Nghiên cứu hiệu quả của phương pháp luyện viết theo quy trình chuẩn bị cho thi ielts

1 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONALSTUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES LƯU TÚ OANH A STUDY ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PROCESS-ORIENTED WRITING FOR IELTS NGHIÊN CỨU HIỆU QUẢ CỦA PHƯƠNG PHÁP LUYỆN VIẾT THEO QUY TRÌNH CHUẨN BỊ CHO THI IELTS M.A Minor Thesis Field : English methodology Code : 601410 Ha noi, 2011 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONALSTUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES LƯU TÚ OANH A STUDY ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PROCESS-ORIENTED WRITING FOR IELTS NGHIÊN CỨU HIỆU QUẢ CỦA PHƯƠNG PHÁP LUYỆN VIẾT THEO QUY TRÌNH CHUẨN BỊ CHO THI IELTS M.A Minor Thesis Field : English methodology Code : 601410 Supervisor : LÊ VĂN CANH, Phd Ha noi, 2011 Content Acknowledgement PART 1: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………… 1.1 Rationale …………………………………………………………… 1.2 Aims and scope of the study………………………………………… 1.2.1 Objectives of the study……………………………………………… 1.2.2 Research questions…………………………………………………… 1.2.3 Scope of the study…………………………………………………… 1.3 Significance…………………………………………………………… 1.4 Methods of the study………………………………………………… PART LITERATURE REVIEW Academic writing…………………………………………………… 10 2.1.1 What is writing? 10 2.1.2 What is an academic essay? 10 2.1.3 What are the main types of academic essays? 13 Challenges of learners……………………………………………… 15 2.2.1 Problems of the EFL learners……………………………………… 15 2.2.2 Major problems of Academic writing instruction in Vietnam context 15 2.1 2.2 2.2.2.1 Heavy emphasis on grammatical form…………………………… 17 2.2.2.2 Overemphasis on the final product………………………………… 18 2.2.2.3 Lack of genre-specific writing across the curriculum…………… 19 2.2.2.4 The need for more diverse types of feedback……………………… 19 2.3 Writing in preparation classes for IELTS…………………………… 19 2.3.1 Academic Writing…………………………………………………… 20 2.3.1.1 IELS Academic writing – task ………………………………… 21 2.3.1.2 IELTS Academic writing – task 2………………………………… 21 2.3.2 Problems of IELTS writing learners in Vietnam context…………… 22 Approaches to teaching writing…………………………………… 23 2.4.1 The Product Approach……………………………………………… 23 2.4 2.4.1.1 Definitions of the product approach……………………………… 23 2.4.1.2 Limitations of product approach…………………………………… 23 2.4.2 The process approach……………………………………………… 25 2.4.2.1 Definitions of the process approach……………………………… 26 2.4.2.2 Strengths of the process approach………………………………… 26 2.4.2.3 Weaknesses of the process approach……………………………… 31 2.4.3 Differences between the product and process approach………… 32 PART 3: THE STUDY…………………………………………………… 33 3.1 The Course…………………………………………………………… 35 3.2 Participants………………………………………………………… 35 3.3 Methodology………………………………………………………… 48 3.3.1 Reasons for choosing an experimental research strategy…………… 49 3.3.2 The procedure………………………………………………………… 49 The first instrument……………………………………………… 49 3.3.2.1 3.3.2.1.1 Instrument………………………………………………………… 49 3.3.2.1.2 Treatment………………………………………………………… 49 3.3.2.1.3 Data Collection…………………………………………………… 49 3.3 2.1.4 Findings…………………………………………………………… 51 The second instrument…………………………………………… 52 3.3.2.2.1 Instrument………………………………………………………… 58 3.3.2.2.2 Findings…………………………………………………………… 58 3.3.3 Discussion……………………………………………………… 61 PART CONCLUSION………………………………………………… 65 3.3.2.2 4.1 Summary of the main findings…………………………………… 65 4.2 Implications for Academic Writing Instruction………………… 66 4.3 Limitations of the study…………………………………………… 69 4.4 Suggestions for further studies…………………………………… 71 4.5 Reference…………………………………………………………… 74 LIST OF TABLES Table 1: The arrangement of research time 52 Diagram 3.1 The procedure of process oriented approach 53 Table 2: Content: (Total score=2) 54 Table 3: Students‟ Pre-and Post-test Scores for the Content (%) 54 Table 4: Organization: (Total score=2) 56 Table 5: Students‟ Pre-and Post-test Scores for the Organization (%) 56 Table 6: Lexical resource: (Total score=2.5) 57 Table 7: Table 3: Students‟ Pre-and Post-test Scores for the Lexical resource (%) 57 Table 8: Language use: (Total score=2.5) 59 Table 9: Students‟ Pre-and Post-test Scores for the Language use (%) 59 Table 3.10: Students‟ Questionnaire 62 PART1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale The increasing number of Vietnamese students pursuing their academic training in English-speaking countries gives rise to the need to prepare the prospective students to go through the gate-keeper of the pre-departure examination, which is either TOEFL or IELTS In higher education in English speaking countries, in particular, many university courses evaluate students through some form of written text (e.g., essay exams, shortanswer essays, research papers…) Competence in academic writing is very critical to both the success at the exam and that of the students‟ future study Understandably, students who plan to pursue higher education abroad are supposed to demonstrate their ability to write well for academic purposes Considering the great emphasis on writing at oversea universities, the kind of writing