MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY - HOCHIMINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES ------------ PHAN THỊ MAI TRANG APPLYING STEVE PEHA’S APPROACH TO TEACHING L2 WRITING FOR THE FOURTH-YEAR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH – RUSSIAN DEPARTMENT AT USSH A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in TESOL Supervisor: NGUYỄN THỊ KIỀU THU, Ph. HO CHI MINH CITY – MAY, 2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP …. 5 LIST OF TABLES …………………………………………………………. 6 LIST OF CHARTS………………………………………………………….7 LIST OF FIGURES ………………………………………………………… 8 ABBREVIATIONS…………….……………………………… 10 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ……………………………………11 1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY …………………………………….2 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY …………………………………….3 IDENTIFICATION OF THE PROBLEM……………………………….5 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY ……………………………………… 21 1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY……….7 ORGANOZATION OF THE STUDY….
22 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW ….1 AN OVERVIEW OF WRITING SKILL .1 The nature of writing…………………………………….1 Definition of writing ……………………………………….2 The importance of teaching writing ……………………….2 Approaches to teaching writing………………………….1 Exploring the difficulties in teaching writing….2 Brief introduction of writing teaching Approaches…….3 Criteria of w well-formed piece of writing…………….2 READING AND WRITING RELATIONSHIP….1 A historical review of reading and writing connection.2 The influence of reading on writing …………………………………. Studies focusing on the influence of controlled reading on L2 writing41 1 2.3 STEVE READ-LIKE_A_WRITER APPROACH………….………… 43 SUMMARY ……………………………………………………………50 CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY ………………………….1 The Experimental teaching………………………….2 Syllabus for 04A-controll group…………………………… 56 3.3 Syllabus for 04B-controll Experimental group…………… 58 3.2 The Pre-test and Post-test…….1 The Pre-test ….2 The Post-test …….3 Two sets of survey questionnaires……………………………….1 The Students’ questionnaires………………….2 The Teachers’ questionnaires……………………………… 68 3. 68 CHAPTER FOUR: DISCUSSIONS OF FINDINGS ……………………70 4.1 DISCUSSION O THE WRITING TEST RESULTS…….1 The analysis of Writing test’s criteria……………………….1 The analysis of Organization ……………………………….2 The analysis of Ideas …………………… ………………….3 The analysis of Word Choice………….4 The analysis of Sentence Fluency………… …….5 The analysis of Convention………………………………… 76 4.2 The analysis of Writing test’s Scores……………………….2 DISCUSSION OF THE SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRES….1 The importance of writing.2 Students’ frequency of writing practice………………….3 The difficult level of essay writing.4 Criteria for measuring how a good essay is ………………….5 Difficulties encountered by the student writers……………….6 Reasons why students are not good at writing……………… ………87 4.7 Suggestions to improve the teaching and learning of essay writing.92 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATION …………….1 To the Teachers …………………………….2 To the students ……………………………………………….3 To the Writing syllabus ………………………………………….99 APPENDIX 1 ESSAY WRITING RUBRIC ………………………………….104 APPENDIX 2 PERFORMANCE OF 04A-CONTROL GROUP.… 106 APPENDIX 3 PERFORMANCE OF 04B-EXPERIMENTAL GROUP….117 APPENDIX 4 TEST RESULTS OF 04A …………….128 APPENDIX 5 TEST RESULTS OF 04B …………………………………….129 APPENDIX 6 SAMPLE 1- PRE-TEST-04A……………………………….130 APPENDIX 7 SAMPLE 1- PRE-TEST-04B ……………………………….132 APPENDIX 8 SAMPLE 2- POST-TEST-04A ……….133 APPENDIX 9 SAMPLE 2- POST-TEST-04B …………….134 APPENDIX 10 STUDENT’S QUESTIONNAIRE IN VETNAMESE……….135 APPENDIX 11 STUDENT’S QUESTIONNAIRE IN ENGLISH…….138 APPENDIX 12 TEACHER’S QUESTIONNAIRE IN VETNAMESE ……….141 APPENDIX 13 TEACHER’S QUESTIONNAIRE IN VETNAMESE……….144 3 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I certify that this thesis entitled “APPLYING STEVE PEHA’S APPROACH to TEACHING L2 WRITING for THE FOURTH-YEAR STUDENTS of ENGLISH-RUSSIAN DEPARTMENT AT USSH” is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other institution.
