An Investigation Into The Difficulties In Doing The Heading Matching Exercise Encountered By 3rd Year Ufl-Ud Students

Abstract

Reading is one of the most necessary skills in the process of learning English. Besides, it is not easy for students to learn and practice, especially in IELTS tests. Of many exercises of an IELTS Reading test, Heading Matching could be considered as one of the most challenging exercises by a large number of students. The survey carried out on 162 third year students at the University of Foreign Languages - University of Danang focuses on the difficulties along with the causes leading to difficulties when they handle the Heading Matching exercise of IELTS Reading. The results of the study showed that students face a lot of difficulties related to (1) finding the correlation between the title and the text, (2) finding main ideas, (3) identifying keywords of headings and the passage and (4) implementing the procedure of doing Heading Matching exercise. The study also clarified some of the main reasons for these problems on two basic aspects: linguistic competence and strategies of learning and doing HM exercise, based on which the research suggests some solutions.