Difficulties in learning writing, from the perspective of grade 6 students in a local school

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES ********************* NGUYỄN THỊ PHƢƠNG AN DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING WRITING, FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF GRADE STUDENTS IN A LOCAL SCHOOL Những khó khăn việc học Viết, từ quan điểm học sinh lớp trƣờng địa phƣơng M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Method Code: 8140231.01 Hanoi, 2018 i VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES ********************* NGUYỄN THỊ PHƢƠNG AN DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING WRITING, FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF GRADE STUDENTS IN A LOCAL SCHOOL Những khó khăn việc học Viết, từ quan điểm học sinh lớp trƣờng địa phƣơng M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Method Code: 8140231.01 Supervisor: Prof Dr Nguyễn Hoà Hanoi, 2018 ii DECLARATION I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report entitled “Difficulties in learning Writing, from the perspective of grade students in a local school” submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in English Teaching Methodology No person‟s work has been utilized without the acknowledgement in the text of the thesis i ACKOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Prof Dr Nguyễn Hòa, who helped, supported and encouraged me while I conducted this research Without his helpful comments, valuable advice and considerable assistance, this research could not have been completed I also want to thank all the staff members, colleagues and students of the secondary X for providing me the best conditions to fulfill my research ii LIST OF ABBREVIATION EFL English as a foreign language NWREL Model The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory Model iii LIST OF THE TABLES Table Figure 1.1 The percentage of students who not know how to use tenses Figure 1.2 The number of students who not know how to use tenses The percentage of students having problems with active/passive Figure 2.1 Table Figure 2.2 Figure 3.1 Table Figure 3.2 Figure 4.1 Table Figure 4.2 Figure 5.1 Table Figure 5.2 Figure 6.1 Table Figure 6.2 Table form The number of students having problems with active/passive form The percentage of students having problems with subject-verb agreement The number of students having problems with subject-verb agreement The percentage of students who not know how to write a word correctly The number of students who not know how to write a word correctly The percentage of students who not know exact meaning of the English words The number of students who not know exact meaning of the English words The percentage of students who not have enough range of vocabulary The number of students who not have enough range of Figure 7.1 vocabulary The percentage of students who not have enough ideas Figure 7.2 The number of students who not have enough ideas The percentage of students who not know how to manage the Figure 8.1 Table Figure 8.2 ideas The number of students who not know how to manage the ideas iv Table Figure 9.1 Figure 9.2 Figure 10.1 Table 10 Figure 10.2 Figure 11.1 Table 11 Figure 11.2 Table 12 Figure 11.1 Figure 11.2 v ABSTRACT Writing - one of four main English skills - plays an important part in learning this language It is not only a compulsory subject at schools but also an essential skill in a real life Therefore, this research has been conducted to determine what difficulties Grade students often have in learning writing The study is a case study It used both qualitative methodology and quantitative methodology The participants included 50 grade students in a secondary school located in Hanoi (school X) The data have been collected from the survey, interviews and written artifacts The written artifacts help me find out students‟ writing problems The survey and the interview used as a means to get more information about grade students‟ point of view about learning writing and difficulties they cope with when learning this skill From these findings, some suggestions were proposed to grade students and EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers in order to improve students‟ writing skill throughout their writing learning process vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Content Page TABLE OF CONTENTS I PART I: INTRODUCTION Rationale of the study Aims and objectives of the study Research questions Scope of the study Methods of the study Significance of the study Design of the study AI PART II: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: Literature review 5-10 1.1 Definition of terms 1.1.1 Definition of Writing 1.1.2 Definition of Writing Problems 1.2 An overview of writing 5-8 1.2.1 Types of writing in Grade 1.2.2 The 6+1 Traits Writing Model (NWREL Model) 1.2.3 Main causes of writing problems 1.3 Previous studies 1.4 The importance of writing skills to Grade students 10 1.5 Summary 10 Chapter 2: Methodology 11-15 2.1 Setting of the study 11 2.2 Research type 11 2.3 Participants of the study 12 vii 44 | P a g e Sequencing (Organization) Introduction (Organization) 45 | P a g e Support for Topic (Content) Focus on Topic (Content) Sentence Length (Sentence Fluency) 46 | P a g e Conclusion (Organization) Grammar & Spelling (Conventions) Penmanship (Conventions) 47 | P a g e Commitment (Voice) Capitalization & Punctuation (Conventions) 48 | P a g e Flow & Rhythm (Sentence Fluency) Sentence Structure (Sentence Fluency) 49 | P a g e APPENDIX 05 General paragraph Rubrics Rating Scale: First appropriate thesis Details in Conclusion rep up, or expres advice Cohesion is u correct way (C Linking Redundancy is Punctuation Grammar Spelling Capitalization 50 | P a g e APPENDIX 06 Students’ written artifacts - Student A1 and student B1 are students who learned English at the primary school X - Student A2 and student B2 are students who learned English in other primary schools Topic 01: Write a passage (about 120 – 150 words) about your favorite day in a week Students A1 51 | P a g e Student A2 Topic 02: Imagine that you are a famous author Try to write a new story (maximum 300 words) Student B1 52 | P a g e Student B2 53 | P a g e ... adopted both qualitative and quantitative approaches to gathering information and data in order to assist in achieving the study goals 2.3 Participants of the research The participants of the study... Main causes of writing problems According to Al-Khsawneh (2010), main causes of students? ?? weaknesses in English are the teaching method and the learning environment Their weak qualification in. .. students not aware of its importance and they make lots of mistakes in their written works Additionally, learning writing is a challenging task for the majority of grade students Actually, they not