training Vietnamese students receive prior to their studies and the solutions to their problems in English academic writing need to be examined To investigate these issues could contribute to the improvement of writing instruction for Vietnamese EFL students who plan to study in academic programs in English speaking countries Therefore, an appropriate score achieved by students in IELTS officially defined on http://www.IELTS.org as the International English Language Testing System is one of the fundamental requirements for abroad university entry IELTS, the results of which are used by three international organizations, British Council, Idp, and University of Cambridge, to assess your language skills when people want to study, work or live in an English-speaking country, exactly tests their ability to communicate in English It is estimated that more than 700,000 people use the test to access opportunities in careers, study and migration every year IELTS are administered in over 500 centres globally four times a month Examinees can optionally choose from two types of IELTS test: Academic or General Training, depending on whether they want to study, work or migrate Both modules are made up of four parts – Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking IELTS results are graded on the unique IELTS 9-band scale The test covers the full range of ability from non-user to expert user Candidates are not limited in how many times they can sit the test However, IELTS, which is increasingly important in Vietnam as mentioned above, is a great challenge for Vietnamese test-takers and test-trainers for a variety of reasons The main reason is their lack of the required proficiency due to factors such as (a) a lack of qualified language teachers; (b) extremely large classes, with poor teacher-to-student ratios; (c) teaching methods which focus on grammar, vocabulary, and linguistic phenomena; and (e) lack of suitable, authentic teaching materials For academic writing skills only, non major Vietnamese students of English have been done a number of grammar exercises, but they have not learned how to write an academic paragraph or essay Because the dominant teaching methods in Vietnam are grammar-centred, the development of students‟ academic writing skills is either ignored or superficially emphasized Yet, in order to obtain high test scores in IELTS, along with continued concerns about grammar and vocabulary at sentence levels, Vietnamese students, especially, encountered various problems in recognizing and managing conventional differences between Vietnamese and English academic writing, such as the lack of knowledge about expected structure, style, organization and use of language The motivation behind this study is that I, as a teacher, wish to find ways to help the students develop their academic writing more effectively so that they can achieve higher scores for the writing component in the IELTS I believe that a high score on the IELTS is so critical to most of the test-takers if they not want to be disadvantaged in the competition for scholarship or for enrolment opportunity in foreign higher education institutions The instructional strategy that I experimented with is the application of a processoriented approach to writing I believed that this approach would enhance the students‟ overall writing proficiency because it is revealed that instruction in process strategies 10 promoted the students‟ awareness of conceptual writing strategies and willingness to apply practical writing strategies to compose the writings which are perfectly constructed, academically styled, well organized, and correctly language used Furthermore, the effects of the process oriented writing instruction may be sustainable over a period of time without further instruction The success of this teaching approach that has been documented in the literature suggests that this approach to writing teaching may help the students improve their writing performance in their IELTS This assumption motivates the researcher to conduct this study 1.2 Aims and scope of the study 1.2.1 Objectives of the study This study is aimed at experimenting a process-oriented approach to academic writing in the context of an IELTS preparation course to a small group of Vietnamese adult learners (N=20) Thus, the objectives of the study include: a) To test the effectiveness of the process-oriented approach on the students‟ overall competence in academic writing; b) To find out on which sub-skills of the academic writing skills the processoriented approach is most effective c) The findings of this study will have significant pedagogical implications for Academic writing curriculum planners, and teachers Furthermore, it is expected that this study will shed light on the feasibility of incorporating process oriented writing instruction into IELTS academic writing preparation course 1.2.2 Research questions: This study aims to investigate the following research questions: (1) How does the process approach help the students progress in their writing profiency in terms of the content, organization, lexical resource, and language use as reflected in their writings? 