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ABSTRACT
Based on teaching experience at Nam Dinh College of Education (NCE), the
researcher has found that English majored students in our college seem to be bored
with the reading texts in the course book and unmotivated to learn, and even lack
vocabulary and background knowledge of real life. Therefore, the present
experimental research recruiting 30 second year English majored students at NCE
was conducted to explore the effectiveness using authentic materials to improve the
students‟ reading comprehension. They were then assigned to be an experimental
group and a control group (15 students per each). During the treatment of 8 weeks,
the experimental group was exposed to authentic materials. Pretest and posttest
were conducted in a pair sample T-test as means to distinguish the difference of
reading comprehension between the two groups. Next, follow-up semi-structured
interviews were carried out with 15 students from experimental group to investigate
their satisfaction level toward the lesson as well as their difficulties in reading the
authentic materials. The study results emphasized the research hypothesis that
authentic materials make significant improvement students‟ reading comprehension.
Consequently, the findings in this study result in some pedagogical implications for
teachers and students to improve students‟ reading comprehension. The research
might be useful for English language teachers, students as well as researchers.
