INTRODUCTION
Rationale of the study
Today, the importance of English is undeniable since English is used as an effective medium of international communication in the global context With the help of technology, English has been playing a major role in many fields covering education, trade, science, technology, tourism, sport, entertainment and many other sectors of life Besides, the need of learning the language has increased markedly with various purposes including business, foreign travel or academic study In order to meet this demand, teaching and learning English clearly becomes a key factor In process of learning English, writing is obviously one of the most important skills According to Nunan (1999), writing is “an extremely complex cognitive activity in which the writer is required to demonstrate controls of variables simultaneously” White and Arndt (1991) state that “Writing is far from being a simple matter of transcribing language into written symbols: it is thinking process in its own right It is a permanent record, as a form of expression and as a means of communication” The conclusion drawn out from the ideas above that writing is a really complex process involving different skills such as mental, rhetorical, psychological and critical aspects
From 1945 onwards, English has been taught and used in Vietnam as a foreign language However, since the early 1990s when English was taught formally as a compulsory subject in Vietnamese educational system, it has gradually gained its popularity among the foreign languages used in Vietnam
For English learners especially those who are studying in high schools, it is necessary for them to build up a positive attitude in allowing meaningful learning to take place Nonetheless, productive skills, especially writing is considered to be the “nightmare” for most students at high school Obviously, writing is predominantly product – oriented, and it requires a huge amount of individual work In Vietnamese high schools, there seems to be a little or no interaction among students in classroom activities, especially in writing lessons For most of time, the teacher gives the instructions, and then provides structures and vocabulary After that, students practice by doing exercises or writing essays by themselves Besides, only the teacher gives comments and does the correcting work However, with a really big size of a class (range from 40 to more than 50 students), the teacher has to make enormous effort to complete the marking and correcting task In reality, it is a time – consuming and stressful job
Thus, it is important to identify a class activity that not only could partly reduce the pressure and stress for the teacher, but also could open up the golden opportunities for students to enhance the skill of recognizing and correcting the mistakes simultaneously Using peer feedback has been proved to be effective in learning and teaching English, but has attracted little attention in writing lessons at high schools From my point of view, students read and comment on each other‟s writing, to some extent, increases their chances for interacting and improving their social relations and boosting their self-confidence and motivation as well After that, students could learn a lot through their peer‟s errors Therefore, using peer feedback may make the writing lessons more interesting and effective
Since 2014, the National high school graduation examination for students at without doubt, becomes a challenge for majority of students since writing is a complex and difficult skill In addition, very few students in class V3 of Luong The Vinh high school are interested in writing lesson Most of students in this class prefer scientific subjects and tend to use the result of Math, Physics and Chemistry for university examination Consequently, they ignore or underestimate English They are usually fed up with English lessons and are often under high pressure of writing Consequently, it is essential to find an effective way to improve the students‟ writing skill as well as gain student‟s interest and vary writing class activities That is the reason why I decided to work on “Using peer feedback on enhancing writing paragraph skills for students at grade 12, Luong The Vinh high school, Hanoi: Action research” for my thesis.
Aims of the study
The researcher carries out this study with two purposes Firstly, the study aims at investigating the student‟s attitudes towards using peer feedback in their writing lessons Secondly, the study explores the effectiveness of using peer feedback in writing lessons in the process of enhancing the student‟s improvement in writing.
Research questions
The study seeks to answer the following two questions:
1 To what extent does peer feedback improve student‟s writing ability?
2 What are student‟s attitudes towards using peer feedback in their writing lesson?
The scope of the study
The study was conducted at Luong The Vinh high school, Hanoi Because of limited time, it only focused on examining the effectiveness of using peer feedback in enhancing writing skill and the attitudes of the students towards using peer feedback This technique is applied for a group of 10 students, in the form of a private tutor group In terms of samples, the participants were 10 students from class 12V3 in the total of 40 students at Luong The Vinh high school, who were non-English major class and a teacher of English.
The method of the study
Action research methodology is applied to this study Regarding to the nature of an action research, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of using peer feedback on enhancing student‟s writing skill
This study followed the steps based on Nunan‟s action research model (1992)
In addition, a survey questionnaire was designed for the research The researcher explained the content and purpose of the questionnaire to the students clearly to help them fully understand it Finally, the data were collected, synthesized and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to obtain realistic results.
Significance of the study
As mentioned above, it is practically necessary for the researcher to address the issue of using peer feedback in the English writing classes The present study brings a lot of benefits for both students and teachers Firstly, for the students, it creates chance for them to develop giving and receiving comments about their writing Secondly, for the teachers, they would get a deeper insight into the peer feedback‟s advantages and also gain some practical advice about using peer correction and assessment Additionally, in most high schools of
Vietnam, teachers rarely use peer feedback as an official correction for student‟s writing Therefore, this result drawn from this study, more or less open up the opportunity to vary the activities in writing lesson as well as to reduce the huge amount of correcting mistakes teacher has to do, enhancing the quality of teaching and writing English at high school.
