VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ KHÁNH EFFECTIVENESS OF INDIRECT CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN ENGLISH WRITING AT THE FACULTY OF ENGLISH, HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION (HIỆU QUẢ CỦA CHỮA LỖI GIÁN TIẾP TRONG MÔN VIẾT TIẾNG ANH TẠI KHOA TIẾNG ANH TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM HÀ NỘI) M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Language Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10 HANOI – 2013 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ KHÁNH EFFECTIVENESS OF INDIRECT CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN ENGLISH WRITING AT THE FACULTY OF ENGLISH, HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION (HIỆU QUẢ CỦA CHỮA LỖI GIÁN TIẾP TRONG MÔN VIẾT TIẾNG ANH TẠI KHOA TIẾNG ANH TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM HÀ NỘI) M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Language Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10 Supervisor: Nguyễn Thị Bách Thảo, M. HANOI - 2013 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.
vii LIST OF TABLES. viii LIST OF CHARTS. ix PART A: INTRODUCTION. Aims of the study.
Scope of the study. Method of the study. Significance of the study. Organization of the study.
5 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW. An overview of process approach. Stages in a writing process. Definitions of corrective feedback.
Types of corrective feedback to students’ writing. Teachers' corrective feedback strategies. Effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback. 13 iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Students’ reactions and attitudes towards teachers’ indirect corrective feedback. Data collection instruments. Students’ writing analysis. The procedure of data collection and analysis.
Effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback on students’ writing accuracy from students’ writing analysis. Students’ reactions and attitudes towards teacher’s indirect corrective feedback from survey questionnaires. Effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback to students’ writing accuracy from students’ writing analysis. Students’ reactions and attitudes towards teacher’s indirect corrective feedback from survey questionnaires.
Students’ feeling about the use of indirect corrective feedback. Students’ difficulties when the teacher uses indirect corrective feedback in class. Effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback on students’ attitudes towards writing. Students’ attitudes towards the value of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback.
Students’ expectations for better use of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback. Recommendations for the teachers. Recommendations for the students. 40 v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further study. I Survey Questionnaires for Students .I vi LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CF : Corrective Feedback CLT : Communicative Language Teaching ESL : English as a Second Language FOE : Faculty of English HNUE : Hanoi National University of Education vii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Ellis’ table of feedback types (2009 p. 12 Table 2: Frequency of grammatical errors of experimental group and control group.
21 Table 3: Effectiveness of Teacher’s indirect corrective feedback to students' attitudes towards writing. 26 Table 4: The students’ perception about the effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback on their writing accuracy. 28 Table 5: Students’ sources to self-correct their grammatical errors. 29 Table 6: The students’ progress in writing accuracy after 6 weeks of the study.
31 Table 7: Students’ suggestions for better use of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback. 32 viii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF CHARTS Chart 1: Students’ feeling about the use of indirect corrective feedback. 23 Chart 2: Students’ difficulties when the teacher uses indirect corrective feedback in class. 25 Chart 3: The suitability of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback to the students and their leaning style.
27 Chart 4: Percentage of errors corrected by students after receiving teacher’s indirect corrective feedback. 30 ix LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART A: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale Nowadays, English is considered as an international language in the world with over 1,500 million speakers (Crystal, 2003). Recently, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been widely used in Vietnam.
In such approach, students are taught four main skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing. However, not many students like writing and are able to write well. Le (2008), when investigating the teaching and learning English among high schools in Can Tho, found that only 6.9% of the Vietnamese students want to learn writing. In my own teaching experience, it was found that most students in Faculty of English, Hanoi National University of Education have similar problems with their writing.
These problems are (1) they have a lot of grammatical errors in their writing, and (2) they have negative attitudes towards learning writing. Thus, how to improve students’ writing as well as to change their attitudes towards writing activities has greatly attracted my attention. Through a review of literature, although the effect of written corrective feedback is still controversial, numerous studies on the use of corrective feedback in writing classes have shown that corrective feedback including indirect feedback can be applied in writing classes to improve students’ writing accuracy (Liu, 2008; Kaweera, 2008; Ferris, 2000; Ferris et al. Beside teacher’s writing instructions, in many cases, teacher’s correction and comments can help to solve the problems of students’ writing accuracy and their attitudes towards writing.
In other words, teacher’s good feedback strategies may give students stimulation for revision and motivation to maintain their interest in writing. In Vietnam, there has been some research on teacher’s written corrective feedback such as Le (2011) or Tran (2011) which focuses on the high school setting but none of the 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com studies has investigated the effect of indirect corrective feedback on students’ writing in university setting. For all the mentioned reasons, the researcher wishes to conduct a study entitled “Effectiveness of indirect corrective feedback in English writing at Faculty of English, Hanoi National University of Education” 2. Aims of the study This current study aims at (1) examining the effectiveness of written indirect corrective feedback on improving writing accuracy of the second-year students at Faculty of English, Hanoi National University of Education (FOE, HNUE); (2) investigating the students’ attitudes towards the use of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback and (3) proposing some recommendations of the use of teacher’s written indirect corrective feedback in writing classes.
In short, the research paper aims to address the following questions: 1. To what extent does indirect corrective feedback strategy have effects on second- year students’ writing accuracy at Faculty of English, Hanoi National University of Education? 2. How do second-year students at Faculty of English, Hanoi National University of Education react to teacher’s indirect corrective feedback on their writing? 3. What can be done to improve students’ writing by employing indirect corrective feedback? 3.
Scope of the study In fact, teacher’s corrective feedback can be given in both oral and written forms, directly and indirectly on students’ writing. However, within the framework of a graduation paper, the researcher only focuses on the teacher’s written indirect corrective feedback. 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com In addition, due to the limit of this study, the participants selected are not all second- year students at FOE, HNUE but only students from the two classes that the researcher directly teach. Method of the study Analysis of students’ writing and questionnaires were utilized to collect the data for the whole paper.
50 second-year students at FOE, HUNE were divided into two groups: one experimental group and one control group. The 26 students in the experimental group were given teacher’s indirect corrective feedback while the 24 students in the control group were given direct corrective feedback without any revision required. All the 50 students were asked to do a pre-test at the beginning of the study and a post-test after 6 weeks of the study. All the 50 students’ writing papers in the two tests were collected, measured and analyzed.
After the sixth week of the study, 26 students from the indirect corrective group were asked to complete questionnaires on their reactions and attitudes towards the teacher’s use of indirect corrective feedback in class. After that, all the questionnaires were collected, analyzed and discussed. Significance of the study As mentioned above, only few researchers have investigated the effectiveness of teacher’s written indirect corrective feedback on students’ writing in university setting. Thus, the thesis can help to fill the gap in literature.
Moreover, in practice, the suggestions presented in this study may partly contribute to the enhancement of the effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback to second-year students at FOE, HNUE in particular and to university students in general. 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Organization of the study The study consists of three parts: Part A – Introduction – states the problems and rationale of the study, the aim, the scope, the method, the significance and the organization of the study. Part B - Development Chapter 1 – Literature review – synthesizes the results of other research that are relevant to this study.
Chapter 2 – Methodology – describes the methods utilized in the study. Chapter 3 – Findings and Discussion – presents and analyses the collected data from students’ writing and questionnaires; provides the discussion based on the findings Chapter 4 – Recomendations – makes some suggestions for better use of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback to improve students’ writing accuracy and change their attitudes towards writing at FOE, HNUE. Part C – Conclusion – summarizes the main issues mentioned in the research, outlines the limitations of the study and makes suggestions for further research. 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.
An overview of process approach Since early 1970s, what is now called the writing process has been taken into consideration as an approach of teaching writing. Nowadays there is a shift from the focus on students' written products to attention to students' writing process. Product writing is considered a traditional approach in which writing is defined as “an act of transferring ideas to paper with attention neither to the context nor to the stages writers go through when creating a text” (Aires, 2010, p. In their study on approaches to teaching writing, Badger, R.
(2000) state that “product- based approaches see writing as mainly concerned with knowledge about the structure of language, and the writing development as mainly the result of imitation of input in the form of texts provided by the teacher.” In a word, it can be understood that this approach to writing mainly concentrates on the product of writing rather than on the process of writing. On the contrary, process approach in writing is demonstrated in Harmer (2001, p. 257) as an approach in which the teacher pays attention to various stages that any piece of writing goes through. It is also noted that “Writing in process approaches is seen as predominantly to do with linguistic skills, such as planning and drafting, and there is much less emphasis on linguistic knowledge, such as knowledge about grammar and text structure” (Badger, R.
In recent years, the process approach to writing has been seen as an improvement over the traditional methods of writing instruction. Writing is no longer considered to be a 5 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com “linear and fragmented procedure” (Hairston, 1982, p.78) with the mere target at an error-free product. Rather, it is “a cyclical process during which writers can move back and forth on a continuum, discovering, analyzing and synthesizing ideas” (Hughey, et al., 1983 as cited in Joe, 2006, p.