Luận văn thạc sĩ VNU ULIS effects of different types of teacher written corrective feedback on students writing performance an action research approach with 12th form english major students

Aims of the study

This current study aims at (1) examining the effects of different types of teacher written corrective feedback on the writing performance of 12 th form English major students at Luong Van Tuy Gifted High School, Ninh Binh; (2) investigating the students’ attitudes towards the use of teacher written corrective feedback and proposing some recommendations of the use of teacher written corrective feedback in writing classes

In short, the research paper aims to address the following questions:

 How do three common types of teacher written corrective feedback (namely direct, indirect, metalinguistic) influence students’ writings as reflected in their revised essays and new essays?

 How are students’ preferences to the feedback types related to their writing improvement?

Scope of the study

In fact, teacher corrective feedback can be given in both oral and written forms

However, within the framework of a graduation paper, the study only focuses on the teacher written corrective feedback

In addition, due to the limited scope of this study, the participants selected are not all gifted students at Luong Van Tuy Gifted High School, but only students from the class that I directly teach.

Method of the study

Given that this study was implemented with the hope to improve the students’

English writing skills, I decided to adopt the action research approach because this type of research is aimed at improving a situation After a preliminary investigation was carried out, a writing instruction course was designed, and different types of teacher written corrective feedback were applied The data were collected by the analysis of students’ writing and students’ free narratives Students’ writings were collected and analyzed before, during and after treatment period (i.e the delivery of feedback) to measure the students’ progress in their writing performance In addition, students’ free narratives were collected and analyzed at the end of the research to find out their attitudes towards each feedback type and its effects.

Significance of the study

The findings of this study can inform classroom teachers of how to provide feedback on their students’ writings, thereby raising the quality of students’ writings.

Structure of the study

The study consists of 3 main parts:

This part deals with the rationale, aims, scope, research questions, research methods, significance and structure of the study

Part B: Development This part has three chapters:

Chapter 1: Literature Review presents various concepts relevant to the research topic such as CF and its roles in language teaching and learning, previous studies on different types of written feedback strategies and their effects on students writing performance

Chapter 2: Research Methodology describes the methods utilized in the study, presents the situation of teaching and learning English at Luong Van Tuy Gifted High School and general information about the study subjects It also focuses on the data collection instruments and procedures

Chapter 3: Research Findings and Discussion gives a detailed presentation and analysis of the data from the students’ writings and free narratives This chapter also consists of some discussions and interpretations of the findings of the study and provides some recommendations for effective written correction in writing lessons

This part summarizes the main issues mentioned in the research, points out some limitations of the study and provides some plans for the next cycle.

LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Corrective feedback

Definition of corrective feedback

Responding to the student writing, including giving feedback is one of the most controversial topics in second language instruction and theory Different researchers may have their own way to define feedback Keh (1989, P.24) suggests that feedback is “input from a reader to a writer with the effect of providing information for revision” Teacher feedback, is this sense, can be regarded as an effective means to communicate to students about their writing so that the can enhance their composition

Feedback, as viewed by Furnborough and Truman (2009), involves the existence of gaps between what has been learned and the target competence of the learners and the efforts undertaken to bridge the gaps This feedback is provided to ask for further information, to give directions, suggestion for revision, and to give positive feedback about what the students have done well (Ferris, 1997) Lightbown and Spada (1999, p.172) states that feedback is “an indication to the learner that his or her use the target languages is incorrect”

When reviewing their students’ writing, second language teachers give feedback on a wide range of issues They may address the text’s content, the way in which the ideas are organized, the choice of vocabulary that is used The type of feedback that has attracted numerous researchers’ attention, however, is feedback on linguistic errors

Such responses have widely been referred to as “corrective feedback” or “error correction” According to Yeh and Lo (2009), corrective feedback often takes the form of responses to the texts containing errors They also claim that corrective feedback supplies students with direct or indirect responses about what is unacceptable The responses can be an indication where the errors are, what types of errors those belong to; a provision of correct form of the target language; metalinguistic information about the errors or any combination of these This definition Yeh and Lo (2009) seems to be the most suitable and closely involves in the scope of this study because it mentions the teachers’ responses to the students’ errors in different ways Therefore, this definition is adapted in this study.

Forms of feedback

Basing on forms, feedback is distinguished as two main types which are oral feedback and written feedback Comparing between these two types, written form is more common but it is a fairly traditional and time-consuming method to give feedback on various drafts of a student paper Both of these two forms are recommended to be considered

Oral feedback is correction, comment or guidance that is uttered out by teacher during or after students’ performance It is the fastest type of feedback and students also can improve their discourse immediately after feedback is given However, in enhancing students’ writings, this type of feedback seems not very effective because of the time shortage The teacher cannot give oral feedback to students individually but they use written feedback instead However, oral feedback is still a good means of supplementing written feedback The reason is that verbal feedback takes only few minutes, but has the potential to influence to students’ future performance in positive way This study limits itself to the exploration of written corrective feedback only

In written feedback, comments, correction or marks are given to students’ written work The marks may be on words or symbols such as underlining, circles and other signs

Written feedback is an integral aspect of any English language course This is especially true now with the predominance of the process approach to writing that requires some kinds of instructors’ feedback on students’ drafts This form of feedback can be also divided into several different subtypes.

Types of corrective feedback to students’ writing

Written feedback in writing can be divided into three main types, namely self- evaluation or self-assessment, peer feedback and teacher’s feedback

1.1.3.1 Self-evaluation (Self-directed feedback)

Self-evaluation means the students correct and evaluate their own mistake It is stated in Wei and Chen (2004) that “Self-assessment encourages students to look critically and analytically at their writing and to take more responsibility for what they write

Being involved in the process of self-evaluation, the students are no longer simply passive recipients of feedback, but become active participants in evaluation”

Self-evaluation may increase students’ independence as they are supposed to find their own mistakes Next, by finding their own mistakes, the students are expected to remember what mistakes they have done so they will not make the same mistakes later on Moreover, self-evaluation saves time in a large class However, self-assessment is unsuitable way for students with low English proficiency to revise their writing

Peer feedback is a practice in language education where feedback is given by one student to another According to Bartels (2004), peer feedback means feedback from the fellow students If students are working on the same assignment together, peer feedback means exchanging drafts and comments on each other’s drafts

Peer feedback is used in writing classes to provide students more opportunities to learn from each other Peer feedback broadens learners’ involvement by giving them the additional roles of reader and advisor to go with that of writer Further, structuring face-to-face discussion into the feedback process provides students the opportunity to engage in constructive controversy, which may lead to insights and greater task engagement (Johnson & Johnson, 1987)

However, there are still some problems in the use of peer feedback One of the major problems is that the quality of the responses is questioned Students often feel that their peers offer unspecific, unhelpful and even incorrect feedback because they lack the knowledge of the target language or the knowledge in certain specific content areas

Another problem with peer written feedback is the students’ characteristics Many students may not easily accept the idea that their peers are qualified enough to evaluate their writing (Rollinson, 2005)

In the light of process writing approach, teachers play an important role in helping students to revise their writing drafts Teacher’s corrective feedback, to some extent, is the teacher's correction and can be defined as teachers' indication to learners' errors, which takes the forms of implicit or explicit correction

Written corrective feedback refers to teacher written feedback on a student’s essay with an aim of improving grammatical accuracy (including spelling, capitalization, and punctuation) as well as idiomatic usage (such as word order and word choice) The term written feedback, in contrast, refers to written commentary by the teacher as feedback on form and content of a student’s essay Therefore, the term written corrective feedback, the main emphasis of this thesis, has a very different meaning from that of the term written feedback While the two are intertwined and go hand-in- hand, and while both written corrective feedback and written feedback are addressed in this thesis, the primary of this thesis is meant to be an investigation into the effect of different teacher written corrective feedback strategies

Some researchers indicate that students favor corrective feedback from teachers because they believe that they will benefit greatly from it (Leki, 1990) Studies by Ashwell (2000), and Ferris (2003) conclude that there is a positive correlation between student writing accuracy and teacher corrective feedback Furthermore, Ellis (1998) and Lightbown (1998) state that thanks to teacher corrective feedback adult learners can avoid fossilization and maintain their progress in their second language proficiency.

