to be implemented in the future. 1.3. Method of the study In order to achieve the aims mentioned above, the present study utilized quantitative method including tests and survey questionnaires to collect data on the reading strategies employed by TBU students. First, the two reading comprehension tests were given to the subjects in order to identify their English reading proficiency levels. Then, the questionnaires were administered to find out their reading strategies. After the data is analyzed and discussed, some conclusions will be drawn, and some suggestions will be raised in the thesis. 1.4 Organization of the thesis The study is divided into five chapters Chapter 1 includes the rationale, scope, aims, significance, methods and organization of the study. Chapter 2 reviews the literature relevant to the topic of research and summarizes some selected studies on reading strategies, which serve as a theoretical and methodological foundation of the study. Chapter 3 presents the research methodology of the study. It provides information about the participants, the research method, the instrumentation, the data collection procedures and data analysis. Chapter 4, the main part of the study that reports, discusses the main findings according to the research question. Chapter 5 is the conclusion that summarizes the findings, presents the implications and limitations of the study and finally give some suggestions for further research.