The structure of the thesis
The thesis consists of three main parts:
Part I, Introduction, presents the rationale of the study, the aims, the research questions, the significance, the scope, the method and the structure of the thesis
Part II, Development, includes three chapters:
Chapter 1, Literature Review, reviews the theories on writing approaches; the overview of peer feedback, the advantages and disadvantages of peer feedback; and related previous studies
Chapter 2, Methodology, describes the method of the study, the participants and the researcher Moreover, this chapter shows how the researcher applied the data collection instruments and her procedure of conducting the study
Chapter 3, Data analysis and findings, the researcher used quantitative and qualitative method to study and analyze the figure and information collected
Part III, Conclusion gives a summary of the study, pedagogical implications, its limitations and suggestions for further studies
DEVELOPMENT
LITERATURE REVIEW
Generally, the purpose of this chapter is to present an overview of the theoretical concepts underlining peer feedback, different writing approaches, the effects on the process of improving writing skills by using peer feedback and the previous related studies
In process of learning a language, writing is regarded as a product – oriented skill Based on the natural order hypothesis, writing is generally considered to be the skill obtained last According to Rivers (1968), writing refers to the way we express the ideas “in a system and organize the graphic conventions of the language” White (1994) argues that “Writing is far from being a simple matter of transcribing language into written symbols: it is thinking process in its own right It is a permanent record, as a form of expression and as a means of communication” Meanwhile, Jalaludin (2011) states that
“Writing is a system for interpersonal communication using various styles of language” The conclusion drawn out from the ideas above could be understood that writing is a really complex process or a “complicated cognitive task” which involves different skills as it is an activity that requires the writer to think carefully, follow the discipline and highly concentrate
Overall, there are many approaches to teaching writing in English This part mainly represents 3 common approaches practice today: The product approach, the process approach and the genre approach
In general, the product approach mainly focuses on the writing products with the belief that learning is a mechanical process or habit formation Both Richards (1990) and Nunan (1999) state that the product approach is possibly regarded as the most traditional approach among L2 writing approaches
Referring to the historical perspective, Flower (1984), Ferris and Hedgcock
(2004) consider that this approach shares the similarity with the audio-lingual method of second language teaching that appeared in the 1950‟s and early 1960‟s Specifically, writing was used as a tool to “reinforce oral patterns and to check learners' correct application of grammatical rules.” The product approach aims to make learners “imitate a model text for the purpose of producing a correct piece of writing” (McDonough & Shaw, 2003)
Additionally, according to Pincas (1982) and Badger and White (2000) the product approach greatly concentrates on delivering linguistic knowledge relating to grammatical accuracy, structure, vocabulary, punctuation, and spelling to learner
Actually, the product approach could generate both advantages and disadvantages In terms of advantages, this approach greatly supplies the learner with the linguistic knowledge For example, this approach could enhance the learners‟ grammatical accuracy, “especially with lower-level students”, and enriching learners‟ range of vocabulary (McDonough & Shaw,
2003) Nonetheless, this approach also has a couple of disadvantages for several reasons Firstly, learners easily remain passively on a model answer
Badger and White (2000) criticize “it does not allow much of a role for the planning of a text, nor for other process skills” Consequently, students would, to some extent, become “frustrated and demotivated” when they make comparison between their writing and the given models Secondly, the learners greatly lack of flexibility when they have to cope with the real life situation writing Hairston (1982) also argues that using this approach in teaching writing fails to encourage students to practice writing as it does not show them how to write in real-life situations Thirdly, the learner seems to lose the motivation and self – esteem if this approach is applied in the long term Yan (2005) believes that product approach “ignores the actual process used by students or any writers to produce a piece of writing”
In a nutshell, the product approach only concentrates on the final product of the student writers without paying attention to the factors involving the process of writing and the need of writing in real - life situations
This approach is considered as a reaction against product-based approaches, where the focus “has shifted from the final product to the underlying processes of writing that enable writers to produce written texts” This approach regards writing as “the exercise of linguistic skills and writing development as an unconscious process that occurs when teachers facilitate the exercise of writing skills” (Badger & White, 2000; Zhang, 1995) In terms of a historical perspective, Zamel (1976) believes that this approach follows a model of the composing processes proposed by psychologists, relating to three central elements in writing, namely planning, translating, and reviewing
According to Liu and Hansen (2002) and Zamel (1983), this approach mainly concentrates on the composing process, indicating that writing “is not as a product-oriented activity, focusing only on the final product, but rather as a nonlinear, exploratory, and generative process”