Ho Chi Minh City, May, 2011. Phan Thị Mai Trang 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Dr. Nguyễn Thị Kiều Thu, Dean of Department of English Literature and Linguistics (DELL) for her constant enthusiastic guidance, enormously helpful advice, unbounded patience and careful proof-reading on my writing. Without her help, this M.
thesis would still be far from finished. My special thanks go to all of my professors and lecturers for their dedication and helpful instruction during the graduate course. I am also thankful to the teaching staff of University of Social Science and Humanities, in particular Ms. Trần Thị Thanh Lan and Ms.
Phạm Thị Thùy Trang for their help and support. I also owe sincere thanks to my students, who are an inspiration to me, for their enquiries into essay writing problems and participation in the study; without which my thesis would never have been accomplished. Finally, I am greatly indebted to my beloved family and close friend Ms. Lê Thị Xuân Vũ for their warm love, unending help and support.
5 LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1: Students’ age, gender, and time to start learning English .1: The criteria analysis of the pre-test and post-test…….2: Reasons why writing is important .3: Students’ frequency of writing practice .4: Difficulty level of essay writing. 83 6 LIST OF CHARTS Chart 4.1: The analysis of Organization Chart 4.2: The analysis of Ideas Chart 4.3: The analysis of Word Choice Chart 4.4: The analysis of Sentence Fluency Chart 4.5: The analysis of Convention Chart 4.6: The pre-test result Chart 4.7: The post-test result Chart 4.8: Reasons given by students why writing is important Chart 4.9: Reasons given by teachers why writing is important Chart 4.10: Students’ frequency of writing practice Chart 4.11: Teachers’ responses for students’ frequency of writing practice Chart 4.12: Difficulty level of the essay writing Chart 4.13: Students’ responses to criteria of a good essay Chart 4.14: Teachers’ responses to criteria of a good essay Chart 4.15: Degree of difficulties of essay writing responded by students Chart 4.16: Degree of difficulties of essay writing responded by teachers Chart 4.17: Reasons responded by students why the students are not good at writing Chart 4.18: Reasons responded by teachers why the students are not good at writing Chart 4.19: Students’ suggestions to improve students’ learning writing Chart 4.20: Teachers’ suggestions to the students to improve the learning of writing Chart 4.21: Students’ suggestions to the teachers to improve students’ competence in writing Chart 4.22: Teachers’ suggestions to improve their students’ competence in writing 7 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: The process genre model……………………………………32 8 ABBREVIATIONS USSH : University of Social Sciences and Humanities DELL : Department of English Linguistics and Literature DERLL : Department of English-Russian Linguistics and Literature ESL : English as Second Language FL : Foreign Langue L1 : First Language L2 : Foreign / Second Language 9 ABSTRACT The study done for this M. thesis examines possible problems facing the fourth-year students of English-Russian Department (DERLL) at USSH in writing essays. It then investigates whether the application of Steve Peha’s read-like-a- writer approach in writing classroom can help the students, the subjects of the research, solve their problems and thereby improve their proficiency as a writer.
To conduct this study, two groups of students of DERLL were chosen, one of which received more critical analytic reading activity input than the other. A careful investigation of the student subjects was done to justify the design of the syllabus for each group. Then came a pre-test and post-test in writing being administrated in both groups as well as the two set of questionnaires to the students and the teachers. To ensure the validity and consistency of the scoring of writing test, students’ papers were computerized and marked twice basing on the writing rubric including five criteria 1) organization, 2) ideas, 3) word choice, 4) sentence fluency and 5) convention.
