MOTIVATION FOR THE STUDY THE 21ST CENTURY IS THE CENTURY OF THE INT...

1. Motivation for the study The 21st century is the century of the integration. In addition, the electronic media explosion and its implications for the processes of globalization highlighted issues of intercultural communication. Therefore, English has a crucial role to play in the current age. Indeed, all the work in any company are involved in English, such as transactions, communicating with foreign partners and customers, translating contracts, relevant documents for professional works. English can be divided into two categories: academic English language (used for scholarships, studying abroad, etc.) and English communication (daily use, works, etc.). If the academic English language is known as TOEFL and IELTS certificate, the English communication perhaps is of TOEIC one, which is a crucial requirement in the global labor market. In recent years, it has become one of the international English language testing programs, which is very popular all over the world. More than 70 corporations, companies, domestic and foreign associations in Vietnam have used it as a mandatory requirement of the standardization and staff recruitment. The state has special interest in foreign language teaching and learning. On September 30th, 2008, Prime Minister signed Decision No. 1400/QĐ-TTg, approving the Project entitled “Teaching and Learning Foreign Languages in the National Education System, Period 2008-2020”. Its general goals are “to renovate thoroughly the tasks of teaching and learning foreign language within national education system, to implement a new program on teaching and learning foreign language at every school levels and training degrees, which aims to achieve by the year 2015 a vivid progress on professional skills, language competency for human resources, especially at some prioritized sectors; by the year 2020 most Vietnamese 1 youth whoever graduate from vocational schools, colleges and universities gain the capacity to use a foreign language independently.‟‟ Consequently, achieving a standard level of a foreign language is a requirement for each student. For the significant role of English, the Rector of Dong Thap University issued Decisions No. 86/QĐ-ĐHĐT, which has required students of non-major English to pass the Toeic exam as one of graduation conditions. Specifically, the university students have to reach at least a Toeic of 300 score and 250 scores to the college ones. Therefore, they have to take these English courses and pass the exam be fore graduating. However, how is the reality of this issue? According to the report to the Rector by Informatics and Languages Center, there are only 231 students among 1651 candidates attained the requirement in the first Toeic exam hold on August 25

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, 2012. This statistic data also show that the number of those who passed the exam was 241 students making up 24.79% of all candidates (972 candidates). The number of candidates passing in the second exam has increased 10.8% compared to the first one (13.99%), but the rates of passing candidates is still very low compared to the total number of students at Dong Thap University. So, what is the reason for the reality of this issue? Must it be the fault of students‟ limited knowledge or their learning methods or teachers‟ training ones or other reasons? To answer these questions, I decided to carry out the topic “AN INVESTIGATION ON STUDYING ENGLISH GRAMMAR FOR TOEIC EXAM BY DONG THAP UNIVERSITY STUDENTS” with an effort to find out some common problems in learning English grammar made by Dong Thap University students and suggest some possible solutions.