11 (2) In which area(s) of the content, organisation, lexical resource, and language use the students show least improvement with the process approach? (3) How the students self-evaluate their progress in their writing proficiency with the process approach? 1.3 Scope of the study The study is confined to the testing of the effectiveness of the process-oriented approach to the development of the academic writing skills of a small group of students who were studying for the IELTS It is, therefore, a quasi-experimental study in nature Thus, there is no intention of generalizing the findings Significance Although no generalization of the findings of the study is intended, the study is significant in at least two ways First, it shows how effective the process-oriented approach to writing to preparing the students for their academic writing tests Second, the findings can be applied beyond the test-preparation context to similar contexts of writing instruction, i.e where the class size is small and the students are sufficiently motivated Methods of the study Since the aim of the study is to test the effectiveness of the process-oriented approach to academic writing, two methods were used First, a quasi-experimental design was implemented over a period of 15 hours of classroom instruction Second, a questionnaire was administered to the students by the end of the course in order to find out how the students perceived of the usefulness of the teaching approach under investigation 12 PART2 LITERATURE REVIEW Academic writing 1.1 What is writing? To begin with, it is normally stated that writing is an expression of ideas - the conveying of message to readers, so the ideas themselves should arguably be seen as the most important aspect of it What is more, writing can take many forms, including anything from a shopping list, acting as an aide-memoire, through letters, both formal and informal, to academic texts like this essay Each type of writing displays a variety of features which “can be observed within the sentence at the level of grammar, and beyond the sentence at the level of text structure.” (Nunan, 1999, p 275) Therefore, each type of writing requires more or less skill, and the more complex the writing, the more essential writing skills are Attention should also be paid to formal aspects: neat hand writing, correct spelling and punctuation, as well as acceptable grammar and careful selection of vocabulary (Penny 1996) Writing is a productive skill which, Nunan (1999) also suggests, shares some functional characteristics with spoken discourse but also displays unique elements which are not common to both Harmer (2004), on the other hand, views that the type of writing determines how similar spoken and written discourse are Halliday (1985) cited in Nunan (1999 p 275) outlines main purposes for writing, namely “action” (including public signs, product labels, etc), “information” (including newspapers and magazines etc) and “entertainment” (including comic strips, novels, newspaper features etc) So it appears that writing has many facets 1.2 What is an academic essay? As mentioned above, among many kinds of writing, this paper thoroughly works out and discuss academic assays which are usually identified as writings requiring no outside research (though they sometimes may) In academics, Maryanna Smith (2010) considers academic writing as a major assignment in which one is supposed to possess the 59 the writing lessons have many pair and group 11 (working activities together on 100% generating ideas, and giving feedback to peers) On the whole I felt that the 12 writing lesson were highly 57% 43% 76% 24% 73% 36% 67% 21% effective for me I appreciate the support and 13 assistance give by my teachers in the writing lessons 14 15 I found the writing task give by my teachers useful to me I really enjoy the writing lessons 12% 3.3.2.2.2 Findings The result of the questionnaire survey indicates that the majority of the students, or eighty per cent of them felt that their writing skills were improved considerably after the experiment Specifically, 100%, 82%, and 90% of students assured that they knew how to structure and write the introductory paragraph and conclusion of an academic essay, respectively Other areas that are positively evaluated by the students are their ability to revise their writing (54% agree, and 46% strongly agree), to organize Similarly, nearly two-thirds of them ( 76%), and a third of them ( 24%) strongly accepted that they are usefully supported and assisted by the teacher, and 57% of them totally agreed and 43% of them agreed that the lessons were quite effective to them Two-thirds of them (71%) also stated that they felt more confident in dealing with the academic writing skills One area that the students were divided was their ability to self-evaluate their own writing including the ability to deal with the mechanics of writing such as checking the organization, content, 60 lexical resource, and use of language While 53% of the students believed that they were competent in self-evaluating their own essay, 43% of