Teachers' written corrective feedback strategies

Although the provision of written corrective feedback has long been deemed integral to second language/foreign instruction programs, it has not always been provided in the same manner There are different classifications for corrective feedback strategies proposed by different researches

Ellis (2009) presents a typology which consists of six main strategies to provide corrective feedback (see Table 1)

Table 1.1: Ellis’ typology of feedback types (2009 p.98)

Types of CF Description Studies

1 Direct CF The teacher provides students with the correct form e.g Lalande(1982) and Rob et al.(1986)

2 Indirect CF The teacher indicates that an error exists but does not provide the correction a Indicating + locating the error

This takes the form of underlining and the uses of cursors to show omissions in the students’ text

Various studies have employed indirect correction of this kind (e.g Ferris and Roberts 2001; Chandler

This takes the form of an indication in the margin that an error or errors have taken place in

Fewer studies have employed this method (e.g Robb et al

The teacher provides some kind of metalinguistic clue as to nature of the error a Use of error code

Teacher writes code in the margin (e.g ww = wrong word; art article)

Various studies have examined the effects of using codes (e.g Lalande 1982;

Teacher numbers errors in text and writes a grammatical description for each numbered error at the bottom of the text

Sheen (2007) compared the effects of direct CF and direct

3 The focus of the feedback

This concerns whether the teacher attempts to correct all (or most) of the students’ errors or selects one or two specific types of errors to correct This distinction can be applied to each of above options

Most studies have investigated unfocused CF (e.g Chandler 2003; Ferris

2006) Sheen (2007), drawing on traditions in SLA studies of CF, investigated focused

Unfocused CF in extensive b Focused CF Focused CF is intensive

The teacher indicates an error and provides a hyperlink to a concordance file that provides

Milton (2006) examples of correct usage

5.Reformulation This consists of a native speaker’s reworking of the students’ entire text to make the language seem as native-like as possible while keeping the content of the original intact

Sachs and Polio (2007) compared the effects of direct correction and reformulation on students’ revisions of their text

Ellis, Loewen and Erlam (2006) categorize responses from teachers to students’ error into three forms or strategies: (1) teacher feedback that indicates that an error has been made, (2) teacher feedback that provides the correct form of the target language, and

(3) teacher feedback that provides the metalinguistic information about the nature of the error This current research adapts this categorization together with Ellis’ typology of written corrective feedback in that the focus of this research was how and whether students’ writing performance could be improved via the 3 main types of written corrective feedback strategies, namely direct, indirect, metalinguistic corrective feedback

1.1.4.1 Teacher direct corrective feedback and previous studies on its effectiveness

In the case of direct corrective feedback, the teacher gives the corrected form of the mistake to the students Direct feedback may be done in various ways such as by striking out an incorrect or unnecessary word, phrase, or morpheme, inserting a missing or expected word, phrase or morpheme; and by providing the correct linguistic form above, in the margin or near the erroneous form (Ellis, 2008; Ferris, 2006) A number of previous studies have proved the revision effect of direct feedback

Chandler’s (2003) suggests that direct correction works best for producing accurate revisions This type of corrective feedback is desirable for students of low level of proficiency who are unable to self-correct and do not know what the correct form might be However, it requires minimal processing on the part of the learners and thus, it may not contribute to long-term learning (Ellis, 2009) In addition, a recent study by Sheen (2007) suggests that direct corrective feedback can be effective in promoting acquisition of only specific grammatical features This finding is in line with the study of Van Beuningen, Dejong and Kuiken (2012) which claims that “Direct correction is better suited for grammatical errors and indirect correction is better suited for non- grammatical errors”

Another advocate of direct written corrective feedback has also suggested that it may be more beneficial because it “reduces confusion” (Chandler, 2003), supplies students with information to “resolve more complex errors” and is “more immediate”

Therefore, direct written corrective feedback may be more useful for learners who have comparatively limited linguistic knowledge

Lee (2005) adds that direct feedback may be appropriate for beginner students, or in a situation when errors are “untreatable” that are not susceptible to self-correction such as sentence structure and word choice, and when teachers want to direct students’ attention to error patterns that require student correction

1.1.4.2 Teacher indirect corrective feedback and previous studies on its effectiveness

Indirect written corrective feedback refers to situations when the teacher indicates that an error has been made but does not provide a correction, thereby leaving the student to diagnose and correct it This can be done by underlying or circling errors, recording in the margin the number of errors in a given line, confirmation checks, and request for clarification (Bitchener, 2008)

Advocates of indirect written corrective feedback (e.g., Ferris, 1999, 2006) claim that it may foster deeper language processing by requiring the student to engage in “guided learning and problem solving”, leading to reflection about linguistic forms that may foster long-term acquisition Thus, although indirect corrective feedback does not have immediate revision effect, it leads to long-term learning and has more benefits than direct feedback on students’ long-term development and acquisition especially for more advanced students (Ferris and Roberts, 2001) Therefore it is suggested that indirect corrective feedback, by requiring the students to determined the correct form of the mistake on his own, may be more useful for learners at higher proficiency levels as they have relatively advanced linguistic knowledge

Ferris (2002), Ferris and Roberts (2001) observe that while direct feedback led to greater accuracy in text revisions, indirect feedback results in the production of fewer initial errors over time Bitchener et al (2005), Bitchener and Knoch (2010) point out that complex errors might not be good targets for indirect feedback since learners are often not capable of self-correcting the identified errors Additionally, for features about which students already have some explicit knowledge, indirect corrective feedback can assist them in the transition from declarative to procedural knowledge (Lyster, 2004)

However, the results of studies that have investigated the difference between direct and indirect are very mixed Some studies (e.g., Ferris & Helt, 2000) showed that indirect feedback is indeed more effective in enabling students to correct their errors Lalande

(1982, p.140) recommends that indirect feedback consistently calls errors to students’ attention, triggering the “guided learning and problem-solving” processes By contrast, Frantzen, (1995) found no difference between direct and indirect corrective feedback

1.1.4.3 Teacher metalinguistic corrective feedback and previous studies on its effectiveness

Metalinguistic feedback could take one of two forms Use of error coding or a brief grammatical description In the former type, the teacher writes some codes in the margin to suggest what problem learners have Of course, the learners will have a list of codes to avoid confusion However, in the second type of metalinguistic feedback, the teacher numbers the errors and briefly provides a brief explanation for the error at the end of the text

Roles of teacher written corrective feedback

Concerning the role of teacher written corrective feedback, there have existed an endless discussion so far, both favorably and unfavorably Not only researchers but also teachers and students do agree that written feedback from teachers play the crucial role in improve students’ writing and attitude toward writing (Leki, 1990, p.58)

However there has been a debate on the role of teacher written feedback in which there are people who believe in giving feedback to improve student’s writing and who do not Some may refer to feedback as highly beneficial and inevitable in teaching and learning writing, while some consider teacher feedback to be time-consuming and useless Therefore, it is normal to see different judgments of different individuals about this matter

1.2.1 Arguments for the role of teacher written corrective feedback

Corrective feedback plays an importance role in language learning and acquisition as it assists learners notice the difference between their own production and the target structure, raising their consciousness about the structures they are learning

Teacher feedback is considered to be an important aspect of every school day and play a critical role in the teaching and learning process (Konold, Miller and Konold, 2004)

It is crucial since it helps encourage and consolidate learning (Hyland & Hyland, 2006) and serves such significant purposes as to: reinforce appropriate learner behaviour, let students know how they are doing and extend learning opportunities (Konold et al,

Teacher feedback is also essential in second language writing by giving specific purpose of providing teacher feedback on students’ writing performance Teacher corrective feedback aims at supporting student’s writing development, teaching or reinforcing a particular aspect of disciplinary content or specific academic writing convention, indicating strengths and weaknesses of a piece of writing, explaining or justifying a grade and suggesting how a student may improve in their next piece of writing

Additionally, written corrective feedback serves as a source of motivation since it enables learners to evaluate their progress, to understand the level of their competence, and to maintain their effort in striving to reach realistic goals (Riviere, 2000)

From the output hypothesis perspective, Swain (1985, 1995) has noted repeatedly that for grammatical accuracy to develop, learners need to receive feedback on their output because it enables learners to “notice the gap” between what they want to say and what they can actually say If learners’ attention is not drawn to their errors, they may not know that they made an error, and therefore they miss opportunities to practice and correct themselves Thus, the proverb “Learning from mistake” is less likely to take place (Swain 2000)

Another argument for corrective feedback is the belief that corrective feedback is essential to prevent fossilization “Fossilization” was defined by Brown (2007) as “the relatively permanent incorporation of incorrect linguistic forms into a person’s second language competence” (P.382) It is supported by Dekeyser (2010) who claims that; timely corrective feedback creates additional opportunities for practice and may help prevent automatization of uncorrected errors which may lead to fossilization

Corrective feedback also helps to overcome the first language interference Van Patten

(1990) gives the concept of parameter setting, defined as the variations in different language in terms of the abstract properties of a language which “inform us that a sentence is possible or not” Corrective feedback informs the learners about what is not allowed in a language Moreover, some second language structures are not likely to be acquirable from positive evidence alone (Trahey & White, 1993), especially if they do not exist in the first language grammar Therefore, corrective feedback as a type of pedagogical intervention may trigger the parameter restructuring process and help the learners to overcome the interference from their first language