Generally, the process approach offers a huge amount of advantages and disadvantages First of all, in terms of advantages, Badger and White (2000) suggest that the process approach opens up the opportunity for learners to be conscious of the importance of the various skills relating in writing process
Additionally, by applying this approach, learners could practice some classroom activities involving to linguistic knowledge such as pre - writing, brainstorming, drafting and editing and less focus on linguistic knowledge aspects such as grammar and range off vocabulary (Badger & White, 2003;
White & Arndt, 1991) Secondly, regarding to disadvantages, the process approach fails to provide linguistic knowledge for learners It means that students are not provided the sufficient language input to support them to write efficiently Furthermore, Ivanic (2004) states that aspects of writing and writing processes “might not be easy to assess, meaning that the assessment will usually be preserved for the final product” Besides, the process approach does not distinguish the text-type, context, and purpose for writing Therefore, students may not be well - prepared for the exams which result of final products mainly decides level and grade they get
In short, the process-oriented approach refers to a teaching approach that greatly concentrates on the process a writer engages in when constructing meaning This teaching approach involves editing as a final stage in text creation
The genre approach to teaching writing is mainly concerned, as the name indicates, on teaching particular genres that students need control of in order to succeed in particular situations Hyland (2007) states this approach is an
“outcome of the communicative language teaching approach” which gained large popularity in the 1970‟s It is also shown by Badger and White (2000) as
METHODOLOGY
This chapter presents the methodology applied, including the discussions of the research method, data collection instrument, procedure of collecting data and the participants of the study
The research method which is applied in this study is action research In the recent time, action research has increasingly gained the popularity due to the belief that teacher would be the best assessor for his or her quality of teaching Using action research for this study is suitable because of following three main reasons
Firstly, the main purpose of the study is to “evaluate” the application of the new technique – peer feedback in writing lessons Burns (2010) defines the action research is the reflection of practice and teacher plays a role of researcher simultaneously In other words, action research relates to a “self- reflective, critical and systematic” research method to identify and deeply understand the teaching and learning context According to Tsui (1993), action research is a very effective way of helping teachers to reflect on their teaching and to come up with their own alternatives to improve their practice”
Secondly, it involves “small-scale intervention” when a specific problem is identified; specific actions are implemented to bring about the changes and solutions to solve the problems The specific problem in this study is that the students have low writing ability as well as low or no interest in writing lessons According to Cohen and Manion (1994), an action research involves a “small –scale intervention” in the performance of the world outside and a
“close examination” with the results of such this intervention The information is gathered with the goals of gaining insight, developing reflective practice, effecting positive changes in the school environment and improving student outcomes
Thirdly, it is the way the teachers respond to the changing demands of a teaching situation, namely it is the need for an effective way of writing As defined by Mills (2003), action research is “any systematic inquiry” conducted by teacher researchers to gather information about the ways that their particular school operates how they teach, and how well their students learn The information is gathered with the goals of gaining insight, developing reflective practice, effecting positive changes in the school environment and on educational practices in generals, and improving student outcomes
To sum up, an action research is carried out to improve the current affairs by identifying and addressing a problem in a specific context and with a scientific way Thus, the action research is a truly suitable research method for this study
According to Nunan (1992), seven phases are distinguished to be conducted within each research cycle
Figure 1: Action research cycle (Nunan, 1992)
The researcher observe or do survey about what is happening via video, audio, hash marks, or whatever relevant means are available Then, the problem will be determined
An attempt will be made to collect the concrete information about what the problem is
The researcher designs an activity to address the problem and gives hypothesis for the research
The ongoing regular classroom activities will be interrupted and a new treatment will be applied to the class The main purpose of this is to bring change in the organizing state of affairs
The researcher evaluates the effect of the intervention by analyzing the changes
It is the activity carried out after completing the study The researcher will share the findings of the study to other people
Here, the findings of the study are followed up by the practitioners As a result, the regular way of teaching and learning is changed and the new method is adopted to introduce certain changes in the studying progress
Addressing and solving the practical problems of an academic context by bridging the gap between the theory and practice is the ultimate purpose of an action research
1.3 Action research procedure for this study
Action research is employed in this study to investigate the effectiveness of peer feedback on students‟ writing skill The author follows seven steps in the action research cycle by Nunan (1992) in conducting this study The Nunan„s action research model was adapted to this study because the cycles are simple, clear and easy to follow.