them responded negatively On the other hand, some of them (38%) stated that they did not exactly know how to evaluate their essay in terms of content, organization, lexical resource, and language use 3.3.3 Discussions The findings of this study indicate that the process-oriented approach to teaching academic writing has both advantages and limitations These advantages and limitations will be discussed below The process-oriented approach is effective and efficient in helping IELTS takers to develop their academic writing skills in the following three respects First, in the perspective of constructivist learning theories, more intellectual control should be put into the hands of learners In this project, instead of getting ideas from the teacher, students accumulated ideas through group discussion They were actively engaged in meaningconstruction activities such as analyzing the task questions, brain-storming, self-revision and peer-editing Second, instead of being passive learners, most of the students actively took part in the whole process of writing When they realized that they were the masters of the classroom and there was space for them to things that they considered meaningful, they would become more interested in doing the writing tasks Third, students in IELTS preparation class found it very convenient and fascinating in IELTS writing in the process-oriented classes To them the complicated and timeconsuming writing tasks became simplified and easier-to-perform with the help of their classmates and teacher Therefore, they become more and more self-confident that they can produce an accurate and appropriate academic IELTS essay 61 It is suggested that the process oriented approach may contribute to the subjects' improvement in both test and essay-writing tasks Interestingly, the students improved more in terms of essay content and organization which was represented in their writing scores in pre-test, post-test, and progress tests As far as the questionnaire results are concerned, most of the responses were positive toward the courseware At least we are sure that none of the subjects think this instruction strategy is detrimental to their learning Specifically they regarded the content and organization as the most useful for them when understanding and giving correct answer to the task questions However, throughout the research time, though teacher applied the process oriented approach, there were some weaknesses in students‟ performance in terms of language use and lexical resources This is reflected in their‟ scores in the Pre-test, Post-test and progress tests, which did not show significant progress in these regards Generally speaking, although the Process-oriented approach could help students improve their academic writing proficiency and particularly develop their other sub-skills like how to analyzing the writing tasks, generating and planning ideas, communicating with others, and giving a favorable comment how to analyze a composition and how to find out mistakes, etc…, not all students thought highly of the process-oriented approach Statistically, students‟ essays showed their little improvement in lexical resource and language use First, poor students held different opinions on it For example, in the class, it was a real challenge for some of them who lacked of vocabulary and natural native expression and did not expertise in grammar to join the pair or group discussion to generate ideas, selfevaluate their own essay, and give peer feedback, and comment on others‟ essays, so that they did not make much progress at the end of the short time course since their language competence levels were low at the beginning of the course 62 Second, those poor students found the process-oriented approach a waste of time in that they spent some time peer-editing their other composition yet they could find few mistakes or errors; the process-oriented approach failed to build Students‟ confidence because they now had no modeling compositions to mimic The findings of this study show that there is no best single method to all types of students in all contexts of teaching and learning (Prabhu, 1990) In other words, there needs to be a good combination of both the process and process approach depending on the subskills of writing proficiency that the teacher wants to focus on and on the students‟ level of proficiency as well as their learning styles 63 PART4: Conclusion 4.1 Summary of the main findings Three major findings are summarized as follows ： 1) The process-oriented approach has positive effects on students‟ academic writing proficiency After the process-oriented approach was employed for 10 weeks in IELTS preparation class, the results in the post-test showed that there was a significant difference between them Most of the students‟ essays were full of contents which were required in the IELTS task questions In addition, task required ideas were generated, put in logical orders and structured in three main separate parts; introduction, bodies and conclusion, as well 2) However, the process-oriented approach did not show its effectiveness in helping students