Finally, written corrective feedback can lead students toward autonomy One long-term purpose of feedback is to lead students to the point where they can find their own mistakes In many cases, teachers indicate the place and type of error without correcting They leave the students the chance to find and correct the mistake themselves It is obvious that teacher corrective feedback is an important step toward the learner-centeredness as it motivates students to learn actively and critically

Therefore, it should be made use of in suitable and effective ways in teaching and learning in general and in teaching and learning writing skill in particular to sharpen students’ abilities in analyzing their writings critically

1.2.2 Arguments against the role of teacher written corrective feedback

Notwithstanding countless research and writing, inconsistencies in the research still make it unclear what role written corrective feedback should play in the language classroom Apart from the researchers that have strongly supported written corrective feedback, there are others have argued against it for various reasons (Robb, Ross &

Trustcott (1996, 1999) holds a strong view against error correction He argues that all forms of error correction of second language student writing are not only ineffective but also harmful and should be abandoned He further emphasizes that although most second language learners clearly desire grammar correction, teachers should not give it to them because correction may have value for non-grammatical errors but not for errors in grammar He claims that written corrective feedback is counter-productive because it promotes shortening simplification in student writing According to him, teachers run the risk of making their students avoid more complex structures when they emphasize learners’ errors by providing corrective feedback Moreover, Trustcott

(2007) claims that written corrective feedback is a waste of time and suggests that the energy spent on dealing with corrections could be allocated productively to additional writing practice to improve students’ writing ability His practical doubts concern teachers’ capacities in providing adequate and consistent feedback and to learners’ ability and willingness to use the feedback effectively

Sharing with Van Beuningen et al (2012), Trustcott maintains that written corrective feedback encourages learners to avoid situations in which they made errors This view is also supported by Sheppard (1992) who reported a negative effect of written corrective feedback on the structural complexity of learners’ writing

Factors affecting the effectiveness of written corrective feedback

The counter-arguments by scholars as presented in 1.2 are not empirically supported

In fact, the effectiveness of written corrective feedback depends on a number of factors such as: time to give corrective feedback, types of corrective feedback, quality of corrective feedback, nature of errors, students’ attitudes and expectations, the learning environment of each classroom, situational variables, teacher factors, learner variables such as students’ first language, learning style, beliefs, socioeconomic background, motivation and future goals and other additional factors Some of these factors are discussed in the following sections

The issue of which type of error should be corrected has also attracted much researchers’ attention Relating the nature of error to written corrective feedback, Ferris

(1999) made a distinction between the “treatable” and “untreatable” errors “Treatable” errors are those that are easy to describe, i.e errors that occur in a patterned, rule- governed way (e.g., verb tense and form, subject-verb agreement, article usage, plural and possessive noun endings, and sentence fragments), so learners can be pointed to a grammar book or set of rules to resolve the errors In contrast, errors can be considered

“untreatable” (such as word choice errors, and unidiomatic sentence structure, resulting from problems to do with word order and missing or unnecessary words) when there are no clear and succinct rules that students can consult to avoid or fix those types of errors (Ferris, 1999, 2010) As error types can impact the effectiveness of a particular written corrective feedback method, students might be served best when the method of feedback is decided by the error type (Ferris, 2006) She suggests that multiple forms of feedback should be used in combination depending on the nature of the error and student characteristics

Ferris (2002) also gives some criteria that can help teacher made decisions about which error to correct Errors that occur frequently in individual students’ writing and errors that have highly stigmatizing effects on the reader should be corrected Thus, it can be concluded that categorizing the types of errors and choosing suitable corrective feedback strategies for each type of error will directly affect the effectiveness of giving corrective feedback It is vitally important for teachers to commit themselves to selective error feedback and to strategy for building students’ awareness and knowledge of their most serious and frequent problems

The degree of adoption of corrective feedback may be influenced by many individual learner factors such as aptitude and learning styles, language proficiency, motivation and attitude toward written corrective feedback, learners’ preference for written corrective feedback, first language, learning style, beliefs, socioeconomic background, motivation and future goals and other additional factors

Firstly, students’ ability to make use of written corrective feedback depends on their proficiency level Frantzen and Rissel (1987) and Vyatkina (2010) have found that, for students of lower level of proficiency, simply underlining the error might not be informative enough because students could not determine exactly what the error was

Ferris (2002) recommends indirect feedback for most instances but cautions that students at lower of second language proficiency may need direct feedback

Another research (Hedcock and Lefkowitz, 1996) has also shown the impact of student background on the effectiveness of error correction The authors concluded that

“Learners’ perception about what constitutes useful feedback varies considerably according to the educational context and students’ level of literacy” Secondly, the motivation level of the student becomes linked with the desire for corrective feedback

If a student wishes to improve their writing, to get better grades, they feel that error correction is one method of insuring enhanced performance, and vice versa for students with low motivation level Gue’nette (2007) emphasizes the importance of learner motivation in relation to the effectiveness of corrective feedback and students’ success in improving their writing According to him, any type of corrective feedback will fail if the students are not committed, or are not motivated to improve their writing skills

For students of low levels of motivation, teachers often complain that they did not attend to the written corrective feedback provided Therefore, in order to remedy this problem, many teachers implement the requirement of revision for the writing tasks

Converting corrective feedback into long-term acquisition must be achieved internally by the learners themselves, in accordance with their particular learning goals (Carroll,

Goldstein (2006) also claims that written corrective feedback is effective only if it is noticed and understood Learners with higher degree of motivation have more interest in engaging in a high level of analysis of corrective feedback This intensity of engagement with corrective feedback may play crucial role for making the general claim whether corrective feedback is effective or not Learner may need to be sensitive to feedback cues to make progress (Ferris & Robert, 2001; Robb, Ross & Shortreed,

Teacher factors may include teachers’ attitudes toward particular students or the content of their texts, the number of classes teachers need to teach and the number of institutions at which teachers need to teach in order to make a living and the quality of teacher written corrective feedback strategy

Quality of teacher written corrective feedback strategy undoubtedly affects the efficacy of the feedback itself Goldstein,(2004) as cited by Hyland & Hyland (2006) “We would all agree that the quality of feedback matters and that students will most benefit from feedback that is text-specific, relevant and clear” (P.203) & “Our comments can transform students’ attitudes to writing and lead to improvement, but our words can also confuse and dishearten them We need, then, to be sure that we monitor our feedback so that it is consistent, clear, helpful and constructive” As noted by Ferris &

Hedgcook (1998, P.202), effort to find answers to the question “Does error correction work?” must consider crucial factors: is corrective feedback and instruction carried out selectively, systematically and accurately? Ferris (2006) also suggests that teacher factor such as teacher differences in marking or coding an error may affect students’ performance

Students need to be provided with appropriate feedback which is given at the right time and in the right context Hence, teachers should keep their own experiences and intuitions in mind, listen to their students and consider their need in deciding if, when and how to provide feedback and correction to second language student writer As teachers, we can only hope that we will continue to find answers and discover ways to respond more timely, thoughtfully and effectively to our student writers’ needs

There are several contextual variables that need to be considered when providing corrective feedback on students’ writing According to Goldstein (2004, cited in Hyland and Hyland, 2006), contextual factors can include: sociopolitical issues that influence teacher status, class size, program and curricular requirements, the entrance and exit requirements

Evans et al (2010) states that situational or contextual variables are everything that can form the context of learning outsides learner variables or methodological variables

Situational variables may include several factors such as the learning atmosphere or the physical environment

Research design

This study follows the action research approach This is because this type of research is aimed at improving teaching practice As Nunan (1992) asserts, action research is conducted to investigate a specific teaching situation or practice when the teacher in charge wants to find a solution to that situation or practice In other words, action research is carried out in the classroom by the teacher of the course, mainly with the purpose of solving a problem or improving the teaching and learning problem It involves a self-reflective, critical, and systematic approach to exploring the researcher’s own teaching contexts (Burns, 2010) This action research was carried out in an attempt to find out solutions to the improvement of students’ writing skills It was carried out by the teacher-researcher with my own students in an intact class For these reasons, I believed an action research design would fit my purpose

Although there exist models which include different steps to carry out the action research, they all share the following basic elements: the process begins with the researcher identifying a problem, then a plan of action is worked out, afterwards the plan is implemented, and the process culminates when the researcher evaluates the effectiveness of the plan and proposes next actions to further address the problem

In this study, I followed the model proposed by Kemmis and Mc Taggart (1988, cited in Burns, 2010 p.9) because the steps in this model make it easier and more convenient for me to carry out the research Besides, it reflects correctly what steps will be taken during the study According Kemmis and Mc Taggart, the action research process has four steps as illustrated in Figure 2.1 below:

Figure 2.1: Steps in the action research cycle

According to the authors, each action research cycle should involve: planning an action, implementing the action, observing the process and consequences of the action, and reflecting the action In applying this model, this study underwent the following steps:

-Step 2: Planning the action -Step 3: Implementing the action -Step 4: Reflecting the action

Because of the limited time, the researcher would not continue the action in the next cycle.

Research setting

Luong Van Tuy Gifted High School, where I am working as a teacher of English, is located in the centre of Ninh Binh City, Ninh Binh province There are about 145 teachers and about 1300 students English is among the most important subjects at the school It is one of the three compulsory subjects of the required examinations the students have to pass in order to be qualified for the General Education Diploma It is also the subject a great number of students choose as the main one to take part in university entrance examination In English major classes, the students have eleven periods learning English every week The materials are not only the text book issued by Ministry of Education and Training but also the ones adapted by the teachers The responsibility of teaching the language is on the hand of the teachers of English at the school

The 12 th form English major students at Luong Van Tuy Gifted High School are eighteen years old and have been learning English for six years; their English knowledge is, in general, quite good especially English grammar and vocabulary

2.2.2 Participants and data collection instruments

Thirty five students of 12 th form English major students at Luong Van Tuy Gifted High School were chosen for the research Of the 35 students, there were 32 girls and 3 boys All these students were in the class where I was teaching

During the research, I conducted a cycle, in which I applied different types of written corrective feedback to see the effects of these types of feedback on students’ writing performance At the same time, analysis of students’ writings and free narratives was utilized to collect the data for the whole paper After 6 months of the study, all the 35 students’ writing papers and free narratives were collected, analyzed and discussed

The action research was conducted during the first semester of school year 2015-

2016 Adapting steps in Kemmis’ and Mc Taggart’s action research cycle (1988, cited in Burns, 2010 p.9), the action was developed in four steps as follows:

I have been a teacher at the school for more than 10 years During the teaching process, I discovered that my students seemed to be weak at writing skills although their English knowledge was, in general, quite good especially English grammar and vocabulary More specifically, after teaching this English major class for one semester,

I realized that almost all of the students were not interested in learning writing, and they often made mistakes in writing although they performed relatively well in reading and listening skills and also had a good knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary I began to gather data and then analyzed the data to identify the problems of students’ writings In order to gather the needed data, I asked each of the students to write a free narrative about their problems writing skill and the possible reasons for these problems It was surprising to know that 30 out of 35 students said that they didn’t often get regular, detailed feedback from teachers so they often didn’t really know exactly what their weak points in writing were In a writing period of 45 minutes they often got teacher’s writing instructions in content and organization as well as a provision of some related words and phrases The moment they finished their writing in class often coincided with the end of the period so teacher only had the chance to give feedback to some students’ writing papers Even when feedback was delivered, teachers had little time to check and process the students’ revision so students often made mistakes again Therefore, error fossilization was unavoidable In writing tests, what they often received for their writing were marks and some teacher’s comments on content and organization at the bottom of their writing papers Some students said that they didn’t often rewrite their writing so even when they were given feedback on specific error, they still made the same kind of error in the next writing They also said that because of the large number of the students and because most of the time in grade

10 and 11 was often spent on finishing the text books and only student qualified for the national examination for gifted students would have more chance to write and receive detailed feedback regularly In addition, a large number of students (28 of them) admitted that they found writing the most difficult skill After the results were obtained, the study was conducted to improve the situation

With a view to helping the students improve their writing performance, I decided to use different types of written corrective feedback during the pilot teaching because I believed that besides teacher’s writing instructions, in many cases, teacher’s correction and comments could help to solve the problems of students’ writing accuracy and their attitudes towards writing In other words, teacher’s good feedback strategies may give students stimulation for revision and motivation to maintain their interest in writing

This study was limited to the investigation of the impact of 3 written error correction strategies on students’ writing performance After giving a clear written model, I asked students to write a short essay (about 200 words) related to the main topics of specific units in their English book The time allowance for doing all these three tasks was about 35 minutes at the class During the composing time, they were encouraged to do it on their own and not to consult any dictionaries, or books They received feedback on their essays, mainly on the use of language, and were then asked to rewrite the essay based on the teacher feedback and resubmitted a revised draft The research was divided into three stages with a different type of feedback applied for each stage All the students’ papers were collected and analyzed The data-collecting process helped in eliminating slips due to carelessness or performance mistakes induced by psychological factors The errors were counted according to five error categories adapted from Ferris & Roberts (2001) and those which occurred most frequently in the participants’ writings The five targeted error types are: verb tense and form, subject- verb agreement, article, language expression (which includes lexical error such as wrong word choice and form, collocation and idiom), and sentence structures

The following is the planned timetable (see Table 2.1) the researcher followed during six months of the action implementation (For essay topics, see appendix B)

Table 2.1: Timetable of the action implementation

Stage 1 Week Essay Types of CF applied

1 Essay 1 & Revised draft 1 Direct Feedback

2 Essay 2 & Revised draft 2 Direct Feedback

3 Essay 3 & Revised draft 3 Direct Feedback

8 Delayed Test 1 Stage 2 9 Essay 1 & Revised draft 1 Metalinguistic Feedback

10 Essay 2 & Revised draft 2 Metalinguistic Feedback

11 Essay 3 & Revised draft 3 Metalinguistic Feedback

16 Delayed Test 2 Stage 3 17 Essay 1 & Revised draft 1 Indirect Feedback

18 Essay 2 & Revised draft 2 Indirect Feedback

19 Essay 3 & Revised draft 3 Indirect Feedback

Stage 1: (Direct corrective feedback applied) With this strategy, the teacher provided the students with the correct form above or near to the erroneous form

- After having corrected the students’ essay 1 for the first time, the teacher counted errors

- Then, the teacher handed back written work, the students had chance to look at the papers carefully and rewrote the tasks and resubmitted the papers

- The teacher got the papers back, kept reading and correcting the second time, then counted the errors committed and returned the papers to the students

- One week later students were required to write new essays following the same procedure

- One month later, delayed test 1 was conducted to see the long-term effect of direct feedback

Stage 2: (Metalinguistic corrective feedback applied) Because of the big size of the class, I only used the first form of metalinguistic corrective feedback, which is the using of error codes Students were provided a list of error codes (Appendix A) and all the codes were explained The list containing abbreviation and symbols and a gloss of what these mean was adapted from International English Language Testing System code list

- After collecting students’ written work for the first time, the teacher labeled for different kinds of errors placed over the location of the error in the text or in the margin, then counted errors

- Students then got the writings back

- Next, they rewrote the tasks with correction and resubmitted the essays

- The teacher got the papers back, read and counted the errors still committed

- The teacher returned the papers to the students

- One week later students were asked to write new essays following the same procedure

- One month later, delayed test 2 was conducted to see the long-term effect of metalinguistic corrective feedback

Stage 3: (Indirect corrective feedback applied)

- After the students’ written papers were collected for the first time, errors in students’ writing were simply underlined or circle without any correction or explanation of the errors The teacher then counted errors

- Then, students got them back and rewrote the tasks with their own correction, and handed in the papers

- The teacher got the papers back, read the second time, counted the errors committed

- The teacher then returned the written work to the students

- One week later students were required to write new essays following the same procedure

- One month later, delayed test 3 was conducted to see the long-term effect of indirect feedback

At the end of the semester, the students were asked to write a free narrative to express their attitudes and opinion on the effects of three types of feedback as well as their preference for certain type of corrective feedback and suggestions for more effective use or teacher corrective feedback

The data collected during the action implementing period and the students’ narratives were analyzed The results of the analysis were consulted to find out the effects of different types of written corrective feedback on students’ writing performance The data analysis results were also used to answer the research questions

The criteria of success of the action and the students’ writing performance reflected the area of concern the teacher wanted to emphasize in the teaching and learning process

The reflection was done at the end of the cycle The results of the analysis after implementing the action were evaluated to see whether the action was effective or not

Because of the limited time, the researcher would not continue the action in the next cycle

Summary

This chapter provides detailed information about the methods of data analysis, and the steps to conduct the action research including; Problem identification, Planning the action, Implementing the action, Reflecting the action The major instruments used for data collection are students’ writing papers and students’ free narratives The findings of the research will be presented in the next chapter.

FINDINGS AND REFLECTION 3.1 Effects of three common types of feedback on students’ writing performance.33 3.1.1 Effects of three common types of feedback on students’ revised essays

The effects of three common types of feedback on students’ new pieces of writing

This section presents the results of investigating the extent to which different types of corrective feedback on five targeted linguistic errors helped learners improve the accuracy of their writing when producing new texts The result was reflected by the data collected in the three following tables

3.1.2.1 Description of the students’ performance in Stage 1 - Direct corrective feedback applied

Table 3.2: Taxonomy of errors and their frequency in Stage 1

Error frequency Essay 1 Essay 2 Essay 3 Delayed Test

The data collected in stage 1 show that the total number of errors made by 35 students fluctuated from 231 errors for Essay 1 to 224 errors for Essay 2, and 215 errors for Essay 3 Of all these five types of errors presented in Table 3.2, errors in article, sentence structure and language expression (including wrong word choice, collocation and idiom) were the most noticeable The biggest number of errors went with language expression with 67 errors (29%) for Essay 1, 63 errors (28%) for Essay

2, and 60 errors (27.2%) for Essay 3 Errors of sentence structure ranked in second position with 52 errors (22.5%) for Essay 1, 46 errors (20.5%) for Essay 2, and 48 (22.5%) for Essay 3 The third position of errors belonged to article with 40 errors (17.3%) for Essay 1, 44 errors (19.6%) for Essay 2, and 40 (18.7 %) for Essay 3 The fourth place in the table were errors of subject-verb agreement with 37 errors (16%) for Essay 1, 35 errors (15.6%) for Essay 2, and 34 errors (16%) for Essay 3 The fewest number of errors belonged to verb tense and form which accounted for 15%, 16.1%, and 15.4% for Essay 1, Essay 2, Essay 3 respectively

The delayed test data was analyzed to determine the types and frequency of the errors made one month after treatment It is clearly seen from Table 3.2 that the total number of errors for the delayed test was 219 compared to 231 errors for Essay 1, 224 errors for Essay 2 and 215 errors for Essay 3 Among the main five categories of errors, the ones of language expression and sentence structure showed a slight decrease Regarding language expression, the number of errors declined from 60 errors (27.2%) for Essay 3 to 55 errors (25%) for the delayed test In terms of sentence structure, the number of errors went down from 48 errors (25.5%) for Essay 3 to 40 errors (18.3%) for the delayed test In contrast, the number of article errors increased slightly from 40 errors (18.7%) for Essay 3 to 45 errors (20.5%) for the delayed test

For the other 2 types of errors, there still existed a little variation in the number of errors between Essay 3 and the delayed test

3.1.2.2 Description of the students’ performance in Stage 2 - Metalinguistic corrective feedback applied

Table 3.3: Taxonomy of errors and their frequency in Stage 2

Error frequency Essay 1 Essay 2 Essay 3 Delayed Test

It can be seen from Table 3.3 that the total number of errors varied from 215 errors for Essay 1 to 203 errors for Essay 2 and 202 errors for Essay 3 The biggest number of errors was language expression with 53 errors (25%) Essay 1, 53 errors (26.1%) for Essay 2, and 54 errors (26.7%) for Essay 3 The number of sentence structure errors still ranked in second place with 47 errors (21.8%) for Essay 1, 45 errors (22.2%) for Essay 2, and 47 errors (23.3%) for Essay 3 The number of article errors remained in third position and makes up 20.5% (44 errors) for Essay 1, 18.7 %

(38 errors) for Essay 2, and 16.8% (34 errors) for Essay 3 Errors of verb tense and form and errors of subject-verb agreement ranked in fourth and fifth place respectively

It is clearly shown from Table 3.3 that the total number of errors for the delayed test is 205 compared to 215 errors for Essay 1, 203 errors for Essay 2 and 202 errors for Essay 3 Among the five categories of errors, only the ones of article showed a slight decrease The number of article errors dropped from 34 errors (16.8%) for Essay

3 to 26 errors (12.7%) for the delayed test In contrast, error of language expression and sentence structure almost stayed the same Regarding language expression, the number of errors fluctuated from 54 errors (26.7%) for Essay 3 to 58 errors (28.3%) for the delayed test In terms of sentence structure, the number of errors was 47 (23.3%) for Essay 3 and 49 (24%) for the delayed test For the other types of errors, there was not any decrease in the number of errors There was a little variation in the number of errors between Essay 3 and the delayed test

3.1.2.3 Description of the students’ performance Stage 3 - Indirect corrective feedback applied

Table 3.4: Taxonomy of errors and their frequency in Stage 3

Essay 1 Essay 2 Essay 3 Delayed Test

The data collected in stage 3 show that the total number of errors went down considerably from 201 errors for Essay 1 to 183 errors for Essay 2 and 157 errors for Essay 3 Most types of errors showed a decrease in number The biggest number of errors went with language expression with 55 errors (27.4%) for Essay 1, 53 errors (29%) for Essay 2, and 33 errors (49%) for Essay 3 Besides, the number of sentence structure errors ranked in second position with 44 errors (21.9%) for Essay 1, 38 errors (20.8%) for Essay 2, and 35 errors (22.3%) for Essay 3 The number of article errors was in third position and made up 17.9% (36 errors) for Essay 1, 18% (33 errors) for Essay 2, and 15.9% (25 errors) for Essay 3 For other types of errors (verb tense and form, subject-verb agreement), the position remained unchanged but all types of these errors reduced gradually over time

It is also demonstrated in Table 3.4 that the total number of errors for the delayed test was 121 compared to 201 errors for Essay 1, 183 errors for Essay 2 and

157 errors for Essay 3 The number of grammatical errors showed a remarkable decrease The number of subject-verb agreement errors fell from 22 errors (14%) for Essay 3 to 10 errors (8.3%) for the delayed test Regarding language expression, the number of errors went down from 52 errors (33%) for Essay 3 to 49 errors (40.5%) for the delayed test In terms of sentence structure, the number of errors was 35 errors (22.3%) for Essay 3 and 34 (28.1%) for the delayed test.

Discussion of results

The comparison of students’ writing performance demonstrated in Essay 1, Essay 2, Essay 3 and the delayed test showed that, in stage 1, rewriting following a teacher’s direct corrections resulted in almost the same number of errors on a subsequent assignment and the delayed test even though students made much fewer errors on revision of the same assignment It meant that students’ short-term ability to edit certain types of errors did not always translate to long-term improvement As presented in Table 3.2, although the students made fewer errors in Essay 2 and Essay 3 compared to Essay 1, the change was not considerable In the delayed test at the end of stage 1, there were even a greater number of errors compared to Essay 3 This is partly due to the fact that the time for direct feedback to be applied is not long enough for students to incorporate what they have learnt from that period into their language input

Furthermore, in stage 1, the teachers provided the students with the correct form in every error, thus the students didn’t need to give much thought to revision and this direct intervention did not appear to have any lasting effect over time Therefore, after a month without any feedback, the students may forget what they learnt from teacher direct feedback This finding is in line with Ellis’s finding (2009) that direct feedback requires minimal processing on the part of the learners and thus, it may not contribute to long-term learning Regarding different types of errors, in stage 1 when direct feedback was used, the number of errors in verb tense, verb form, subject- verb agreement and article was not on the decline after each essay These kinds of errors even showed a slight increase in the number in the delayed test Surprisingly, there were fewer numbers of errors of language expression (word choice and collocation) and sentence structure in the subsequent writings and the delayed test in this stage This was partly due to the fact that some students tended to collected the fixed phrases and the structures they had been provided by the teacher when I corrected the students’ previous essay and used the in subsequent writing because most Essay in this stage were of the same kind (write about the benefits or advantages of something) The finding can be explained by Lee’s (2005) suggestion that direct feedback may be appropriate in a situation when errors are “untreatable” that are not susceptible to self- correction such as sentence structure and word choice However, this result is not in line with Van Beuningen, Dejong and Kuiken’s (2012) claim that “Direct correction is better suited for grammatical errors and indirect correction is better suited for non- grammatical errors”

The situation was surprisingly the same for stage 2 when metalinguistic feedback was applied It was demonstrated in Table 3.3 that there was a very slight decrease in the number of errors in Essay 2 and Essay 3 compared to Essay 1

However, after one month, the number of errors in the delayed test wasn’t on the same decline Looking back at the students’ essays in this stage, I found that when some students received coded corrective feedback on some linguistic errors that they still could not correct on their own, they often showed the tendency to avoid these types of errors in the next essay and invented a new structure instead, thus errors were unavoidable This finding did not accord with the superior longitudinal effect of metalinguistic explanation that has been found by Bitchener and Knoch (2010) In this stage, when metalinguistic corrective feedback was applied, the number of article errors constantly reduced This result was similar to the finding of Sheen (2007) He found that metalinguistic corrective feedback was effective in increasing accuracy in the students’ use of articles in subsequent writing completed immediately after the corrective feedback treatment However, there was little or no change in other kinds of errors especially the ones of language expression and sentence structure When asked for reasons, some students said that whether there was a code from the teacher or not they still knew that they made a word choice error but they did not find the right word or phrase to replace it if the teacher did not provide them the correct word Therefore, they still made these types of errors in the next essay The research also found that the overall accuracy of the participants varied significantly across the four writing times in the same stage In other words, there was not a linear and upward pattern of improvement from one time to another This was not surprising as earlier research has shown that L2 learner, on the process of learning new linguistic forms, may perform them with accuracy on one occasion but fail to do so on other, similar occasions (Ellis,1994; Lightbow & Spada, 1999; Pienemann, 1989)

