PART A: INTRODUCTION

i Rationale

Nowadays, as an effective means of international communication, English is widely used in all fields of activity throughout the world. Therefore, there has been a growing demand for the learning of this language of those who want to master English to serve their different purposes. This leads to the introduction of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in many universities in Vietnam. Being aware of the importance of ESP, Department of Linguisticsand Vietnamese Studies at University of Social Sciences and Humanities (USSH) – VNU have had its own collections of teaching material on Linguistics Studies. It is aimed at providing students with background knowledge and a system of terms related to Linguistics.

In the process of acquiring English as a whole, studentsmust learn not only language items but also four language skills among which reading plays an important part. This is also true to students of linguistics because they can broaden their professional knowledge in their major as well as get access to language inputs to develop the other language skills when reading a lot of materials on linguistics in English.

Despite the significant role of reading skills, the teaching and learning of it at the Department have not been properly carried out. There are some exiting problems such as the lack of experience in teaching ESP, no training course for teachers of ESP, uneven English level of the students. Besides, Grammar - Translation method is still in use to exploit reading texts.Reading skill is often taught separately or, in other words, there is no integration with the other language skills. The text is, in fact, exploited as a source of materials for a language lesson. As a result, most of the students become bored and passive.

This has given rise to the question, “How can ESP teachers improve the situation to bring life into the lessons and motivate the students to read in English?” And the following answer can often be heard, “To teach reading skills in integration with the other language skills.” But how can this be done? This study will try to answer this question.

ii Objectives of the study

The study is aimed at: