Difficulties and mistakes in writing english of grade 10th students at the asian international school, cao thang campus

i DECLARATION I am, Dao Quang Huy declare that the work presented in this Graduation Thesis is uniquely prepared by me This is my first research about “Difficulties and mistakes in writing English of grade 10th students at The Asian International School, Cao Thang campus” I declare that this study not copy from other works All the information used in my research are cited from books and websites with specific sourses Name: Dao Quang Huy Student ID: 97011501045 Course: – Class: 15DTA Major: English Language The Saigon International University Date submitted: …………………………… Signed: …………………………………… ii ABSTRACT I write the research of “Difficulties and mistakes in writing English of grade 10th students at The Asian International School, Cao Thang campus” to support my graduation from The Saigon International School with helps from The Saigon International School and Mr Nguyen Thanh Tuan – my instructor My study does not only support my graduation but also help other people have a deep look inside English language Everyone can read my article, especially new teachers and students who have difficulties in teaching English and studying English iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I have received many helps before I completed my research First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to Mr Nguyen Thanh Tuan who helped and encouraged, guided and willing motivated me from the beginning to the end of this work Next, I would like to appreciation the Saigon International University for providing me a professional environment and facilities of studying, and all teachers in the English Language major for giving enthusiasm and sympathies that help me finish this research In addition, because of my limited nuts and bolts, and mistakes which hardly avoided, I believe to receive advices from teachers to make my study more perfect I really thank to all people who helped me to finish this graduation research Best regard, Dao Quang Huy iv INSTRUCTOR’S COMMENT ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………… Mark: …………………………… Signed: ………………………… v CONTENTS LIST OF CHARTS vii CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1.1 Statement of problem 1.2 Purposes of the study 1.3 Significance of the research 1.4 Research questions 1.5 Scope and limitation of the study 10 1.5.1 Scope of the study 10 1.5.2 Limitation of the study 10 CHAPTER II 11 LITERATURE REVIEW 11 2.1 Definitions of Key Terms 11 2.2 Review Previous Works 11 CHAPTER III 14 METHODOLOGY 14 3.1 Research design 14 3.2 Procedures 14 3.3 Participants 15 3.4 Sample Selection 16 3.5 Material Techniques 16 3.6 Data collections 17 3.7 Reliability and Validity 17 CHAPTER 18 ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 18 Chart 4.1: Difficult skills of English to learn 18 Chart 4.2: Braintorming idea problems 19 Chart 4.3: Problems in writing English 20 Chart 4.4: Choosing righ type of a sentence 21 Chart 4.5: Choosing righ type of a sentence 22 CHAPTER 26 CONCLUSION 26 vi REFERENCES 27 APPENDIX 29 vii LIST OF CHARTS Chart 4.1: Difficult skills of English to learn 18 Chart 4.2: Braintorming idea problems 19 Chart 4.3: Problems in writing English 20 Chart 4.4: Choosing righ type of a sentence 21 Chart 4.5: Choosing righ type of a sentence 22 CHAPTER INTRODUCTION The research of “Difficulties and mistakes in writing English of grade 10th students at The Asian International School, Cao Thang campus” is writen to find out difficulites when students write English Therefore, we can figure out answers to solve this issue My study also reflects my achievements of four – year studying proccess at The Saigon International University 1.1 Statement of problem When English becomes the most popular language in the world Writing is one of the most important skills that people use to show their thoughts by writing This skill is used for most aspects of people’s works In another word, people use writing skills to create work documents However, they usually get mistakes or difficulties when conduct an English paragraph, a sentence or an essay Therefore, readers may not understand or they may misunderstand ideas of writers Especially, it happens a lot in high schools Some Vietnamese high school students still get some difficulties in writing English Since this problem happens to most students in Vietnam I decided to choose this topic: “Difficulties and mistakes in writing English of grade 10th students at The Asian International School, Cao Thang campus” to find out barriers which constrain their development in writing English 1.2 Purposes of the study This study is conducted by me with the aim of finding out barriers of high school students and understanding deeper difficulties when they write an English essay or a paragraph This study will point out fields that students mostly have such as grammar, vocabulary, coherence, logic or structure of an essay Therefore, this research can provide us with solutions to answer this problem 1.3 Significance of the research This research is really essential for all people As I said above, this study aims to find problems of students in writing English, which leads to answers for this issue The study is carried out by me in order to help teachers and students figure out their weaknesses in teaching and learning writing skills I also want to contribute my knowledge through this research to educational development in Vietnam Additional, my research has a vital role in my graduation It proves my process of studying in The Saigon International University 1.4 Research questions What difficulties students in high schools get in writing English? Why they get into dificulties with writing? How they improve their writing skills? 