In contrast, rewriting based on a teacher’s underlining led to fewer errors on a subsequent assignment and in the delayed test The comparison of 140 students’ papers showed that students made statistically significant reductions in their total number of errors in three categories (see Table 3.4) over four writing times This showed some advantages of underlining as a strategy for corrective feedback When Students received underlining only in the last assignment, they had to work out correction themselves, and this process likely improved their self-editing ability Thus, they were more conscious of the linguistic errors when writing a new essay In other words, indirect feedback that students received may have helped them more over time because it consistently called these errors to their attention, triggering the “guided learning and problem-solving” processes as recommended by Lalande (1982, p.140) Regarding different types of errors in this stage, students made fewer errors in Essay 2 and Essay

3 and the delayed test in almost all of categories of errors The students made a lot of improvement in the language usage, especially in terms of grammar The reduction of errors in verb tense and form, subject-verb agreement and article was significant This indicated that when receiving less explicit feedback, students paid some attention to language usage when they wrote a different essay Although this awareness cannot be completely attributed to the effect of indirect correction they received on the previous essays, the process of finding out the correct form by students themselves in the revision of the first essay seemed to help students internalize the rules related to the grammatical errors They could then avoid similar errors in the subsequent writing In stage 3, the number of errors of language expression and sentence structure wasn’t on the gradual decrease from Essay 1 to Essay 2 and Essay 3 as well as the delayed test

As discussed earlier, lexical errors are not rule-based, are thus harder to be treated than grammatical errors Though students could correct some of the lexical errors marked by the teacher in revision, they made new errors when producing a new piece of writing The result of this comparison collaborates with Bitchener et al’s (2005) finding that indirect corrective feedback resulted in greater accuracy in terms of the simple past tense and the definite article while no effect was found in the use of vocabulary It is possible that linguistic features or knowledge of these errors, which are not rule- governed, require much more frequencies of intake to acquire, and the acquisition of the linguistic knowledge of this kind take much longer time than the rule-governed linguistic knowledge; the treatment of this study may not have provided enough inputs, and the time span of the study may also not long enough for any considerable change to happen Also, the acquisition process may be diverse among different domains of a language The finding also gives more evidence related to relationship between the effect of feedback and the nature of errors This finding can be explained by what Ferris (1999) called “treatable” and “untreatable” errors “Treatable” errors are those that occur in a patterned, rule-governed way (e.g., verb tense and form, subject-verb agreement, article usage, plural and possessive noun endings, and sentence fragments), so learners can be pointed to a grammar book or set of rules to resolve the errors In contrast, errors can be considered “untreatable” (such as word choice errors, and unidiomatic sentence structure) L2 learners cannot improve their performance of these linguistic categories until they acquire more idiosyncratic knowledge of the target language (Ferris, 1999, 2010) This finding suggests that written indirect corrective feedback can have significant impact only on “treatable” errors

In brief, after three stages of correction, the total number of errors declined

However, using different feedback strategies can change the number of individual error type flexibly It is found from Table 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, that after each correction, the changing of the number of each error type is not the same for all The data collected in all three stages has shown that positive feedback strategy can help students to reduce errors in writing and among these three strategies, indirect corrective feedback with suitable procedures make great sense It is suggested that indirect feedback is more effective than direct feedback and metalinguistic feedback in the long run and it is also argued that indirect feedback requires students to engage in guided learning and problem solving and, as a result, promotes the type of reflection, noticing and attention that is more likely to foster long-term acquisition (Ferris and Roberts, 2001).

Students’ attitudes towards different types of CF and their effectiveness

3.2.1 Students’ attitudes towards teacher corrective feedback in general

The results of the students’ narratives indicated that about 97.1% of the students (34 of out of 35 students) admitted that teacher corrective feedback had positive effect on their writing performance and wished to receive more feedback in the future They provided several reasons for their wish, mainly related to the improvement of their writing As one student said: “Now I can see the positive impact of the error correction on my essay Last year, my writing skill was very bad, I can’t usually finish my writing in the allowance time Now, I have made a lot of improvements in my writing skill”

Others said: “My teacher’s feedback in the last semester certainly results in a significant improvement in my writing” and “Indicating my errors by my teacher can help me avoid them in subsequent writing” One student also explained that if he were not to receive feedback on all his errors, the errors would remain Therefore, “I want feedback in order not to fossilize wrong information in my mind” The students’ positive attitude towards teacher corrective feedback explained the steady reduction in the number of errors in the students’ essay before and after the feedback was provided

In contrast, only one student expressed some hesitation about the effectiveness of corrective feedback on improving accuracy in writing Although she said that her writing has greatly improved over the last six months, she didn’t think this was because of the teacher’s feedback She attributed her writing progress to frequent writing practice over a long period of time As she put it: “Practice makes perfect.” She also said that the teacher’s thorough instruction and input before writing were enough for her to have a good essay She only needed some time after finishing her writing to read the essay and check the mistakes on her own, because most errors made in her writing were due to carelessness or mistakes induced by psychological factors Looking back at this student’s writing papers, it was interesting to see that, her essays were quite good

Some of these essays were error-free, some essays still contained linguistic errors but not the serious ones Her idea is partly reasonable due to the fact that “Practice makes perfect.” but somehow, in many cases, only “Good practice makes perfect.” As another student said: “We all know that practice makes perfect, but only practice without careful instruction from the teacher can not make us successful in learning a language especially in writing skill.”

3.2.2 Students’ preference for each type of teacher corrective feedback

Students’ preference for each type of teacher corrective feedback is demonstrated in the following pie chart

Figure 3.1: Students’ students' attitudes towards the use of teacher written corrective feedback

As for types of written corrective feedback, 40% of the students (14 out of 35

“Direct correction is one of the easiest ways to correct errors, because the correct forms are provided.” They provided different reasons for their preference for direct feedback

The two main ones were related to the advantage of the immediate identification of the correct form and also the certainty of the correct answer As one student said, “It is because it would be clearer for me when revising my writing.” These students were also concerned that errors code may not lead them to the correct amendments As one student put it, “If the teacher does not provide the correct answer, then I may not be sure that the one I write can be correct This kind of feedback also helps me avoid misunderstanding.” Others also expressed their lack of confidence in their ability to correct their errors and their belief that error correction was the work of their teacher

However, two students said that although they liked this kind of feedback, they thought that: “Indirect feedback should only be used at the time when students were not used to writing If the teacher used this kind of feedback for a long period of time, it would be very time-consuming for the teacher and it would also make students lazier.”

Evidence from students’ revised essays in stage 1 when direct feedback was applied showed that students did show greater improvement in their revised drafts than the other types of feedback Also, despite the fact that students were in favor of teacher’s giving direct feedback, which was expressed in most free narratives, the effectiveness of this type of feedback in the long run was little compared to indirect feedback

On the other hand, 15 students (42.86%) expressed their preferences for metalinguistic corrective feedback They admitted that they wanted underlining together with codes of the errors in their writing because they wanted to know what kind of errors they made

They agreed that direct correction was one of the easiest ways to correct errors, but students may not understand why they made those errors and tended to make the same errors when they wrote different sentences Underlining and description can provide information on errors, so the students can figure out the correct forms by themselves

As one student put it: “I need some information about my mistakes, underlining error only is sometimes confusing, because I may make wrong guesses about my errors.”