In the process of teaching the writing skill for a group of 10 students in form of a private tutor group, the author discovered that the students‟ writing ability was quite low Most of them found it difficult and bored to write the paragraph correctly Therefore, when they were asked write, they could not write even the simple sentences Another big problem the researcher found was that many students were not motivated in class and were not interested in writing lessons They sat in class quietly, listened and took note passively
To investigate the causes of these above problems, the researcher based on her teaching experiences, the result of the pre- test and student‟s pre- questionnaire Some students revealed that they lack of expressions and vocabulary It was because of their low English proficiency as well
Furthermore, many of them expressed that they are afraid of making mistakes; particularly they did have no interest in writing lessons
After reviewing initial data, the researcher formed the hypothesis that students had difficulties and they are unmotivated in writing lessons because they are afraid of making mistakes and unable to correct the mistakes due to low English proficiency
Based on the hypothesis above, the researcher suggested using a new technique of peer feedback in the hope of solving the problem Firstly, the researcher introduced the student feedback form to the students After completing writing version for a topic, the students exchanged their writing and gave feedback The feedback was focused on two aspects: writing mechanics and writing content The writing mechanics covers 4 main elements: capitalization, punctuation, spelling and verb agreement The writing content included the unclear meaning sentences and the suggestion to make the writing better After giving feedback, students counted the number of mistakes and filled in the student feedback form The teacher would check again to examine the quality of student‟s given feedback After that, the researcher collected the data and then carried out to analyze the data
During the period of implementing the new technique, the researcher used the following three instruments to help her to see the effectiveness of her intervention: pre and post-test, pre and post questionnaire and the student‟s feedback form
STEP 6 and 7: DISSEMINATION AND FOLLOW- UP
The author discussed the effectiveness of peer feedback in writing lessons in this thesis In addition, the researcher gave some suggestion for the further studies
2.1.1 Rationale for the use of questionnaire
The questionnaire was chosen as a tool for collecting data for this study due to the following reasons
Firstly, this study aims at investigating the attitude of students towards using peer feedback in the writing lessons Meanwhile, Richards (1990) states the benefit of using questionnaire in research as an effective gathering information tool in terms of teaching and learning field such as “beliefs, attitudes, motivation, and preferences” Therefore, questionnaire could support greatly for the aim of the study
DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
In this chapter, the results of the research will be presented, explained and discussed in order to deal with two research questions raised at the beginning of the study Based on the results and discussions, these two questions will be addressed in turn in this chapter
1 The effectiveness of peer feedback in writing skill
The data for this part was collected from both writing versions and questionnaire The effectiveness of peer feedback in writing skill was shown in 2 main aspects: frequency of making mistakes in writing versions during 7 weeks taking action plan and the result of pre- test and post – test
1.1 The result of pre-test and post - test
The results of the pre – test and post – test partly illustrate the improvement in student‟s writing skill when the peer feedback technique was applied in 7 weeks from week 2 to week 8) The total number of mistakes is shown in the Chart 1 as follow:
Chart 1: Total number of mistakes in pre-test and post- test
From Chart 1, we found that the number of mistakes which student made decreased after using peer feedback Specifically, the mechanic mistakes such as capitalization, punctuation, spelling and verb agreement showed a remarkable fall from 250 to 97 Meanwhile, the mistakes relating to unclear meaning sentences witnessed a slight decrease, from 50 to 33
Additionally, the results collected from student feedback form in 7 weeks also, to some extent, revealed the improvement of student‟s writing skill through using peer feedback This result was double checked by the teacher to see the quality of student‟s feedback The number of mistakes identified by teacher and students in 7 weeks is shown in the following Table 2
SS T SS T SS T SS T SS T SS T
C= Capitalization P= Punctuation S= Spelling V= Verb UM= Unclear meaning SS= Students T= Teacher I= What can be added to make writing better
Table 2: Total number of mistakes identified by teacher and students
Generally, there was a downward trend in the number of mistakes made by students during 7 weeks using peer feedback
Obviously, capitalization and punctuation group came out first in the decrease rate Both of these two groups saw a sharp plunge, to 6 and 6 from 21 and 31 respectively By contrast, the number of unclear meaning sentence illustrated a slight fall from 17 (week 2) to 12 (week 8)
To be remarkable, the number of feedback given by students relating to improvement that can be added to make writing better was by far the smallest among the group of feedback, just from 2 to 4 feedbacks given through 7 weeks
In a word, the number of mistakes decreased considerably in terms of writing mechanics, namely the capitalization, punctuation, spelling and verb agreement On the contrary, there were a few changes on the improvement of writing content
From this table, we also draw the comparison between the number of mistakes identified by teacher and students Overall, there is no or very little difference between two kinds of feedback in group of mechanics including capitalization, punctuation, spelling and verb agreement The gap is always smaller than 5 mistakes Especially, in the final 2 weeks, the number of mistakes given by teacher and students are equal, 11 and 6 respectively in terms of capitalization or 10 and 6 respectively in terms of punctuation
