Author: Ms. Khanittha VANNALATH
Advisor: Mr. Paul Silver
Academic Year: 2020
Publisher: Lao-Top College
ABSTRACT
This thesis is a part of higher diploma degree of General English Department at Lao-Top College with the topic “Students’ Opinions on Their Abilities and Potential Improvement Tactics for Writing and Reading; A case study of Lao International College”.
The objective of this research was set as:
- To identify the students’ opinions on their ability level for the subjects of writing and reading.
- To determine the problems faced with writing and reading by students.
- To survey students’ opinions on how to improve their writing and reading skills.
This research used the questionnaire as a tool to collect the data from the participants. The questionnaire was divided into 5 parts. The first part is the personal information of participants. The second part is the opinions on the writing and reading ability level. The third part is the opinions on writing and reading problems. The fourth part is the opinions on improvement tactics. The fifth part is a quiz on writing and reading. The participants of the research were the year-3 students at Lao International College. The collected data was analysed using the SPSS program.
The findings of this research indicated that a large quantity of students ranked their writing and reading skills at a moderate level. The problems students faced with writing and reading were to lack a wide vocabulary range and narrow grammatical problems, idea organization and background knowledge to link with what they read or write. With regard to improvement tactics for writing and reading, student believes that if they want to advance their writing and reading capabilities they need to develop grammatical knowledge, enlarge their vocabulary range, exchange feedback with others on their performance, follow skilled user’s techniques or enroll in a specific writing or reading course