The effect of pairwork and groupwork in improving writing skills for the first year students at the university off technology, hcm

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I here by certify my aut horship of the thesis submitte d today en titled : THE EFFECT OF PAIRWORK AND GROUPWORK IN IMPROVING WRITING SKILLS FOR THE FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, HCMC in terms of the statement of Requirements for Theses in Master' s Programs issued by the Higher De gre e Committee Ho Chi Minh City, August 30, 2006 HUYNH TH J atcn PHUQNG RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS I hereby state that I, Huynh Thi Bich Phuong, being the candidate for the degree of Master of TESOL, accept the requirements of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities relating to the retention and use of Master's Thesis deposited in the Library In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original version of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for the purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for care, loan, or reproduction of thesis H6 Chi Minh City, August 30, 2006 HUYNH THl BtCH PHVC,jNG ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to ex press my deep est gratitude to my thesis supe rvisor, Ms Nguyen Thi K.i ~u Thu , PhD who was patient to read my manu script with great care, ga ve thoughtful and insightful comme nts and provided va luable support in the prep aration and compl etion of this thesis I am also grateful to the orga nizers of this master course, Dr Le Hiru Phuoc, Head of the Dep artm ent of Post Gradu ate Studies of H6 Chi Minh City University of Social Scienc e s and Humanitie s and Mr Nguyen Huynh Dat, M.A., De an of the Dep artm ent of English Linguistics and Literature, H6 Chi Minh City University of Social Scienc e s and Hum anitie s, and their staff memb ers My spec ial thank s must go to the teachers and student s who were very responsive to the survey questionn aire s, without whom the the sis could not have been possible ; all teachers who gave rem arks and advice , which are inva luable for the thesis In particular, I wish to thank the teachers who we re willing to aid me to mark the stude nts' writin g papers that are conside red the indispe nsable part of the thesis I also wish to thank Ms Yvonne Bissonnette who was very enthusias tic to read and give corre ction of mechani cal errors, ambiguous se ntences, as well as structura l probl em s In addition, these friend s and colleagues of mine : Nguyen Thi Thu Hien, Nguyen Thi ThQ, Ha Thi Tu yet Trinh , Huynh Qu6c Minh Chau were particularly of great help in my prep aring of the thesis and searching for relevant references My he artfelt appre ciation is expressed to all of them Last, I would like to ded icate the thesis to my family: my father, my mother, my sister, and es pecia lly my husband who, as always, have been wholeh eartedly supportive They have taken care of everything so that I could devote all time to the writing of the the sis I am grea tly indebted to all of the m iii ABSTRACT This thesis examines how to improve the quality of first-year students' writing performance at the University of Technology, HCMC in the light of applying pairwork and groupwork to the pre-writing act In order to this, questionnaires were delivered to the first-year students in Course 2004-2005 and teachers currently in charge of GE at UT to elicit data about (1) first-year students' difficulties in writing; (2) some suggestions of what should been done to facilitate the situation Besides, a quasi-experiment was conducted to prove the activities in pairs and groups can be very helpful for prewriting act in particular, and writing performance in general The results of the study show that (1) pairwork and groupwork can greatly help the first-year students in idea discovery and organization; (2) the first-year students have difficulty generating and organizing ideas, finding out appropriate words, phrases, expressions, etc or even making grammatical sentences and to express their ideas clearly and exactly In other words, they have difficulty doing the pre-writing act (the hardest stage of the whole writing process) as well as expected; (3) the first-year students' and teachers ' wrong attitudes toward the teaching and learning writing skills The thesis suggests that (1); pairwork and groupwork should be applied for discussions to assist the first-year students to be able to discover and organize ideas more effectively; (2) the topic for discussions and writing tasks should be the same and the first-year students should be offered enough time for discussion before starting to write; (3) a design of tips, techniques, and even guided questions as a writing supplementary material should be made to assist the first-year students to understand more about the forms of paragraph writing as well as to orient them to the pre-writing act more effectively; (4) an amount of fixed time iv and assignments for writing should be spent regularly in class (and even at home) However, neither the teachers nor the students alone can make the whole process of teaching and learning successful; in fact they should be both aware of their shared roles in a writing class and willing to cooperate in order to create a favorable atmosphere in which collaborative work is a must There is no doubt that if pairwork and groupwork are applied for writing performance together with efforts of both teachers and students, a lot of success will be