On the other hand, there is a great gap in the number of mistakes involving the unclear meaning Specifically, the number of mistakes given by teacher nearly doubled or tripled the student‟s one
In summary, the quality of student‟s feedback was good in terms of correcting the writing mechanic mistakes However, the students did not recognize the mistakes relating to the lexical issue and writing content
The findings above are also supported by the data collected from the post- questionnaire Question 7 in the post-questionnaire investigated the capacity of avoiding the mistakes after peer feedback was applied to correct their mistakes in 7 weeks This probably indicates the effectiveness of using peer feedback on enhancing student‟s writing skill The majority of students (8/10) claimed that they were able to avoid repeating the mistakes that they had been corrected from peer feedback Only 2 students still made the same mistakes as they did before
The given reasons could be listed as they were careless, paid no attention when writing or they did not truly understand why those mistakes happened and how to correct
2 Attitudes of students towards using peer feedback in writing lessons
The data for this part was collected from the questionnaire The attitude of students was discussed in three main aspects: the general attitude towards using peer feedback in writing lessons, student‟s attitude towards the benefits of peer feedback and the student‟s view on the use of peer feedback in the future
2.1 Student’s general attitude towards using peer feedback in the writing lessons
In the post-questionnaire, Question 3 collected information if students were interested in writing when the teacher used peer feedback in writing lessons
Chart 2: Student’s interest in peer feedback
It is seen clearly from Chart 2 that a large number of students were interested in writing lessons when the new technique was applied and only small a number of them showed the negative and neutral feelings In other words, the percentage of “strongly agree and agree” responses were majored 70%
Whereas, only 10% disagreed that they were attracted in the writing lessons when the peer feedback was applied The rest 20% refers to the students have neutral attitudes towards peer feedback
2.2 Student’s attitude towards the benefits of using peer feedback in writing lessons
2 Peer feedback made you more autonomous in judging the quality of learning and knowledge
4 Peer feedback gave you more confident to write
5 Peer feedback motivated you to write
6 Peer feedback helped you to avoid the mistakes which you had made
Table 3: Student’s attitude towards the benefits of peer feedback
Student‟s attitude towards benefits of using peer feedback in writing is obviously illustrated in the Chart 3 below:
Chart 3: Student’s attitudes towards benefits of peer feedback
As can be seen from Chart 3, the majority of students highly appreciated the benefits of peer feedback in writing lessons
Specifically, in item 2, 7/10 students agreed that peer feedback made them more autonomous in judging the quality of learning and knowledge In other words, peer feedback could open up the opportunity to assess their own writing and linguistic knowledge such as grammar, vocabulary and expression Meanwhile, only one student did not have same idea and 2 students were not sure about their answer
CONCLUSION
Summary of the study
With the aim of study how peer feedback is used to improve writing skill in group 12V3, the researcher conducted an action research in the first semester of academic school 2016 - 2017 The researcher described and discussed all the stages of the action research The initial stage was aimed at investigating the existing problems in learning students‟ writing skill The preliminary investigation stage was generated to identify the problem and explore the causes for students‟ low writing ability and motivation Both stages are based on the student‟s responses in pre- questionnaire and pre-test
Then, the hypothesis of the study was formed that the students‟ writing skill and motivation level could be improved if peer feedback was implemented in writing lessons
An action plan was then formulated and carried out to increase writing ability and motivation for the students The data was collected through the survey questionnaire and the student feedback form After collecting the data, the researcher analyzed and synthesized the data to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention
The evaluation showed that the intervention was successful in partly enhancing students‟ writing ability, creating high motivation for the students in writing lessons Moreover, the evaluation also reported that the students had positive views on peer feedback These changes created a joyful and exciting classroom atmosphere which provided the students with more opportunities to obtain knowledge with pleasure and helped the students enjoy writing lessons more.
Pedagogical implications
As illustrated in section 3, chapter 3 of part 2, the findings of the study revealed that peer feedback was effective and useful for students‟ writing skill In the light of the findings of the study, some pedagogical implications are recommended for the teachers as following:
First, the teachers should pay more attention on the writing content or lexical complexity, especially with students at low proficiency Students mainly concentrate on the grammatical accuracy or word formation The encouragement with the further designed tasks focusing on writing content should be carried out in the future learning process
Second, the teachers should combine both peer feedback and teacher feedback to get the better result The peer feedback should be carried out first to create chance for students to provide students with an automatic audience, increase student‟s motivation for writing, help students learn to read critically their own writing and enable them to receive different views on their writing Then the teacher also should give feedback to double check the quality of student‟s feedback This creates the chance for student to get a deeper understand why their mistakes happened and how to correct them properly.