to enrich their topic-related vocabulary, and use grammatical rules more appropriately It seemed that poor students should be given more time to practice and acquire their language skills to make their ideas more appropriate and sparkling in terms lexical resource and language use such as expression, word choice and grammatical ranges to build their confidence in self evaluating, and giving feedbacks and comments on others‟ essays 3) Their attitude towards the process-oriented approach is mainly positive The survey showed that it was very flexible and helped develop their divergent thinking; and that it helped develop English academic writing proficiency Most of them accepted that after course they knew how to brainstorm, outline and structure an academic essay, such as how to write introductory and concluding paragraph appropriately Moreover, they felt being motivated and found writing lessons useful and effective Group-discussion was also of great help to the success of writing A lot of students failed to produce sparkling ideas and thus their writings were quite poor in content and illogically organized at first But through group-discussion, they became very 64 creative and learned how to analyze the task questions, collect ideas, make their essays full of meaning, and more logically organized 4.2 Implications for Academic Writing Instruction 1) The process-oriented approach can be widely used to improve students‟ EFL writing proficiency in Vietnamese English classrooms But this approach designed originally to teach students English as their 1st or 2nd language should be adapted to better suit students in the Vietnamese context If it is borrowed blindly, it is likely that this approach will produce more negative effects on students‟ writing proficiency 2) Although the process-oriented approach effectively helped students to improve their writing competence, especially regarding the content, and organization, students needed more time spent acquiring and practicing to expand their vocabulary and improve their language use For example, more inputs are still needed It is generally acknowledged that the five basic language skills are closely interrelated and therefore should be integrated as a whole Reading, as a major input channel, has always been considered closely related to writing According to Krashen and Terrell（1983), reading can “serve as an important resource of comprehensible input and may make a significant contribution to the development of overall proficiency” 3) In all, this study has great significance in that the findings of the study, from both a theoretical and practical perspective, can be effectively used to teach Vietnamese students writing, to encourage them to write more freely, naturally, fluently, creatively and ultimately to improve their writing proficiency In general, English teaching methodologies, such as communicative writing instruction, the process approach, and the product approach, are oriented towards English language education based in Britain, Australia, and North America (ESL or BANA) These approaches cannot be successfully applied to EFL contexts without consideration of 65 different goals of teaching writing to EFL learners because these approaches were not developed specifically for the rest of the ELT world (EFL or TESEP countries), (Holliday, 1994) In conclusion, the Vietnamese social contexts, before these teaching methods are utilized, Vietnamese educators and the Vietnamese government need to consider if these methods are suitable to the needs and goals of students within EFL social and academic contexts To provide the best learning environment and to effectively facilitate Vietnamese students' learning English, we need to identify the best teaching methodologies within Vietnamese social and academic contexts In order to achieve appropriate classroom methodologies in Vietnamese contexts, we need to identify what Vietnamese students expect from writing classes and what goals and objectives they have when taking Vietnamese writing classes This study might be generalized to the countries that have similar issues in terms of the learning and teaching of writing, such as those that Kachru (1982; 1992) indicates as countries belonging to the Expanding Circle, countries that recognize the importance of English as an international language and that teach English as a foreign language, including Japan, China, and Taiwan Additionally, these Asian countries share many social and cultural values with Vietnam, and so in many ways face similar issues in terms of English language teaching In EFL contexts, where exposure to English is extremely limited, more effective approaches to writing and teachable skills should be applied to writing instruction To this, what we suggest is using the balanced instructional of the process to teaching writing All of the approaches have benefits and drawbacks However, it is believed that complementary use of the process approach helps student writers develop their skills in using language by experiencing a whole writing process, from analyzing the task question, brainstorming or generating