The result shows that Steve Paha’ approach is effective, proven by the fact that more students in the experimental group improved their skills at the end of the course. Even though the improvement was mostly from the low score range to the middle score, the fact that there was such improvement in only 9 weeks could be considered sufficient to confirm the hypothesis. However, the same thing did not happen with the student of a higher score range.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY For year, writing has been taught unfairly for usually being left to the last stage of learning. Hedge (1998, cited in Simpson, 2004) declared that this skill was often relegated to the status of “homework” due to limitation of time and syllabus outcomes, thus having no effects on the possibility of the teacher guidance.
As structuralists and audio linguists emphasized oral forms of communication and reading, according to Tribble (1996, cited in Simpson, 2004), writing was considered as a tool for the practice and reinforcement of specific grammatical and lexical patterns; accuracy being all important whereas content and self expression given little if any priority. The students who were expected to produce an error-free coherent text without giving any prior thought to the meaning of the finished product encountered numerous seemingly insurmountable obstacles as Trible (1996) stated that they were basically “writing to learn” and not “learning to write” as instructed by this traditional product-oriented approach. This perspective, however, has changed considerably along with the development of the communicative language teaching since 1980s because there was a widespread recognition that writing was a process which involves several steps in creating a piece of work. According to Silva (1990:15), this tendency, namely the process-oriented approach, needed step-by-step developments, one of which was the integration of reading and writing.
As far as we have concerned, reading and writing have a mutual effect. Reading builds the knowledge of diverse kinds to write on or to employ in writing; writing reinforces knowledge in a way that builds schemata to read with. Reading and writing interact with each other, possibly making use of the same cognitive structures to create a text world (Kucer, 1985) 11 Despite the correlation between reading and writing in the construction of knowledge, at the Department of English-Russian Linguistics and Literature (DERLL) of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (USSH), the program designed for the writing class to primarily focus on language rather than acquiring it. In other words, the concentration is on the product-oriented approach rather than the process-oriented one.
Students in a writing class were taught “formulaic” theory to perform certain type of paragraphs or essays, and then they were given topics to practice those types (like a kind of drilling). The result was that after 4 years of skill training, most of them had a hollow feeling of writing because they do not how to express their ideas. Then an important system reform was implemented which changed the existing system into the credit one and required a reform of curriculum design as well as teaching methodology. Reading and writing skills should now be taught in unison in DERLL with intent to constitute the appropriate writing teaching and learning methodology.
Therefore, basically, because there will appear an integrated classroom, the possible promising method is to use critical and analytic oriented-writing reading activities as an effective way to help the students of DERLL improve not only their reading skill but their writing as well. This is where Steve Peha’s approach comes to play. The students will read not for their sake in reading alone but for acquiring the language items that help to improve their writing skills. Accordingly, students will not only write because this is a reading-writing class.
Therefore, it is apparent that an integrated-skill classroom is an ideal environment to apply Steve Peha’ approach- “Read like writer”. It is insufficient if there is not an introduction about Steve Peha and his read- like-a-writer approach, which is theoretical framework for the study. 12 AN INTRODUCTION ABOUT STEVE PEHA After a career as a software developer and high-tech entrepreneur, Steve Peha started Teaching That Makes Sense (TTMS), an education consultancy specializing in literacy, assessment, and educational leadership, in 1995. His goal was to find or to develop the most effective educational practices and get that information to as many educators as possible.
Since starting TTMS, he has written extensively on education including over 300 articles for The Seattle Times' Effective Learning Series for which he won the 2001 Innovators in Education Award from the Newspaper Association of America. His book, "Be a Better Writer," co-written with his wife, and journalist, Margot Carmichael Lester, won the 2006 Gold Medal for Young Adult Non-Fiction from the Independent Publishers Association. All told, he has written over 1000 articles on education and half a dozen books. Peha strongly believes that to understand education one must practice extensively in a wide variety of school situations.