Khảo sát về tính hiệu quả của phương pháp sử dụng ý kiến phản hồi của bạn học tới việc phát triển kỹ năng viết tiếng anh đối với học sinh lớp 11 chuyên anh trường THPT sơn tây

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ****** CHU THỊ PHƯƠNG LINH AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EFFECTTIVENESS OF PEER-WRITTEN FEEDBACK ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF ESL WRITING FOR THE 11th SPECIALIZED ENGLISH GRADE IN SONTAY HIGH SCHOOL (Khảo sát tính hiệu phương pháp sử dụng ý kiến phản hồi bạn học tới việc phát triển kỹ viết Tiếng Anh học sinh lớp 11 chuyên Anh – Trường THPT Sơn Tây) M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 Hanoi – 2015 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ****** CHU THỊ PHƯƠNG LINH AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EFFECTTIVENESS OF PEER-WRITTEN FEEDBACK ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF ESL WRITING FOR THE 11th SPECIALIZED ENGLISH GRADE IN SONTAY HIGH SCHOOL (Khảo sát tính hiệu phương pháp sử dụng ý kiến phản hồi bạn học tới việc phát triển kỹ viết Tiếng Anh học sinh lớp 11 chuyên Anh – Trường THPT Sơn Tây) M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr Nguyen Van Do Hanoi – 2015 DECLARATION I confirm that the thesis “An Investigation into the Effectiveness of Peer-written Feedback to the Development of ESL Writing for 11th Grade Majoring English in Sontay High school” is a presentation of my original research work It was carried out under the consultant of Prof Assoc Dr Nguyen Van Do I also declare that quotation for the information and references in the thesis has obeyed academic rules I hereby want to confirm that this research had never been published anywhere before the submission and this research is only carried out in the framework of a master thesis Date: ……………………………………… Signature: ………………………………… i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS With boundless love and great attitude, I would like to send my deepest sincere and appreciation to the people who devote their valuable work and time for the researchers during the time conducting the research Without their help, this research would have never been completed First of all, I would like to express my special thankfulness to my supervisor, Prof Assoc Nguyen Van Do for the guidance, support, consistence advice as well as remarks and engagements through the process of this master thesis All of his help contributes to bring the success to the research I would also like to send my appreciation to all the participants of this thesis They are Mrs Nguyen Thu Huyen- the former teacher of 11th English gifted class in Sontay high school, Mrs Le Phuong Lan- the teacher of English and 45 students in this class, who willingly shared their precious time and efforts to help me complete the questionnaire and conduct a long series of writing test during four months of collecting data Without their support, the thesis would never been fulfilled I hope to send my thanks to my colleague, teachers and English teaching staffs in Sontay high school for their valuable critical feedbacks, comments and encouragements Last but not least, I am very grateful to my family and friends, who always stand by me and give me mental support as well as encouragement to complete the master thesis ii ABSTRACT The study is designed to investigate the effect of peer written feedback on the development of ESL writing skill for the 11th grade The study primarily aims to explore the attitude of 11th grade students majoring English towards peer written feedback activity This study also explores students‟ writing aspects which had been improved thanks to the feedback from their peers The results of the research may be proved to suggest some implications for the teacher to exploit more roles of peer written feedback within ESL writing lesson Firstly, the sample including 45 students in 11th grade majoring English in Sontay high school was required to the proficiency tests to measure the level of improvement students had thanks to the help of their peer-feedback After that, half of them were asked to attend the survey to give the data for the attitude of students towards peer written feedback in their ESL writing The collected data were then presented under the form of tables and charts The result showed that students had mixed attitude towards peer-written feedback However, the number of students having positive attitude were out-numbered than those who has negative viewpoint about it The main instrument to collect research data were students‟ writing tests measured during the four-month testing The change in the assessment and the number of mistakes which could be realized and corrected indicated that peer written feedback had improved the quality of students‟ writing products in some aspects iii iv INTRODUCTION Rationale of the study Feedback in education is seen to take a crucial contribution to the improvement of students‟ ESL learning It takes benefits in improving “both encouraging and consolidating learning” (Anderson, 1992; Brophy, 1981, Vygotsky, 1978 cited in Ken Hyland and Fiona Hyland, 2006) In most of the traditional ESL class, especially writing section, giving feedback and correctness to students is one of the important tasks of the teachers, as feedback takes benefits in creating supporting learning environment, as well as instructing students a model sample of writing With the help of teacher, students have fewer burdens with their work However, the help of teacher‟s feedback in the proficiency of students‟ ESL writing skill just has benefits in some aspects The researchers found out that focusing on the help of teacher only would be problematic as they just understand the „outer layout‟ of the problems without understanding the core reason of the errors and how to make the writing improved As a consequence, students will have short-term improvement on their revised lesson and they will be easy to make the mistakes again Thus, one of the duties of teachers is to discover an effective way to facilitate students‟ learning without the help of teacher‟s feedback and help them avoid the above-mentioned troubles To prepare for students a good writing skill, teachers should try to combine different strategies with the aim of helping students learn better and enhancing writing skill because “Second language writers often benefit most and make most progress when teachers contribute to this goal through a variety of intervention strategies available in classroom settings” Skroll (2003) Among many interventions, using students‟ peer feedback in writing is one of the effective strategies In this method, students conduct their first writing product In the next stage, they exchange it with their peer to receive their friend‟s feedback Despite the effectiveness of written feedback to students‟ ESL writing skill, most experienced English teachers in the school still blame the drawbacks of peer-written feedback The reason is that students‟ ability is inadequate to give useful feedbacks They have difficulty in indicating the errors and providing suggestions Many teachers not take advantages of peer written feedback in their ESL writing period as they not truly believe it can bring benefits to their students They assume that peer written feedback just has its roles to the college or university students This rumor is an obstacle that prevents the students from receiving modern learning and teaching techniques, and peer written feedback in specific Besides, the previous studies show too much conflict The results of the studies depend largely on the attitudes of students toward this kind of feedback, which contributes to the success and effectiveness of peer written feedback From the above mentioned reasons, the research “The effect of peer written feedback on the development of ESL writing for the 11th major English grade at Sontay high school” is carried out Aims of the study This research is conducted with the aim of: (1) Exploring students‟ attitudes towards the written peer feedback activity (2) Investigating the level of improvement students gained after the periods of testing with peer written feedback method (3) Suggesting some specific implications for teachers to exploit further effectiveness of peer –written feedback in writing lesson Research questions In order to fulfill the aims, the research attempts to answer the following questions: What are the attitudes of students to peer-written feedback on their writing? 2 To what extents of students‟ ESL writing can have improvement thanks to peer-written feedback? What are the drawbacks of applying peer-written feedback in students‟ ESL writing lessons? Scope of the study Feedback applied in writing is such a broad topic, which includes teacher feedback and students‟ feedback Students‟ feedback in particular contains many forms; however, within the framework of the study, the researcher hopes to focus on the students of 11th grade majoring English in Sontay high school to provide written form of feedback to their peers applied in writing skill Previous findings about the study The large numbers of researches and journal published articles have been carried out to evaluate the relationship between peer-written feedback and the improvement of students‟ writing proficiency All of these may use different research methodology and concentrate on their specific aspects; however, all of them try to explore the roles of peer written feedback on ESL teaching and learning writing In this thesis, the author recommends to summarize some previous findings related to the study The first research to be mentioned here is the journal “Effects of Teacher and Peer Feedback on Students’ Writing at Secondary Level”, which was conducted by Ghani, Manuna, Asgher and Tahira The research‟s purpose is to investigate the effectiveness of peer written feedback and teacher feedback on the written record of students and then examine the attitudes of them toward feedback activity In order to give the result for the research, the author carried out an investigation in the five government secondary schools in Bahawalpur with the population of 100 students In order to collect the data, the researcher used survey questionnaires, students‟ pre-test and post test and students‟ written remarks about the whole experimental feedback from the sample The final REFERENCES Brown, H.D (1994), Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy, Englewood, New Jersey, Prentice Hall Regents Bostock, S, J (2000) Students’ Peer Assessment A workshop at Keele University, 2000 Chaudron, C (1984), “The Effects of Feedback on Students‟ Composition revisions”, RELC Journal, 15(2) Coffin, C., Curry, M., Goodman, S., Hewings, A., Lillis, T., & Swann, J (2003) Teaching academic writing: A toolkit for higher education London: Routledge Elbow, P (1983) Writing without Teachers New York: Oxford University Press Elbow, P (1998) Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process New York: Oxford University Press Hassen, J.G & Liu, J (2005), Guiding Principles for Effective Peer response, ELT Journal, 29 (1) Honeycutt, R.L& Pritchard, R, J (2005) Using Unstructured Writing Workshop to Help Good Readers who are Poor Writers North Carolina State University, Raleigh Hyland, K (2001), “Managing group work”, Guidelines A Periodical for Classroom Teacher, 13 (1) 10 Hyland, K (2003) Writing and Teaching Writing In J.C Richard (Ed) Second Language Writing Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 11 Kroll, B.C (1990) Second Language Writing: Research Insight for the Classroom Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 12 Paulus, T.M.(1999) The Effect of Peer and Teacher‟s Feedback on Students‟ Writing Journal of Second Language Teaching 8(3).265-289 13 Rollinson, P (2005), “Using peer feedback in the ESl writing class”, ELT Journal, 59(1) 14 Tsui, A &Ng, M (2000) Do Second Language Writers Benefits from Peer Comment?, Journal of Second Language Writing 15 Ur, P.(1996) A Course in Language Teaching: Practice and Theory, Cambridge: CUP 16 Yang, M., Badger & Ju, Z (2006) A Comparative Study of Peer and Teacher‟s Feedback in a Chinese EFL Writing Class Journal of Second Language Writing, 15, 179-200 I