10 1.5 Scope and limitation of the study 1.5.1 Scope of the study This study only focuses on English writing skills Other skills of English may be mentioned a little bit to support improvement of English writing in this research Also, this research will be conducted at The Saigon International University, and a survey will be carried out at The Asian International School I will co-operate with students in class 10/32 at The Asian International School to complete this study 1.5.2 Limitation of the study I only have ten weeks to finish “Difficulties and mistakes in writing English of grade 10th students at The Asian International School, Cao Thang campus” study Therefore, there may be some mistakes that occur in this research although I try to avoid those faults Additionally, when I make the survey, I also get some difficulties such as several students may not cooperate with me to fill out my questionaire form Other small tough cases can be traffic, when I travel from home to school and place for survey Additionally, within ten weeks, I not have much time to obtain much knowledge about writing English from others’ works Therefore, there can be some lack of proofs to support my research 17 3.6 Data collections I started my survey by making a question form from google form Then, these questions were printed into A4 papers so that it was easy for participants to answers I printed twenty copies for twenty students in class 10/32 at The Asian International School Next, I went there and handed them twenty copies of question form Then, they spent thirty minutes answering eleven questions in my question form which was demonstrated below Students had to answer these questions for 30 minutes from 8:40 am to 9:10 am Then, I collected their answered paper for analizing data 3.7 Reliability and Validity My research was definitely reliable because my survey was conducted through strictly and carefully stages which were listed at procedures In addition, my twenty participants did not have any barrier in understanding English Therefore, they could answer my questions exactly Additionall, my study was based on other author’s works which were demonstrated in my research Those other’s works were cited in the references Therefore, I could have comparision between my results of my survey and older researches In addtion, I believed that my study was valuable due to some reasons My research was based on reliable responses from students Also, my survey was conducted to collect exact numbers Therefore, it provided me with difficulties and mistakes when students wrote English With the responses from twenty students in class 10/32, I believed we could have strong proofs to prove common mistakes and difficulties when students wrote English 18 CHAPTER ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION These graphs below were created by me via google form to support my study They were also my proofs to make my study more effectively and exactly The responses of these charts were based on questionaires that I created via google form Those questions were listed in appendix Those charts below were exported from google form by percentages of students (responses) Each question was a chart Because I did the most general idea, I had to write any question in google form that brought me a deep view inside the problem However, after I did the survey, there were some questions that students did not have mistakes Therefore, I just chose survey questions that proved students’s mistakes and difficulties in writing English Also, I described and evaluated each graph in detail by proportions Chart 4.1: Difficult skills of English to learn The graph illustrated proportion of students in class 10/32 at The Asian International School had problems with listening, reading, writing, and speaking skills in English 19 As I could see that students in class 10/32 had difficulties with listening and writing the most while there was only a small percentage of students who had trouble with speaking English There were 85% students who felt difficult to write English Therefore, most students had trouble with writing skills They might get bored when they were in a writing class Therefore, they might not practice their writing skills regularly Chart 4.2: Braintorming idea problems The pie chart demonstrated percentage of students who had problem with thinking ideas when writing English In the pie chart I could see that there are 65% of students who got tough in brainstomming their idea to conduct an essay or a paragraph However, 35% of students said that they could write English without any difficulty Through those number, we could see that many students could not think of any idea when they started to write a paragraph Even though they had ideas, their ideas were poor and they were not in logical situation Therefore, they could not write an English essay or a paragraph easily 20 Chart 4.3: Problems in writing English The bar graph showed the rate of students had problems with grammar, vocabulary, coherence, logic, struture of a sentence, a paragraph or an essay As I could see in the graph above, vocabulary accounts for the most (80%) compared with others There were also 50% of students who felt that they need to improve their structure of a sentence, a paragraph or an essay In the graph, two things that students regularly had mistakes were vocabulary and structure of a sentence, a paragraph or an essay Therefore, lack of words in writing English was a big problem because they could not describe their thoughts and ideas clearly