certainly made v ABBREVIA TIONS & SYMBOLS CUP EI E2 E3 E4 EFL ESL GE HCMC L2 OUP UT * (asterisk) : Cambridge University Press : English : English : English : English : English as Foreign Language : English as Second Language : General English : Ho Chi Minh City : Second Language : Oxford University Press : University of Technology : indicates the source for the information mentioned above on the same page vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page i ii iii iv vi vii x xi Certificate of originality Retenti on and use of the thesis Acknowled gem ent s Abstrac t Abbrevi ations and symbols Table of contents List of figure s List of tables INTRODUCTION THE PROBLEM 0.2 AIMS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS 0.3 LIMITATION AND DELIMITATION 0.3.1 Limitation 0.3 1 Participants and their syllabus 0.3.1 Stages of the writing process 0.3.1.3 The writing performance involved in the thesis 0.3.2 Deli mitation 0.4 METHODOLOGY 0.5 OVERV IEW OF THE STUDY 1 3 4 4 Chapter 1: BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY • •.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.• • •.• 1.1 DESCRIPTION OF THE ENGLISH SYLLABUS FOR UT FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS 1.1.1 Aims of the syllabus 1.1.2 Coursebook 1.2 FACTORS EFFECTING UT FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS ON STUDYING WRITING SKILLS 10 1.2.1 First-year stude nts' writing background 10 1.2.2 First-year stude nts' attitudes toward writing skills 11 1.2.3 Other factors 12 Summ ary 13 Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 THE NATURE OF THE WRITING SKILL 2.1.1 What is writing 2.1.2 The writing process vii 14 14 14 15 2.1.2.1 The process of writing 2.1.2.2 The stages of the writing process 2.1.2.3 Pre-writing 2.1.2.4 Techniques for pre-writing 2.2 BRIEF INTRODUCTION OF METHODS RELATING TO WRITING SKILLS 2.2.1 Early ESL Methods 2.2.1 The Grammar-Translation Method 2.2.1.2 The Dire ct Method 2.2.1.3 The Audio-Lingual Method 2.2.1.4 Controlled Writing 2.2.1.5 Guided or Free Writing 2.2.2 Recent appr oaches 2.2.2.1 Langu age Based Writing 2.2.2.2 The Pattern! Product Approach 2.2.2.3 The Process Approach 2.2.2.4 The Communicative Approach 2.2.2.5 The Functional-Notional approach 2.3 THE RELATION BETWEEN SPEAKING AND WRITING SKILLS 2.3.1 Differ ences between speaking skills and writing skills 2.3.2 Reciprocities between speaking and writing skills 2.4 PAIRWORK AND GROUPWORK IN RELATION TO IMPROVING WRITING SKILLS 2.4.1 Definition 2.4.2 Advantages and disadvantages of pairwork and groupwork activities 2.4.2.1 Advantages 2.4.2.2 Disadvantages 2.4.3 How pairwork and groupwork assist to improve writing skills 2.5 DESIGNING GUIDED QUESTIONS 2.6 SOME RESEARCHES RELATING TO THE IMPROVING OF WRITING SKILLS Summary Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY 3.1 METHODOLOGY 3.2 RESEARCH DESIGN 3.2.1 Participants of the study 3.2.1.1 Student s 3.2.1.2 Teacher s 3.2.2 Instrum ent s 15 16 17 18 21 21 21 22 22 23 23 23 23 24 25 25 25 27 27 28 30 30 30 30 31 32 32 35 36 38 38 39 39 39 41 41 viii 3.2.2.1 Questionnair es for stude nts 3.2.2.2 Questionnaires for tea chers 3.2.2.3 The quasi-e xperim ent Summ ary 41 43 45 46 Chapter 4: DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 4.1 DATA ANALySIS 4.1 Questi onnaires 4.1.1.1 Questionnaires for students 4.1.1.2 Questionnaires for teachers 4.1.2 The quasi-e xperim ent 4.1.2.1 Task 4.1.2.2 Task 4.2 FINDINGS Summ ary 48 48 49 49 65 75 75 80 83 86 Chapter 5: IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 5.1 IMPLICATIONS 5.1.1 The pre-writing as the priority 5.1.2 Skill-integrated approac hes to teaching and learning L2 writing 1.3 The syllabus 5.1.4 Teacher s' and students' inter est in the writing skill 5.2 RECOMMENDATIONS 5.2.1 To teach ers 5.2.2 To stude nts 5.2.3 Designing the supplementary materials Summ ary 88 88 88 89 90 90 90 91 93 96 99 CONCLUSION 100 Refer ences Appe ndix Appendix Appendix Appe ndix Append ix Appendix 103 108 113 117 119 121 122 ix c Ca hai 19 tren , d Y kien khac : The o ban, giira hai ky nang n6i va viet, ky nang nao giii' vai tro qu an doi voi qua trinh gia o tiep ? a N6i b Viet c Ca hai n6i va viet d Kh ong ky nang nao cii Xin cho bi et quan di~m cu a ban v~ rrurc quan cua ky nang doi vdi chuang trinh Anh van Vui lang danh so thu nr ttt den 4, d6 la quan tro ng nhat a Nghe b N6i c E>Qc d Viet Theo ban, c6 th~ bo han ky nan g viet chua ng trinh Anh van khong? a Don g b Khong d6ng Ban c6 nghi d ing ban se c6 dong II!C manh me M hQC viet nhieu han neu ban ph iii lam mot b viet (v iet an van ) biit buot ky thi giii'a va cu oi hoc ky? a C6 b Khong Theo ban, di~u kien nao sau day c6 th~ giiip ban viet tot han hoc AVI ? Ban c6 th~ ch on nh ieu han 19 Danh so thir nr tan g d§n ttt 1-7, tron g d6 la 19 chu ye u nhar ), D a Neu ban khong g~p kh khan tron g viec tim nrong va ttt vung d~ di ~n dat tuc'1ng d6 D b Neu ban tl! tin ding ban c6 th~ viet duoc tot c N eu ban biet r5 yeu ca u v~ hlnh thirc (form) cua ky nang (VI n6 khac bier vdi each viet bang ti eng Vi et) D d N eu ban khong phai 10 ngai v~ va n pharn va cau tni c cau e Neu ban diroc hoc vie t kh on g thoai mai , it cang thiing D f Neu b~i viet' thirc hanh cua ban diroc ch am di~m va stta 16i o o D g Y ki en khac : Ng on ngir thirong diroc th§y co ciia ban stt dun g gio hQC viet la : a Ti eng Anh b T ieng Viet c C ii hai ngon ngii' tren, tron g d6 Tieng Anh chie rn han 50 % d Cii hai ng on ngii' tren, d6 Tieng V i~t chiern ~an 50 % • Trang ld p cua ban, ky nang viet diroc du