However, in the process of marking errors, I noticed that it is that student who sometimes took a word choice error as a word form error, even when the codes were provided For other students who had the same ideas about metalinguistic feedback still had a successful revision even when codes were not given The analysis of the students’ essays presented an interesting contrast with students’ comment in their narratives In other words, there was a discrepancy between students’ preference for each type of feedback and its real effectiveness

It was more surprising to find that indirect feedback which proved its superior long- term effectiveness over the other two types of feedback in the students’ new pieces of writing was not preferred by many students Only 6 students (17.14%) liked this type of feedback more than the other types, but their reasons for their preference were extremely satisfactory and deserved to get closer attention from teachers The students who preferred this type of feedback noted its benefits in terms of learners’ autonomy

For instance, one student said; “It will help me in learning from my mistakes and to be more independent in identifying my errors.” They even said that it was the most effective type of feedback for English gifted students In their explanation of the choice, these students expressed that, compared with direct correction and coded feedback, indirect feedback helped them become more independent of their teacher in both identifying and correcting errors As one of them said: “This kind of feedback forces me to decide on the kind of error and correct it myself so it helps me develop the ability to self-correct In addition, finding out and correcting my own mistakes also helps me remember the knowledge longer.” Moreover, teacher’s indirect corrective feedback helped the students to find more reference sources for their study, to improve their self-study and problem-solving skill and to be motivated in learning writing As one of them said: “Indirect feedback helps me more responsible for my writing It improves not only my self-study skill but also my problem-solving skill.” Another student added: “ We knew that we would be independent writers after finishing this school year and would, therefore, have to rely on ourselves to fix our errors in the future writings.” Last but not least, the students also admitted that indirect feedback helped them a lot in memorizing something and in doing other exercises related to grammar and vocabulary She said: “Indirect feedback helps me realize the mistakes which before that I did not think they were incorrect Therefore, this kind of feedback helps me avoid misconception It also helps me memorize words, phrases and structure better and it is really beneficial when I do exercises in vocabulary and grammar.” As discussed earlier, indirect feedback was the most effective type of feedback for students in this class It is, therefore, amazing to see that not many students preferred this type of feedback Once again we see that the students’ preference for a certain type of feedback did not accord with its proved effectiveness As Ferris (2003) put it, “what is preferable cannot be equated with what is effective, and what is effective for one student in one setting might be less so in another context”

In brief, the analysis of the students’ papers presented an interesting contrast with the students’ comment in their narratives Most of the students preferred more explicit types of corrective feedback while from their writing evidence, implicit type of corrective feedback proved its effectiveness in the long run

3.2.3 Students’ expectations for better use of teacher corrective feedback

With regard to the students’ suggestions to improve the effectiveness of teacher feedback, all of their ideas were constructive and deserved to be taken into account

Although they differed in their beliefs on which type of written corrective feedback was better, they all believed that the types of feedback given should vary with the students’ proficiency level, error category and the time at which the feedback was provided and the combination of different types of CF

First of all, plenty of the learners expected their instructor to continue to encourage them to write at least two drafts for one topic, which enabled them to improve their writing perfectly in terms of ideas, organization, language use and grammatical structures The following are their ideas: “The teacher should ask students to write more than one drafts because much writing gives us more chance to widen our vocabulary, structure, grammar and to improve writing skills We also receive frequent feedback from our teacher if we write more” Most of them also agreed that some revised drafts should be checked to make sure that the students do something to self- correct their errors and to check the accuracy of their correction

Reflection

The result of this study showed that the use of teacher corrective feedback in writing class during the last six months made a considerable contribution to the students’ improvement in their writing performance All of 35 students became interested in writing lessons Before the implementation of the action, most of the students were not interested in learning writing, and they often made a lot of mistakes in their essays However, from the beginning to the end of the action implementation, all of the students became more active and concentrated on their writing Furthermore, from the research data, it is inferred that the provision of teacher corrective feedback in this action research was effective in reducing linguistic errors in both revised essays and subsequent writings This result was also confirmed in the students’ free narratives

Thirty four students said that their writing skill had gradually improved thanks to the teacher corrective feedback Only one student attributed his writing improvement to constant practice not teacher feedback However, she also admitted that she really became more interested in writing

As a teacher and also the researcher, I also learnt a lot from this action research

I had to admit that one of the most frustrating tasks of language teachers is correcting errors, and seeing them happen again in the students’ writing Despite a great proportion of time correcting errors, there is often a feeling that the same errors are being corrected again and again Teachers must accept the fact that L2 writing contains errors, it is our responsibility to help learner develop strategies for self-correction and regulation After students self-correct their errors, there should be some activities to revise some students’ drafts and explain some common errors made by the students

I also learnt that although the students had positive attitudes towards the teacher’s application of corrective feedback they varied considerably in what they want from teachers in the forms of feedback They often had their own concerns and preferences, but students’ preference for certain feedback type sometimes may not associate with its effectiveness Therefore, it is important that teacher seek to discover these and to the extent possible, address them in their feedback Feedback type should be made with clear purposes rather than with reference to the students’ preferences

It was my experience that, for English major students, self-correction should be encouraged; however, direct correction is sometimes necessary In general, different students and different errors require certain feedback type, teachers should be flexible in dealing with these errors First, teacher can use indirect feedback for all errors and give students chance to self-correct, when they cannot correct, teacher uses direct feedback Metalinguistic may be unnecessary in this context

All in all, with evidence from students’ essays and narratives, it can be concluded that teacher corrective feedback has had positive impact on students’ writing performance and their attitudes towards writing in general and teacher corrective feedback in particular Although there was not too much change, it was a good signal showing the potential effects of teacher corrective feedback in writing class It is expected that if the research is carried out in the next cycle, I can give better result

For more effective use of teacher written corrective feedback, teachers and students should bear the following suggestions in mind

Firstly, teachers should deliver feedback at intermediate stages of the writing process This is necessary because when students are required to write drafts, they can receive feedback during and between the writing of their drafts so that they can respond to feedback and may more actively attend to the teacher’s comments and suggestions To do this, teachers should ask themselves before giving feedback if their feedback leads students to positive learning experiences in their revision process, how their responses shape the students’ view of what revision is, and if their comments help students to see what actions they should take when they revise their papers Moreover, revised versions of students’ writing should be checked by teachers to make sure that students use different sources to self-correct the indicated errors and to check the accuracy in students’ corrections In writing class, students’ common errors in their writing should be discussed and explained by teachers and students By doing that students will have a chance to look back into their own self-correction and find a suitable way to correct their most common errors in writing This is also an interesting learning activity that motivates the students in writing In addition, teachers’ identification and explanation of common errors made by learners also helps teachers to have some thoughts of what to do next with teaching

Secondly, teacher corrective feedback must take individual and contextual variables into account It is also suggested that the students with lower competence in English should be paid more attention to because if they do not know how to self- correct the indicated errors, they will have negative attitudes towards writing and, as a result, their writing accuracy can not be improved In fact, a profound effect of teacher corrective feedback can be expected when feedback given to the students is based on their language proficiency, writing ability and their needs In other words, in many cases, teachers need to know their individual students’ prior experiences, knowledge, and expectations, and give different types feedback to meet individual students’ needs and desires However, the results of the study revealed a mismatch between students’ preferences and beliefs towards each corrective feedback type and its effectiveness

Therefore, it is also very important for teacher not to be influenced by students’ beliefs and preferences when delivering corrective feedback Teacher should apply a certain feedback type for a particular student because that type of feedback is the most effective and suitable for that student, not because that type of feedback is specially preferred by the student It is strongly recommended that teachers should help students understand how feedback is intended to affect their writing and why it is given in such way Also, teachers should make an effort to explore their students’ beliefs about writing, feedback, and error correction and to try to bridge any gap between their own and students’ expectations and the gap between students’ preference for a certain type of feedback and its real effect on their writing performance It is teachers’ responsibility to be aware of their students’ perceptions of what helps them progress and to somehow incorporate these perceptions in their teaching Therefore, incorporating classroom discussions in error correction, feedback, and writing can be essential in helping high school teachers become familiar with their students’ beliefs about what constitutes effective feedback and modifying these beliefs accordingly

Finally, teachers’ positive attitudes and their willing to help the students with their self-correction are of great importance Some of the students may get frustrated and de- motivated because they might not know what to do with the indicated errors That is why teachers have to inspire and convince learners that teachers welcome their questions and worries It is suggested that teachers should look at students’ errors not simply as failures, but as windows into their minds After the remedying process, more exercises or drills should be given so as to give them more opportunity of seeing and repeating the use of these forms

Teachers’ effort will be less effective unless learners want to give right responses Corrective feedback is very necessary for learners to assess and monitor themselves Without individual attention and sufficient feedback on errors, improvement will not take place Thus, students have to involve themselves in the error correction process Good interaction between teachers and students is crucial to establish conductive learning atmosphere It is not an easy task for teachers to identify and acknowledge the students’ problems with their writing and their self-correction

Thus students’ cooperation is needed to improve their writing accuracy

Students are encouraged to monitor their progress by paying more attention to their common errors They should use different sources to self-correct the indicated errors and take notes of their errors and correction, for instance, on their notebook or error record sheet Then, they can always review what they have read and remember their errors so that they will not make these mistakes in the future

Students’ progress depends not only on the teachers’ effort, but also on their own Therefore, students need to be engaged in the error correction process because it will enhance their language acquisition This will lead them to be autonomous learners that are able to self correct their written work

1 Summary of the main findings

In the study, three types of teacher corrective feedback were applied to investigate their effects on writing performance of 12 th form English major students at Luong Van Tuy Gifted High School Thirty five 12 th form English major students were chosen to take part in the six-month action research The data collected were collected from students’ essays and narratives After the action implementation, the study answered the two research questions

1 How do three common types of teacher written corrective feedback (namely direct, indirect, metalinguistic) influence students’ writings as reflected in their revised essays and new essays?