which were very important for readers to understand them Additionally, getting faults of structure of sentences, paragraphs, or essays was a huge trouble as well That was to say that readers might misunderstand what writers illustrated in their works 21 Chart 4.4: Choosing righ type of a sentence The pie chart illustrated proportion of students’ answers to “Because my coffee was too cold, I heated it in the microwave” type of sentence Generally, the answers of compound and complex accounted for the most in the chart (60% and 35% respectively) And, there were small amount of students who chose simple and compound – complex However, the right answer was complex sentence so 60% of students chose wrong answer 35% of students chose true answer, which was lower than students who chose compound As a result, students still misunderstood between compound and complex sentences Following to an article in 2018 writen by Kennth Beare said that complex sentences are the sentences that have one more subject and one more verb Complex sentences are linked by conjunctions and other kind of linking words (Beare,2018) 22 Chart 4.5: Choosing righ type of a sentence The pie chart demonstrated proportion of students’ answers to “They got there early, and they got really good seats” type of sentence 60% of students chose complex sentence while 40% of students chose compound Noone chose simple and compound – complex sentence The right answer was compound sentence Therefore, 40% of students were right A compound sentence can include two or more simple sentences which are connected by a conjunction or an appropriate punctuation mark (Nordquist,2019) 23 Both chart 4.4 and chart 4.5 showed me that students had confusion between types of sentences, especially compound and complex sentence Compound sentences are the sentences which consist of two independent clauses Complex sentences are the sentences which include one dependent clause and an independent clause Whereas simple sentences just have one independent clause Methods to improve writing skills Firstly, grade 10th students in The Asian International school did not find it happy to write down English In chart 4.1, we saw that they considered writing difficult skills to learn Therefore, an article which was writen by Karen Dikson in 2016 said that: Every human skill gets better with constant, repetitive practice In your case, you could easily make a small change in your classroom routine, and organize brief writing sessions each and every day Ask your students to write a relatively small amount of words on a specific subject every day It may be painful for them at first, but the more they write, the better their writing will get (Dikson,2016) I believe that this way can improve students’ thoughts about writing classes By giving them homework of writing a small paragraph everyday, they can improve not only writing skills but also their variety of vocabularies Therefore, over a long period, they no longer see that writing classes are boring classes The second method to blow up their ideas in writing English The most common method that is being applied to most writing essay or paragraph is sketch an outline before going detail of a paragraph or an essay This solution is suitable for most people and students 24 Structure refers to the order of ideas; the progression of your writing should feel smooth with similar points linked together Structuring your work is a key aspect of good academic writing ensuring that related sections are linked together and that the ideas and arguments progress in a logical and orderly manner (“Learnhigher”,2013) Structure in writing English or in any other languages was really vital By making an outline, students can well organise their article They also avoid getting off the topic that they write In addition, in an outline, they can list all their ideas, which make their writing become easier Finally, basing on chart 4.4 and 4.5, we can see students misunderstand between types of sentences (simple, compound, complex), which lead to mistakes in writing English Jack Milgram (2018) said “the most typical sentence errors are fragments and run-on sentences” Therefore, it is very essential for teachers to give students excercises of writing sentences Also, teachers ought to teach students how to use punctuation, comma effectively to get rid of run on sentences Run-on sentences happen when two or more main clauses are connected together without appropriate punctuation (Milgram,2018) In order to make students get used to new words or vocabularies, teachers need to have appropriate methods to teach them According to an article writen by Claudia Pesce said that teacher can use visual objects, smells, sounds and tastes whenever possible to make student clearly understand new words (Pesce,n.d.) This method is very convenient for students to obtain new words because they not need to translate English into Vietnamese Another solution to improve students’ vocabularies is mindmap or brainstorming For example, in an article which was created by Claudia Pesce said that students write down 25 weather in the center Then they will support the words weather with other words such as sunny, windy, raining, foggy and so on by writing these words around weather (Pesce,n.d.) This method will widen students’ vocabularies of a word They can learn adjective, adverb, verb, noun of a certain word For instance, we have success is a noun Students will write success in the center Then, they will write successful, succeed around the success 26 CHAPTER CONCLUSION English is still the most popular language in the world It is used for communication, listening, showing your thoughts by