Limitations and suggestions for further research
Even though this study has provided some evidence of the effectiveness of peer feedback in writing lessons, it still has some limitations:
Firstly, survey questionnaire which was used to investigate the learners' improvement in motivation and attitude were rather subjective In fact, the research included some open questions into the questionnaire and gave student‟s freedom to express the idea Other more objective data collection tools should be exploited in further research
Secondly, the study was conducted in a short period of time which lasted only in 8 weeks Thus, it was difficult to see considerable changes in teaching and learning Even though the students had two lessons per week and each lasted
90 minutes, the total 1440 minutes in 8 weeks was modest It is recommended that other research should be carried out in longer time
Finally, teaching and learning are two long term processes of consciousness which cannot be easily measured The teacher controlled the effects of peer feedback on writing improvement by applying the only peer feedback in writing lessons and did not give any comments or make interfere into the feedback progress However, it was impossible to block other factors coming from writing lessons at school or student‟s self- study Therefore, it requires techniques to supervise closer in order to prevent other factors from influencing the effectiveness of peer feedback on writing skill in the further studies
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This questionnaire is designed to collect data for my study about using peer feedback in improving the writing skill for the students at high school The information provided by you will be extremely meaningful to my research The information is strictly confidential and used for research only
1 Do you often spend a certain period of time each day to practice writing?
2 Does your English teacher operate peer feedback in writing lessons?
3 Do you complete all writing exercises?
4 You are motivated to write when you participate in the writing class activities
5 How do you feel during the writing lessons?
Comfortable Excited Good Sleepy Bored Stressful
6 The classroom atmosphere during writing lessons is good
7 How often do you work in groups or pairs in writing lesson?
8 What are reasons for which many students have no interest in writing?
Lack of vocabulary and structure Being afraid of making mistakes/ getting bad mark Having no interest with recent learning activities Other:………
Adapted from Murtagh and Baker (2009) and Al-Jamal (2009)
Thank you for your co-operation!
This questionnaire is designed to collect data for my study about using peer feedback in improving the writing skill for the students at high school The information provided by you will be extremely meaningful to my research The information is strictly confidential and used for research only
1 How often did you use peer feedback in writing lessons in the last 8 weeks?
Always Usually Sometimes Rarely Never
Question 2-6: Please indicate your (dis)agreement with each statement by putting a tick (V) in the appropriate column
1= Strongly disagree 2= Disagree 3= Neutral 4= Agree 5= Strongly agree
2 Peer feedback made you more autonomous in judging the quality of learning and knowledge
3 Peer feedback made your writing lessons more interesting than before
4 Peer feedback gave you more confident to write
5 Peer feedback motivated you to write
6 Peer feedback helped you to avoid the mistakes which you had made
7 What kind of feedback do you prefer: Teacher‟s feedback or peer feedback?
Please give reasons for your choice
Adapted from Murtagh and Baker (2009) and Al-Jamal (2009)
Thank you for your co-operation!
APPENDIX 3: DATA ON PRE-QUESTIONNAIRE
This questionnaire is designed to collect data for my study about using peer feedback in improving the writing skill for the students at high school The information provided by you will be extremely meaningful to my research The information is strictly confidential and used for research only
1 Do you often spend a certain period of time each day to practice writing?
Reason: Hate writing, No time/ little time for English, Prefer doing grammar or reading exercises
2 Does your English teacher operate peer feedback in writing lessons?
3 Do you complete all writing exercises?
Reasons: Being afraid of teacher’s punishment, only do if they are compulsory exercises
4 You are motivated to write when you participate in the writing class activities
5 How do you feel during the writing lessons?
6 The classroom atmosphere during writing lessons is good
7 How often do you work in groups or pairs in writing lesson?
8 What are reasons for which many students have no interest in writing?
Lack of vocabulary and structure (1) Being afraid of making mistakes/ getting bad mark (3) Having no interest with recent learning activities (6) Other:………
Adapted from Murtagh and Baker (2009) and Al-Jamal (2009)
Thank you for your co-operation!
APPENDIX 4: DATA ON POST – QUESTIONNAIRE
This questionnaire is designed to collect data for my study about using peer feedback in improving the writing skill for the students at high school The information provided by you will be extremely meaningful to my research The information is strictly confidential and used for research only
1 How often did you use peer feedback in writing lessons in the last 8 weeks?
Always (9) Usually (1) Sometimes (0) Rarely (0) Never (0)
Question 2-6: Please indicate your (dis)agreement with each statement by putting a tick (V) in the appropriate column
1= Strongly disagree 2= Disagree 3= Neutral 4= Agree 5= Strongly agree
2 Peer feedback made you more autonomous in judging the quality of learning and knowledge
3 Peer feedback made your writing lessons more interesting than before
4 Peer feedback gave you more confident to write
5 Peer feedback motivated you to write 0 1 1 7 1
6 Peer feedback helped you to avoid the mistakes which you had made
7 What kind of feedback do you prefer: Teacher‟s feedback or peer feedback?
Please give reasons for your choice
Reasons: Peer feedback is sometimes incorrect Teacher’s feedback is more reliable
Reasons: - peer feedback is less stressful than teacher’s feedback
- having a chance to review grammar and vocabulary when correct student’s mistakes
Both teacher’s feedback and peer feedback: 6
Reason: - first using peer feedback, then using teacher’s feedback to revise
Adapted from Murtagh and Baker (2009) and Al-Jamal (2009)
Thank you for your co-operation!
