TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I INTRODUCTION 1 1 Rationale 1 2 Aims of the study 2 3 Scope of the study 2 4 Methods of the study 2 PART II CONTENT 4 1 Literature review 4 1 1 Definition of writing ability 4[.]
TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale .1 Aims of the study Scope of the study .2 Methods of the study PART II: CONTENT Literature review 1.1 Definition of writing ability .4 1.2 Corrective feedback 1.2.1 Definition of corrective feedback 1.2.2 Forms of feedback 1.2.2.1 Oral feedback 1.2.2.2 Written feedback Research setting 2.1 Tong Duy Tan high school .9 2.2 Participants .10 The experiment 10 3.1 Procedure 10 3.2 Results 15 3.2.1 Effects of three common types of feedback on students' writing performance 15 3.2.2 Students' opinions towards teacher corrective feedback .25 Significance of the study 25 PART III: CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION 26 Conclusion 26 Suggestions for further study 27 REFERENCES 28 APPENDICES 30 skkn PART I: INTRODUCTION Rationale English is considered as an international language with more than 1,500 million speakers worldwide With the current wide usage of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach in Vietnam, students are taught four main skills including reading, listening, speaking and writing Out of them, writing is the most challenging and least preferable skill for English learners The difficulty lies not only in generating and organizing ideas, but also in translating these ideas into readable text It means that writing requires English users to carefully brainstorm to produce words, sentences, and paragraph simultaneously in order to express their ideas in a comprehensive way From my teaching experience, I realized that most of my students at Tong Duy Tan high school have similar issues with their writing They often make a variety of mistakes in the procress of writing all kinds of English documents.Trying to overcome these challengesis time-consuming, particularly when students not have sufficient awareness of the significance of improving their writing skills Hence, they are often de-motivated or get discouraged during writing lessons, which affects their learning results to a certain extend Thus, how to improve students' writing as well as to change their attitudes towards writing activities has greatly attracted my attention Some researchers in writing (Leki, 1991; Raimes, 1983) believe that giving feedback is one of the important ways for teachers to help the writers improve their writing Until now, feedback used in pedagogicalcontext is considered as an essential part of the teaching and learning process to improve knowledge and skill acquisition It can not be denied that students want feedback and teachers feel obliged to provide it Feedbackcreates interactions between teacher and students in the second language writing class and it enhances students’ writing accuracy (Ferris, 1997) Raimes (1983, p.139) also emphasized the importance of corrective feedback by considering it as "very much a part of the process of skkn teaching writing" That means corrective feedback is crucial for the success of writing tasks In Vietnam, there have been some researches on teacher’s corrective feedback but none of the studies investigates the effectiveness of teacher’s written corrective feedback on grade-ten students’ writing For all the reasons mentioned above, the researcher wishes to conduct a study entitled "Using written corrective feedback to improve writing ability of grade-10 students at Tong Duy Tan high school” Aims of the study This studyaims at investigating the effectiveness of written corrective feedback on improving students' writing ability Scope of the study This study focuses only on the types of written feedback provided by teachers in language classrooms Moreover, the participants of this study are 35 grade-10 students at Tong Duy Tan high school that the researcher directly teaches Methods of the study Two methods were utilized to obtain sufficient information for the study, which are document analysis and action research to improve a situation After carrying out an initial investigation, a writing instruction course was designed, and different types of teacher written corrective feedback were then applied The data were collected through analyzing students' writing and survey questionnaires Students' writings were collected and analyzed before, during and after treatment period to measure the students' progress in their writing performance Additionly, students' survey questionnaires were collected and analyzed at the end of the research to find out their attitudes towards each type of feedback and its effectiveness skkn PART II: CONTENT Literature review 1.1 Definition of writing ability Writing ability as a critical theoretical construct that has too often been interpreted largely by the testing industry as whatever a particular writing test measures It means that writing ability has traditionally been defined by test of writing Yi(2009) said that the term‘writing ability’ can be defined depending on the teachers' own experience as a teacher or their ideology on writing Also, Yi(2009) said that approaches themselves are classified differently according to researchers However, they can be reduced into three major approaches as following: 1.1.1 Writing ability implied in product/text-oriented approach Those who think oftextsasautonomous objects define writing ability as the ability to respond to a given stimulus according to some authority's definition of the correct response (Nunan, 1999) In other word, it is the ability to adhere to style-guide prescriptions relating grammar, arrangement and punctuation without consideration for audience, purpose or context, working on the assumption that a text can mean the same thing to all people only if it is written explicitly going after the given prescriptions Meanwhile, "text-as-discourse" viewiers consider writing ability as the ability to create coherent and cohesive discourses following prescribed patterns for developing and organising discourse 1.1.2 Writing ability implied in process/cognitive-oriented approach This approach emphasizes what the composer does throughout writing Commonly known as the Process approach, it can be divided into three subcategories including Expressivist, Cognitivist and Social (Situated) strands.Learners are encouraged to look for their own authentic voices and freely express them Accordingly, the writing activities ultilized by those skkn subscribing to this view are likely to be individual essays and journal writing, which are suitable for self-discovery Hence, writing ability can be considered as the ability to freely express oneself Yi(2009) noted that writing ability in this approach isdefined as the ability to initiate and evolve ideas and then use certain revising and editing practices to develop them to maturity in a given context 1.1.3 Writing ability implied in reader/genre-oriented approach Yi(2009) said that this Genre-based approach emphasises awareness of the reader It regards successful writers as those who are able to make reasonable assumptions about what readers know and expect, balance between their writing purpose and readers’ expectations as well as satisfy the readers’ rhetorical needs In other words, writing ability is the ability to perform writing tasks for a given purpose, satisfy a given discourse community concerining the structure and content of the discourse, and communicate functionally 1.2 Corrective feedback 1.2.1 Definition of corrective feedback Definitions for the term "feedback" vary depending on researchers Lightbown and Spada (1999, p.172) says that feedback is "an indication to the learner that his or her use the target languages is incorrect" Teacher feedback can be considered as an effective means to communicate to students about their writing so that they can enhance their composition Corrective feedback refers to the response that second language students receive on the errors that they make in their oral or written production (Sheen, Y & Ellis, R 2011) When reviewing students' writing, second language teachers give feedback on various issues They may address content of the text, idea organization, and vocabulary choice Among them, the type of feedback that has attracted numerous researchers' attentionis feedback on linguistic errors, known as “corrective feedback” or “error correction” Yeh and Lo (2009) defines skkn corrective feedback as the responses to errors in the text They also claim that corrective feedback supplies students with direct or indirect responses about what is inappropriate The responses can indicate 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 Yeh and Lo (2009)'s definition seems to be the most suitable and closely involves in the scope of this study and is adapted in this study 1.2.2 Forms of feedback Basing on forms, feedback is distinguished as two main types which are oral feedback and written feedback 1.2.2.1 Oral feedback Sinclair and Coulthard (1992) claims that oral feedback is “a typical exchange” in class starting by a teacher, then “followed by a response from the pupil, followed by feedback, to the pupil's response from the teacher." Therefore, oral feedback meansa natural part of verbal interaction between teachers and students, or students and students Corrective feedback is used when the teacher gathers the most common mistakes and corrects them in class This could be considered to be more groupfocused oral feedback 1.2.2.2 Written feedback Written feedback involves feedback given to students' written work This type of feedback is usually not provided immediately as teachersneed time to consider how to give feedback and on what Therefore, there are different strategies used when providing students with written feedback According to Weigle (2002), the purpose of teachers' feedback lies in providing guidance in writing skkn a.Peer feedback 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 b Teacher's feedback 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 primary of this thesis is meant to be an investigation into how the different teacher written corrective feedback strategies improve students' writing performance Some researchers indicate that students favor corrective feedback from teachers because they believe that they will benefit greatly from it (Leki, 1990) c Teachers' written corrective feedback strategies 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: Ellis' typology offeedback types (2009, p.98) Types of corrective feedback (CF) Description Direct CF The teacher provides students with correct form skkn Indirect CF The teacher indicates that an error exists but does not provide the correction a Indicating and locating the error This takes the form of underlining and the uses of cursors to show omissions in the students’ text b Indication only This takes the forms of an indication in the margin that an error or errors have taken place in a line of text Metalinguitic CF The teacher provides some kinds of metalinguistic clue as to nature of error a Use of error code Teacher writes code in the margin (e.g.: ww = wrong word, pre = prepositions) b Brief grammatical description Teacher numbers errors in text and writes a grammatical description for each numbered error at the bottom of the 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 (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 through skkn three main types of written corrective feedback strategies, namely direct, indirect, metalinguistic corrective feedback As for 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) Meanwhile, 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) The last strategy, 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 Research setting 2.1 Tong Duy Tan high school Founded in 1995, Tong Duy Tan high school is located in the mountainous area of Vinh Loc district, Thanh Hoa city with nearly 50 teachers including English teachers and over 18 classes English is among the most important subjects at 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 The students have four periods learning English every week The material is the text book skkn issued by Ministry of Education and Training The responsibility of teaching the language is on the hand of the teachers of English at the school The grade 10 students at Tong Duy Tan high school are sixteen years old and have been learning English for about six years; their English knowledge is generally not very good, particularly writing skill 2.2 Participants This study includes 35 students with relatively equal quantity of boys and girls coming from class 10B at Tong Duy Tan high school All of them are sixteen years old and live around the school The students basically are beginners of English despite finishing the English program for the secondary system Apart from instructing knowledge in textbook, the teacher usually has to review the very basic knowledge that they have learnt at secondary school Moreover, there are numerous factors that make teaching and learning English challenging Firstly, most of them come from low-income households and they usually have to help their families to get some more earnings Beside that, students have no extra materials except for their textbooks Therefore, though most of them have already learnt English for at least four years at lower secondary school, their knowledge of English is still poor and limited The other problem is that they learn English just to pass regular tests or examinations, while they cannot use English in reality The textbooks which are required to teach English for grade-ten students in high schools are English Basic 10 They were developed based on the old national curriculum with 16 units, covering four skills The experiment 3.1 Procedure 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: skkn ... written corrective feedback to improve writing ability of grade- 10 students at Tong Duy Tan high school? ?? Aims of the study This studyaims at investigating the effectiveness of written corrective feedback. .. this study are 35 grade- 10 students at Tong Duy Tan high school that the researcher directly teaches Methods of the study Two methods were utilized to obtain sufficient information for the study,... includes 35 students with relatively equal quantity of boys and girls coming from class 10B at Tong Duy Tan high school All of them are sixteen years old and live around the school The students