ideas, planning or organizing the ideas selected to starting writing a complete essay 66 We have provided interesting writing lessons based on the process to compensate for major problems of Vietnamese writing instruction Due to the fact that Vietnamese writing instruction places heavy emphasis on grammatical form, we suggest balancing form and function to help students recognize the roles they play in selecting and conveying their ideas to meet the requirements of the writing tests, constructing their ideas in the accurate academic essay organization as well as using the appropriate language for their writings Additionally, Vietnamese writing instruction overstresses the final product; therefore, what we suggest is a learning strategy that helps create active interaction between a teacher and students and also between students themselves in the writing procedure Through our writing instruction, students are able to understand and reproduce the typical rhetorical patterns they need to express their ideas They are also able to illustrate the process of writing an essay, considering both the content and the language Later, students can write their own essays with confidence Furthermore, to make writing more meaningful and productive, and to help Vietnamese students become more active learners, the writing teachers need to encourage students to experience diverse types of feedback Rather than just focus on teacher's written feedback, writing teachers need to apply alternative forms of feedback, such as teacher-student conferencing and peer-feedback These various types of feedback give both a teacher and students a chance to negotiate the meaning of a text through dialogue 4.3 Limitations of the study There are two noteworthy limitations of this study: generalizability and longitudinal effects The generalizabilty of these research findings are limited because they were generated in an exploratory qualitative inquiry The research design was not intended to produce results that account for or predict the behavior of a wide classification of people as most experimental, hypothesis-testing studies are This liability was clear at the outset However, because the inquiry generated a relatively clear and specific Grounded Theory that can be applied to practical experiences, it should be relatively easy to design a series of 67 focused hypothesis-testing studies to experimentally verify and expand the theory generated here These studies would be much more likely to produce findings generalizable to larger classifications of people Second, time and budget limitations made it impractical to assess how narrativebased processing might have influenced participants‟ long-term thinking over multiple months Some relevant literature suggests that many of the insights that come from experiential interventions such as this one may not show up until long after the intervention ends (Greenberg, Rice, & Elliot, 1993) Thus, it is possible that participants may have experienced more meaningful effects of the process oriented realizations more months after the procedure ended, than on the day the data was actually collected Collecting such data was beyond the scope of the current study Future studies might consider experiential learning interventions which are followed up with longitudinal check-ups for months or longer to explore if and how long-term after-effects actually occur For the survey, many of the questions were not specific enough to penetrate the complex and deep seated nature of learning style The different levels of learners are not addressed in the study Messik (1984) noted that cognitive constructs might vary depending on the level of the learner For example, at early stages students must work to analyse the task, generating and planning their essays, at the same time prepare for a basic and specialised vocabulary and grammar while at higher levels the application of specialised schemata may be required The usual approach in studies of this type is to allow respondents to use their native language unless they have an advanced level of English (See O‟Malley & Chamot 1990, p 92) This survey used only English for all the survey questions, so some questions may not completely understood by students I am not convinced that questionnaires are the best way to investigate writing skills learning either Surveys have the advantage of being readily analysed by statistical methods and hence give apparently solid results with clear and often generalizable patterns A large amount of information can be obtained from hundreds of respondents with relative ease For these reasons, survey is perhaps the most “commonly used descriptive method in 68 educational research” (Cohen & Manion 1987, p 97) While questionnaires have been popular with researchers in the field of learning strategies (e.g Oxford, 1986; Politzer & McGroaty, 1985) I argue their value is limited when investigating such complex behaviour as learning strategies Research like this seems only to tell us what we already know Beebe (2001) notes that questionnaire-based surveys with generalized questions not provide sufficient insight