2 How are students’ preferences to the feedback types related to their writing improvement?

Regarding the first question, the findings suggest that teacher corrective feedback helped reduce students’ linguistic errors over time While positive revision effects were found for all three types of corrective feedback, only indirect feedback proved to have significant long-term effect In terms of the revision effect; results have shown that all three types of feedback led to successful revision Direct feedback proved its superior effectiveness in revised essays This is because, for the most part students simply copied the correction provided by the teacher Immediate revision effect was also clearly seen in stage 2 and 3 when metalinguistic feedback and indirect feedback were applied respectively This revision effect of indirect corrections can be related to the fact that the students probably had the so-called declarative or explicit knowledge about grammar which helped them correct their mistakes when located by the teacher This suggests that students may be capable of correcting their own errors in the editing or revision as long as they are guided as to where their errors are However, when it came to the effects of the 3 types of written corrective feedback in new pieces of writing, it could be noted that the three types of corrective feedback had slightly different effects on different types of errors Indirect feedback consistently proved its consistent effectiveness in most linguistics errors in the long run, especially “treatable” or “rule-based” errors Direct feedback had a little immediate effect on errors of language expression (word choice, collocation) and sentence structure Metalinguistic or coded corrective feedback proved its effectiveness in reducing article errors

Limitations of the study

Although all the research questions are addressed and the aims of the research are achieved, the study still has the following major limitations

This action research is conducted in only one cycle Also, the break between each stage is only one week so the effectiveness of teacher CF in stages 2 and 3 may be influenced by the preceding stage Because of the limited time, the researcher could not continue the action in the next cycle to investigate whether the students’ expectations and suggestions in their narratives are practical or not Despite the limitations above, the researcher hopes that the study will make a contribution to the better situation of teaching and learning writing skill at Luong Van Tuy Gifted High School.

Plans for the next cycle

For the next cycle, the types of written corrective feedback that the students preferred as reported in this cycle will be experimented to measure the correlation between the students’ preferred types of feedback and their improvement in writing performance Moreover, in the next cycle, one more research instrument such as interview is suggested to maximize the reliability of the study result It is also highly recommended that the next cycle should take students’ suggestions (from their narratives) into account to see whether they are practical or not

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SV Subject verb agreement problem

Art Incorrect / wrong / missing article

1 Write an essay of about 250 words about the advantages of living in a family with three or four generations

2 Write an essay of about 250 words about the benefits of playing sports/ doing physical exercise

3 Write an essay of about 250 words about the benefits of national and international sports events

4 “Children should be engaged in doing house work.” Do you agree or disagree?

5 Write an essay of about 250 words about the importance of examination

6 Write an essay of about 250 words to express your answer to the following question:

“How important is tertiary study to you?”

7 Would you prefer to do an undergraduate course abroad or in your country? Explain your choice

8 Should high school students be encouraged to take a part-time job?

9 What do you think of the cooperation among high school students nowadays?

10 Which do you prefer: team learning or individual learning?

11 Write an essay of about 250 words about the benefits of reading books?

12 Write an essay of about 250 words about the roles of women in our society

When I started practising writing essays for the first time, my skill was very bad Now,

I still have problem with choosing the right words for the topic and I have a tendency to translate Vietnamese sentences into English so my sentences sometimes, seem to be meaningless However after writing essays with different topics for a couple of times, my writing skill has improved a lot It’s because of the feedback that you gave me in every essay that I wrote Your feedback in the last semester certainly results in a significant improvement in my writing Indicating my errors by my teacher can help me avoid them in subsequent writing In my opinion, I’d prefer indirect corrective feedback The reason why I like it is because it helps me to realize my mistakes and find the way to correct them This kind of corrective feedback only helps me to find out the mistakes so my job is to think what kind of mistakes they are and how to fix them correctly If I get the direct corrective feedback I will just read them perfunctorily and then I will forget about them in the next days The metallinguistic corrective feedback doesn’t show directly what my mistakes are but it does point out the kind of the mistakes so I just have to find another word or structure to replace them In conclusion, it can be clearly seen that indirect corrective feedback has more advantages and it can help to develop more skills than two types mentioned above

Personally, I think that practice makes perfect because I have written essays for many time so I’m getting used to the English style instead of being affected by my first language Moreover, finding out and correcting my own mistakes by myself also helps me to remember the knowledge deeper and longer We knew that we would be independent writers after finishing this school year and would, therefore, have to rely on ourselves to fix our errors in the future writings (Nguyen Quynh Giang )

In the University entrance Examination, essay writing accounts for fewer points than other parts However, it will be very important If we want to have a very good mark in English When this school year started, most of us could do fairly well in multiple- choice exercises , and didn’t pay much attention to writing After 6 months practising writing, my writing skill has improved significantly One reason is that we practise more but for me the most important reason is corrective feedback we have received

Because, If our mistake weren’t checked & correct, we would not made such a lot of progress

At first, I like direct feedback because I can always realize why I made these mistakes and how to correct them However, this way has some disadvantages We don’t have to think much so it is easy for us to forget For me, among 3 types of CF, the most effective type of CF is indirect feedback and now I like this kind of feedback most

You only underlined and we had to think carefully to find the correct answer and then you checked again, so we would remember longer and paid more attention to these mistakes in the next essays Indirect feedback helps me realize the mistakes which before that I did not think they were incorrect Therefore, this kind of feedback helps me avoid misconception It also helps me memorize words, phrases and structure better and it is really beneficial when I do exercises in vocabulary and grammar

I think, using codes and symbols is not effective I don’t like this type of CF because it takes a lot of time to look up the error code sheet These are some of my ideas, I hope that you will have the most effective way to mark our essays in the next semester depending on each student’s ability and each kind of error Thank you very much (Do Thi Mai)

From grade 10 to the end grade 11, I didn’t pay much attention to practising writing skill Only when you asked us to write every week and to write 2 drafts for each essay can I improve my writing ability I have learnt to make outlines, & to write a short essay in about 35 minutes After more than one semester writing regularly, I realized that my writing skill has been greatly improved Among your ways of giving feedback,

I think coded CF is the most suitable & effective because only underlining the mistakes will lead to misunderstanding and more mistakes I need some information about my mistakes, underlining error only is sometimes confusing, because I may make wrong guesses about my errors Furthermore, direct feedback is too time-consuming for teacher and it also makes us lazier However, I think that using codes is not suitable for errors of sentence structures, because I know that I’ve made a wrong sentence structure but I still don’t know how to correct it In the next semester, you can use indirect feedback for minor mistakes such as word form, verb tense, subject-verb agreement

For errors of sentence structure & word choice, you should give more detailed correction so that we can understand more clearly and avoid these mistakes in the next essay You should continue to ask us to write more than one drafts because much writing gives us more chance to widen our vocabulary, structure, grammar and to improve writing skills We also receive frequent feedback from our teacher if we write more I like the way you collect good points of other students and share with us, so we can note down and apply them in our writings The common errors should be analyzed and explained in class followed by additional exercise if many of us made the same error type I think that you should give written corrective feedback in combination with other sources including conference and oral comment when handing back our essays

After one semester learning writing, I have made a lot of improvements in my writing skill If I were not to receive feedback on all my errors, the errors would remain I want feedback in order not to fossilize wrong information in my mind It is because of the fact that after we finished writing, you collected the papers and corrected mistakes and asked us to rewrite and resubmit our essays In the first stage, you provided correct form, as a result we knew exactly what our problems were as well as the correct form

We also remembered what you provided and didn’t make these mistakes again I like this kind of feedback most Direct correction is one of the easiest ways to correct errors, because the correct forms are provided It is because it would be clearer for me when revising my writing In the next stages, you didn’t give correct form Instead, you underlined the errors and provided the symbols and let us self-correct This type is pretty good because I can realize my mistakes and have to find the correct form so I can remember longer However, this type of CF is sometimes inconvenient because I can’t remember some symbols, it takes me sometime to find explanation from the error code sheet Recently, you have only underlined errors This type of CF requires us to decide what kind of our mistakes are and then find the solutions I think the 2 nd types of

CF is the most effective However, when we are more familiar with writing, indirect feedback is suitable for errors in spelling, verb tenses & forms In the next semester, I think you should use different types of CF at the same time and choose different types of feedback for different students depending on writing abilities and English proficiency (Pham Thuy Lieu)

After one semester learning writing, I see that my writing skill has improved a lot