1 Does every sentence begin with a capital letter? Yes No
2 Do all of the sentences end with a punctuation mark? Yes No
3 Do some sentences seem too long? Do they run on and on? Yes No
If yes, did you make changes to break the sentence up? Yes No
4 Are all of the words spelled correctly? Yes No
5 Did you change or mark the words spelled incorrectly? Yes No
6 Do all of the sentences use the correct verbs in the past, present, or future?
In writing mechanics, the writer needs the most help in
In writing mechanics, the writer is the best at
1 Does the paragraph meet length requirements? Yes No
2 Does the paragraph make sense? Yes No
3 What could be added to make the paragraph better?
5 Length of paragraph (Ok or not)
Time Topic Objectives Learning and teaching activities
Writing about the rules of your family
- Obtain the rules of capitalization and punctuation
- Learn how to write a description , stages of a description
Writing about your family daily routines
- Revise how to write a description, stages of a description
- Use present simple tense to write about daily routines
Describing a Vietnamese conical leaf hat
- Understand the structure of a paragraph
- Revise how to write a description, stages of a description
- Revise how to write a description, stages of a description
Writing a paragraph on the formal school education system in Vietnam
- Be able to write the topic sentence
- Be able to write the school education system in Vietnam
- Revise how to write a description, stages of a description
- Be able to write the supporting sentences
Describing a job you want to do in the future
- Revise how to write a description, stages of a description
Describing the world in which you would like to live in the year 2026
- Revise writing topic and supporting sentences
- Use conjunctions to link the sentences
Writing about measures to protect endangered species and possible results
- Use some expressions to illustrate the cause and effect
Writing about measures to reduce the air pollution in Hanoi
- Revise some expressions to illustrate the cause and effect
- Revise writing topic and supporting sentences
Week Describing - Revise how to write - Classroom activities and writing
Student‟s interest in peer feedback
It is seen clearly from Chart 2 that a large number of students were interested in writing lessons when the new technique was applied and only small a number of them showed the negative and neutral feelings In other words, the percentage of “strongly agree and agree” responses were majored 70%
Whereas, only 10% disagreed that they were attracted in the writing lessons when the peer feedback was applied The rest 20% refers to the students have neutral attitudes towards peer feedback
2.2 Student’s attitude towards the benefits of using peer feedback in writing lessons
2 Peer feedback made you more autonomous in judging the quality of learning and knowledge
4 Peer feedback gave you more confident to write
5 Peer feedback motivated you to write
6 Peer feedback helped you to avoid the mistakes which you had made
Table 3: Student’s attitude towards the benefits of peer feedback
Student‟s attitude towards benefits of using peer feedback in writing is obviously illustrated in the Chart 3 below:
Student‟s attitudes towards benefits of peer feedback
As can be seen from Chart 3, the majority of students highly appreciated the benefits of peer feedback in writing lessons
Specifically, in item 2, 7/10 students agreed that peer feedback made them more autonomous in judging the quality of learning and knowledge In other words, peer feedback could open up the opportunity to assess their own writing and linguistic knowledge such as grammar, vocabulary and expression Meanwhile, only one student did not have same idea and 2 students were not sure about their answer
Regarding to the confidence aspect (item 4), the percentage of students who reported that peer feedback made them more confident to write was up to 70% The rest 30% students disagreed or were uncertain whether this new technique aided them be more confident to write
Similarity, the majority of students (8/10) agreed that the using peer feedback in writing lessons could motivate them to write Meanwhile only one student had the different idea and one student had the neutral opinion
In term of avoiding mistakes, major 80% students supported that with peer feedback, they could avoid the mistakes they had made before, and especially the mistakes were corrected by their classmates
To be concluded, there was a positive trend in student‟s attitude towards the benefits of using peer feedback Specifically, most of students stated that peer feedback could motivate student, help the students avoid the mistakes they had been corrected and become more autonomous and confident during the process of writing
2.3 The student’s view on the use of peer feedback in the future
The findings of student‟s opinion about using peer feedback in the future were collected from Question 7 in the post- questionnaire The data was clearly shown in the following Chart 4
Chart 4: Student’s view on using peer feedback in the future
From the Chart 4, we found that there was a difference in student‟s opinion about the use of feedback in the future
Only one student reported that the teacher‟s feedback would be best The reason for this answer was “Peer feedback is sometimes incorrect The teacher‟s feedback is more reliable”
On the other hand, peer feedback was preferred by 3 students The explanations were stated as “peer feedback is less stressful than teacher‟s feedback”, “learning from friend‟s mistakes”, “having a chance to review grammar and vocabulary when correct student‟s mistakes”
Besides, the percentage of students who would like to use both teacher and student‟s feedback was up to 60% The given reason is “first using peer feedback, then using teacher‟s feedback to revise”