into learner behavior and strategies The highly structured nature of questionnaires necessarily has a strong influence on the eventual data collected (See O‟Malley & Chamot 1990, p.95, p.112, p 221) In conclusion, the results of the study show that the writing course was successful on the whole, as it helped to bring about positive changes in most students‟ attitudes towards writing and improvements in their writing habits The course also helped the students to improve in their writing performance and to learn how to use the strategies at each stage of the process of writing Most students in the course were receptive to such a writing procedure They liked the course and found it useful They also liked most instruments and found them useful and easy to use It seems that this course was workable From this study, it can be seen that the Process-oriented writing course could be successfully implemented within a tight schedule (a double lesson each week for 10 weeks) and a tight syllabus in all the schools, though it would be more desirable if the duration of the course could be longer This might be a signal to indicate that it is not impossible to incorporate such a method in the writing curriculum in most writing class in Vietnam In light of this review of the literature available when examining writing students‟ achievement through the process oriented approach, certain questions arise 4.4 Suggestions for further studies Although the findings of the study show the effectiveness of the process-oriented approach on students writing proficiency in the context of an IELTS preparation course, those findings cannot be generalized First, the students were studying for the IELTS, which was so critical to their enrolment in an international university They therefore were quite motivated Also, they were studying in a small group (No=20) in a private course In 69 the contexts where students are not so motivated and the class size is much larger, the result is likely to be different Second, regarding the methodology, the study employed a quasiexperimental method and the samples were not randomized, the students‟ improved performance might be affected by other variables such as motivation, learning strategies, etc Thus, it is necessary to conduct research on students studying English in a formal situation where classes are large and the teachers not have much freedom to adjust the syllabus or the teaching schedule Another area of research is the relationship between the process-oriented approach and the students‟ learning styles Methodologically, a true experimental method should be applied if generalization is intended Alternately, a mixed approach which uses an experimental approach in combination with either in-depth interviews or stimulated recall to find out how students change their writing strategies under the influence of the instructional strategies may bring better results Learner journal and portfolios are also good methods of data collection to gain more comprehensive and reliable information about the impact of the process-oriented approach to academic writing Despite the above-mentioned limitations, the study is useful in the sense that it encourages teachers to use the process-oriented approach in similar contexts The study also indicates that the application of the process-oriented approach alone may benefit some students and disadvantage others However, further research into these areas would be helpful as we consider writing approach strategies and their effect on the minority language learners in our classrooms Some of the questions that this review brings up include the following: What is the availability of classrooms employing the writing process approach to second language learners? What is the degree of appropriateness of such instruction for all learners? What are some of the individualization strategies usually practiced by teachers in these classrooms? Where very young second language learners fit into our present educational system? Is it more beneficial for them to be pulled from the classroom where the writing 70 process approach is being taught in order to focus on skill drills with other English as a second language (ESL) student? When does the writing process approach begin to be effective with the second language learner and how much additional time is needed for skill building? Should skill building occur in isolation or in the context of the real language of the classroom? 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ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PROCESS-ORIENTED WRITING FOR IELTS NGHIÊN CỨU HIỆU QUẢ CỦA PHƯƠNG PHÁP LUYỆN VIẾT THEO QUY TRÌNH CHUẨN BỊ CHO THI IELTS M.A Minor Thesis Field : English methodology Code... The topics were chosen from IELTS practice test books, such as ? ?IELTS practice tests” by Morgan Terry and Judith Wilson, ? ?IELTS Test builder 2” by Sam McCarter, and “Essential IELTS Practice Tests”... writing which this paper explores display academic essay - writing for IELTS Therefore, in display writing, understanding the requirements of the tasks for IELTS is crucial to success This skill