writing, and obtaining information by reading All skills of English are very important for most English learners, especially young people In this research, I just focused on writing skills because most people find it difficult to be master of English writing skills Since the limit of time, I only conducted my study on grade 10th students in class 10/32 at The Asian International School In my research, I also looked up other people’s researches for understanding more the problems that students have when they conduct an essay, paragraph or a sentence In order to make my study stronger, I applied quantitative method to conduct my research I chose The Asian International School as a place for my study I had an opportunity to cooperate with grade 10th students to complete my survey In addition, I created a question table where students answered by mutiple choices After collecting answered papers from them, I started to analysis and evaluate by charts which were exported by google form – a tool that I used to create questionaires According to my survey, most students felt hard to learn writing They had difficulties in brainstorming ideas Also, types of sentence made them confused However, I provided solutions for these issues in chapter four, which can work well with them and other students 27 REFERENCES Alfaki,I.M.(May 2015).University students’ English writing problems: Diagnosis and Remendy International Journal of English Language Teaching,3(3),40-52 Tyner,E.(1987).College Writing Basics:A Progressive Approach.Belmont.Wands worth Publishing Company McLeod,S.(December 5th, 2017).What’s the difference between qualitative and quantitative research?.Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/qualitative-quantitative.html Long,S.(June 22nd, 2015) ESL Teaching Methods: How to Make Writing Fun.Retrieved from https://www.reachtoteachrecruiting.com/blog/esl-teaching-make-writing-fun Jenkins,C.(May 10th, 2017).Top Tips For Teaching Writing: Games and Ideas to Turn Your Lesson From Boring to Brilliant.Retrieved from http://shaneschools.com/en/top-tips-forteaching-writing/ Dikson,K.(September 2nd, 2016).6 ways to improve students' academic writing skills.Retrieved from https://www.wabisabilearning.com/blog/6-ways-improve-studentswriting-skills Cendana,K.(September 25th, 2018).Making writing interesting for students.Retrieved from https://www.newheightseducation.org/educational-articles/making-writing-interesting-forstudents/ Learnhigher.(June, 2013).How To Structure Your Writing.Retrieved from http://www iversity/academic-writing/hlearnhigher.ac.uk/writing-for-unow-to-structure-your-writing/ 28 Milgram,J.(July 13rd, 2018) How to avoid common mistakes in essay writing.Retrieved from https://custom-writing.org/blog/writing-tips/free-essay-writing-tips/26841.html Nixon,Z.(April 5th,2018).How to improve your writing skills: Exercises you should know about.Retrieved from https://writingcooperative.com/how-to-improve-your-writing-skillsexercises-you-should-know-about-aa2e97e14946 Nordquist,R.(January 14th, 2019).Definition of compound sentences and how to use them.Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-compound-sentence-1689895 Beare,K.(October 16th, 2018).Complex sentence writing from simple sentences to complex sentences.Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/complex-sentence-writing-1211714 Geikhman,Y.(n.d.).9 creative writing exercises perfect for English learners.Retrieved from https://www.fluentu.com/blog/english/english-writing-exercises/ Macfadyen,S.(October 22nd, 2015) Different methods of teaching grammar.Retrieved from https://www.inklyo.com/methods-of-teaching-grammar/ Pesce,C.(n.d.) Teaching English vocabulary.Retrieved from https://busyteacher.org/2921teaching-english-vocabulary-10-fabulous-ways-to.html 29 APPENDIX Questionaires Which skills you find the most difficult to learn? Check all that apply  Listening  Reading  Writing  Speaking Do you think that you spend much time practicing writing at school? Mark only one oval  Very little  Little  Enough  Much  Very much Do your teacher give you homework of writing sentences or essays? Mark only one oval  everyday  several times a week  weekly  other:……………… 30 Have you ever been asked to write an essay? Mark only one oval  Yes  No Anyway, you know how many parts of an essay? (If you not know, let’s guess) Mark only one oval 1 2 3 4 List three main parts of an essay in order? …………………………………………… Do you have any problems with thinking about ideas when writing an essays? Mark only one oval  Yes  No Do you have any problems with? Check all that apply  grammar  vocabulary  coherence 31  logic  structure of a sentence, a paragraph or an essay Type of sentence: Joe is waiting for the train Mark only one oval  simple  compound  complex  compound – complex 10 Because my coffee was too cold, I heated it in the microwave Mark only one oval  simple  compound  complex  compound – complex 11 They got there early, and they got really good seats Mark only one oval  simple  compound  complex  compound – complex ... write the research of ? ?Difficulties and mistakes in writing English of grade 10th students at The Asian International School, Cao Thang campus? ?? to support my graduation from The Saigon International. .. sentence 22 CHAPTER INTRODUCTION The research of ? ?Difficulties and mistakes in writing English of grade 10th students at The Asian International School, Cao Thang campus? ?? is writen to find out difficulites... difficulties in writing English Since this problem happens to most students in Vietnam I decided to choose this topic: ? ?Difficulties and mistakes in writing English of grade 10th students at The Asian International