INTRODUCTION I. Rationale. English nowadays has been a language of internationalization so it is taking a very important role in most fields in personal and professional life as well because of its popularity in the world. Being a student in this new era, she/he has not only opportunities to approach scientific and technological achievements but also challenges of being backwards due to her/his knowledge, and ability. In this case, I mean the language knowledge and ability of language acquisition because English is now surely the language of communication in the world. If her/his English is excellent, there is little difficulty in understanding and acquiring sufficiently all she/he wants. In contrast, there is no chance for her/him to comprehend, communicate with foreigners when her/his language competence is at low level. This is true with students in ESP fields, hereby the students in Medicine specification. Medicine is one of the most difficult categories that everyone finds because of its highly academic features, and difficulties in studying. Learners who want to be experts in this field have to learn as well as they can not only about theories in textbooks, online documents, books and magazines, newspapers, etc., in the library but also the skillful steps they should follow to treat patients. In order to be good at theories, they of course have to read a lot due to the fact that what they learn at school is not enough, and most of the available documents in the library, on the internet, or other resources is written in English. But most students now do not know how to read effectively to get as much knowledge as they desire. When reading they face difficulties of lacking vocabulary, background knowledge, functional words, And they do not know what to do to overcome these difficulties, which demotivate themselves from reading. With the wish of arming students with techniques for improving content reading skills to help them have motivation of reading the required textbooks at university and other available resources, I choose to do my research on the project entitled “Techniques For Developing Content Reading Skills For The Third Year Students At The University of Odonto and Stomatology” because I myself have profound understanding that reading can help learners to get information to the fullest, and that providing learners with useful techniques will motivate them in reading more and more. II. Aims of the study The study is aimed at: 1) better understanding the concepts of reading, content reading, reading comprehension and reading in ESP teaching and learning. 2) identifying some problems in teaching reading English in Medicine at Odonto - Stomatology University (UOS.). 3) providing the students at UOS. with useful techniques of content reading skills. 4) identifying how far the techniques can help to improve the quality of teaching and learning reading ESP. The study is the hope of the author of the study to make some contributions to the improvement of teaching reading Medical English at Odonto – Stomatology University. III. Scope of the study Covering every aspect of language theory and practice in this study is impossible. Therefore, the study focuses on problems in teaching reading experienced by teachers at UOS. It is not proposed to deal with other skills: speaking or writing skills. The other subjects of the study are the third year students at UOS. Also, the purposes of the course are confined to “English in Medicine”. IV. Methodology This study is conducted mainly basing on the theoretical background extracted from many published books written by different authors on language of medicine, communicative language teaching, English for specific purposes, material development, approaches to ESP teaching. In order to carry out this study, the author of the study uses the quantitative method in combination with a variety of methods such as class observation, informal interviews, discussions with the teachers and students at Odonto–Stomatology University. Following the quantitative method, all comments, consideration, suggestions given in the thesis are based on the analysis of the statistics from the survey questionnaires conducted with the teachers and the students at Odonto–Stomatology University. Following the above mentioned methods one more time claim the recommendations stated in the study if they are useful and helpful for both the teachers and the students. V. Design of the study The study consists of three main parts: the introduction, the development and the conclusion. Part I introduces rationales, aims of the study as well as scope and methods of the study. Part II comprises four chapters. Chapter I deals with an overview of the theoretical background of the research. It is concerned with the issues relevant to the topic of the research: reading and reading comprehension, classification of reading, the importance of improving reading skills, roles of reading teachers and those of reading students, reading in ESP teaching and learning. Chapter II is a close look at present teaching and learning reading English in Medicine at Odonto – Stomatology University. Chapter III explores reading problems experienced by the teachers and students at Odonto – Stomatology University. Chapter IV offers some suggestions to improve the teaching of reading English in Medicine and a sample work for some reading lessons for 3rd year students. Part III summarizes the issues addressed and presents recommendations for further improvements and some suggestions for further researches.