Conclusively, most of student preferred the combination of peer feedback and teacher feedback in writing lessons
In this study, qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted to address the issue of peer feedback in relation to writing lessons This section interprets the results presented in the findings section and discusses them in relation to the research questions of the study
With respect to the first research question, on the effectiveness of peer feedback on writing skill, this question received a positive answer The results of the student feedback form and survey questionnaire revealed that peer feedback technique had a significant effect on students‟ writing skill It promoted and facilitated students‟ writing skill Students‟ writing performance had a great change after using peer feedback because peer feedback helped them to avoid making mistakes Specifically, the total number of mistakes relating to writing mechanics such as capitalization, punctuation, spelling and verbs experienced a considerable decrease through the writing versions in 7 weeks Nevertheless, the mistakes regards to the writing content witnessed a slight fall
In general, these findings reconfirmed the usefulness of peer feedback in improving writing skills which is in line with Hyland (2006), Hanson (2006) and Li, Liu and Steckelberg, and Douglas (2010) Specifically, the number of mistakes relating to capitalization, punctuation, spelling and verb agreement decreases significantly Meanwhile, the mistakes involving the content seem to be ignored or unrecognized by students The conclusion drawn out is that the peer initiated writing revisions found to mainly focus on surface-level aspects This leads to slight improvement in fluency, significant improvement in grammatical accuracy, but no significant improvement in lexical complexity The reason given for this trend is the low English proficiency of students The participants in this study were good at science subjects and weak at English Therefore, they probably identified and gave feedback on the surface –level aspects This is also supported by Ting (2010) that peer feedback applying with the learner at low proficiency mainly focuses on the grammatical accuracy and word forms
As for the second research question, the results indicated that the students had positive attitudes towards peer feedback Specifically, the survey questionnaire showed some important findings Firstly, majority of students found the new teaching technique interesting and useful Secondly, most of the students agreed that peer feedback benefited the students a lot To be specific, it helped the students avoid repeating the mistakes they had been corrected and become more autonomous during the process of writing
Besides, peer feedback also aroused student‟s motivation and confidence in learning process Thirdly, students suggested the combination of peer feedback and teacher feedback in the future learning
For the most part, these findings are also similar to the results of research of Tsui and Ng (2000), Mogahed (2009), Liu and Carless (2006), and Douglas
(2010) It means that peer feedback boosts confidence and allows students to become more independent and active learners The participants in this study showed the same positive attitudes towards the peer feedback as the previous studies carried out in other countries such as China, New Zealand and Pakistan These positive changes in student‟s attitude could be attributed to the following reasons First, the peer feedback truly advocates the benefits in terms of social dimension and emotional gains The students could make their own decision on the learning process Thus, in the long-term effect, the students become less reliant on the teacher and more confident in themselves as writers Second, the participants were fed up with the traditional teaching method which teacher playing the center role A new technique – peer feedback probably created a new learning environment, varied the class activity and motivated students to write
However, a finding in this study shows a difference from the findings in the previous studies Specifically, most of students have a preference on the combination between peer feedback and teacher feedback Meanwhile, in the previous research by Zhang (1995) or Ah- Jamal (2009), student either totally agreed or totally disagreed about using peer feedback in the future learning
The students in this study would like to apply the peer feedback as the initial step After that, the teacher would check the writing and give the comments
Then, a comparison would be made in order to help students better understand would be interpreted that students were possibly aware of their linguistic limitations Furthermore, they probably maintained the familiarity and belief that the teacher is the only audience who is more experienced and can give better quality feedback
To sum up, peer feedback has an important role in improving students‟ writing skill and creating highly motivated students in the group of participants in this study
With the aim of study how peer feedback is used to improve writing skill in group 12V3, the researcher conducted an action research in the first semester of academic school 2016 - 2017 The researcher described and discussed all the stages of the action research The initial stage was aimed at investigating the existing problems in learning students‟ writing skill The preliminary investigation stage was generated to identify the problem and explore the causes for students‟ low writing ability and motivation Both stages are based on the student‟s responses in pre- questionnaire and pre-test
Then, the hypothesis of the study was formed that the students‟ writing skill and motivation level could be improved if peer feedback was implemented in writing lessons