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. 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., 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 do 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 pre- writing 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 do 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 : Cambridge University Press EI : English 1 E2 : English 2 E3 : English 3 E4 : English 4 EFL : English as Foreign Language ESL : English as Second Language GE : General English HCMC : Ho Chi Minh City L2 : Second Language OUP : Oxford University Press UT : University of Technology * (asterisk) : indicates the source for the information mentioned above on the same page.
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Certificate of originality i Retenti on and use of the thesis .ii Acknowled gem ent s iii Abstrac t iv Abbrevi ations and symbols vi Table of contents vii List of figure s x List of tables xi INTRODUCTION 1 0.2 AIMS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS 2 0.3 LIMITATION AND DELIMITATION 3 0. 1 Participants and their syllabus 3 0.2 Stages of the writing process .3 The writing performance involved in the thesis .5 OVERV IEW OF THE STUDY 5 Chapter 1: BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY.1 DESCRIPTION OF THE ENGLISH SYLLABUS FOR UT FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS 8 1.1 Aims of the syllabus 8 1.2 FACTORS EFFECTING UT FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS ON STUDYING WRITING SKILLS 10 1.1 First-year stude nts' writing background 10 1.2 First-year stude nts' attitudes toward writing skills 11 1.3 Other factors 12 Summ ary 13 Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW.1 THE NATURE OF THE WRITING SKILL 14 2.1 What is writing 14 2.2 The writing process 15 vii 2.1 The process of writing 15 2.2 The stages of the writing process 16 2.4 Techniques for pre-writing 18 2.2 BRIEF INTRODUCTION OF METHODS RELATING TO WRITING SKILLS 21 2.1 Early ESL Methods 21 2.1 The Grammar-Translation Method .2 The Dire ct Method 22 2.3 The Audio-Lingual Method 22 2.5 Guided or Free Writing 23 2.2 Recent appr oaches 23 2.2 The Pattern! Product Approach 24 2.3 The Process Approach 25 2.4 The Communicative Approach 25 2.5 The Functional-Notional approach 25 2.3 THE RELATION BETWEEN SPEAKING AND WRITING SKILLS 27 2.1 Differ ences between speaking skills and writing skills 27 2.2 Reciprocities between speaking and writing skills 28 2.4 PAIRWORK AND GROUPWORK IN RELATION TO IMPROVING WRITING SKILLS 30 2.2 Advantages and disadvantages of pairwork and groupwork activities 30 2.3 How pairwork and groupwork assist to improve writing skills 32 2.5 DESIGNING GUIDED QUESTIONS 32 2.6 SOME RESEARCHES RELATING TO THE IMPROVING OF WRITING SKILLS 35 Summary 36 Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY 38 3.1 Participants of the study 39 3.2 Instrum ent s 41 viii 3.1 Questionnair es for stude nts .2 Questionnaires for tea chers .3 The quasi-e xperim ent 45 Summ ary 46 Chapter 4: DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 48 4.1 Questionnaires for students 49 4.2 Questionnaires for teachers 65 4.2 The quasi-e xperim ent 75 4.2 FINDINGS 83 Summ ary 86 Chapter 5: IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 88 5.1 The pre-writing as the priority 88 5.2 Skill-integrated approac hes to teaching and learning L2 writing 89 5.4 Teacher s' and students' inter est in the writing skill 90 5.1 To teach ers 91 5.2 To stude nts 93 5.3 Designing the supplementary materials 96 Summ ary 99 CONCLUSION 100 Refer ences 103 Appe ndix 1 108 Appendix 2 113 Appendix 3 117 Appe ndix 4 119 Append ix 5 121 Appendix 6 122 ix LIST OF FIGURES Page Chapter 2 Figure 2.1: The process of the writing skill by Hedge .2: The stages and sub-stages of the writing process .3: Procedu res involved in producing a written text by White 17 Chapter 3 Figure 3.2: Participants' gender 40 Chapter 4 Figure 4.1: First-year stude nts' percepti on about the importance of four skills 51 Chapter 5 Figure 5.1: The learner is central (adapted from Brookes & Grund y, 1990) 96 x LIST OF TABLES Page Chapter 1 Table 1.1: Item s of the course book KnowHow2 for first-yea r stude nts at UT _ 9 Chapter 2 Table 2.1: Differen ces between spee ch and writing by Byrne, D. 1: First-year stude nts' perception about the importance of spea king and writing skills toward the process of communication _ 50 Table 4.2: Effects of the contents of tests on the first-yea r students' learning writing _ _ .3: First-year students' ideas about problem s relating to writing performance 54 Tabl e 4.4 : Freque ncy of instructions of writing skills are given to first-year stude nts _ .5 : First-year students' frequency of writing practice 59 Tabl e 4.6: First-year stude nts' ideas about ways to perform the pre-writing in class _ 60 Table 4.7 : First-year students' se lf assess ment about their ability of spea king 61 Table 4.8: First-year students' ideas about the effec ts of pair/ groupwork on pre-writing act _ 62 Table 4.9: First-year students' ideas about the importance of teachers' roles to their discussions 63 Tabl e 4.10: Teacher s' opinions about the degree of difficulty of the stages of the writing process for the first-ye ar students _.11: Teachers' ideas about the first-year students' common mistakes in their writing 68 Table 4.12: Teacher s' comments about the first-year students' expec tation of speaking practice 70 Tabl e 4.13: Teachers' ideas about effec ts of pair/ groupwork on pre-writing act.14: Teacher s' vie w about their roles for the first-year students' discussion _ 72 Tabl e 4. 15: Teachers' comments about their effects on the students' pre-writing act after discussion 73 Table 4.16: Results of task I, scored by three different teacher s 79 Table 4.17: Results of task 2, score d by three different teacher s 81 xi THE EFFECT OF PAIRWORK ArtD GROOPWORK In IMPROVinG WRITlrtG SKillS FOR THE FIRST-YEAR STODEnTS AT THE onlVERSITY OF TECHnOLOGY.
HCMC Introduction INTRODUCTION 0.1 THE PROBLEM English is one of the obligatory subjects for students in general, and the first-year students at the University of Technology (abbreviated as UT) in Ho Chi Minh City (abbreviated as HCMC) in particular because students who will graduate from UT are expected to be good at both technological knowledge and English. Actually, English not only helps students be able to approach their professional materials in English, which not only is very useful for them in their major or further studying, but also provides them with a key leading to success in life when English becomes globalized.