STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby acknowledge that this study is mine. The information reported in this paper is the result of my own work, except where due reference is made. The thesis has not been accepted for any degree and is not concurrently submitted to any candidature for any other degree or diploma. Hue, June 2011 Author Nguyen Thi Lan Phuong i Acknowledgements First, I am indebted to my supervisor, Dr.
Phan Van Hoa, for his professional guidance and support. Without his help, this thesis could not reach this present standard. Second, I am very grateful and thankful to the English Staff of HUCFL for their valuable suggestions in approving the initial proposal for this thesis, for their guidance and help with valuable evaluation and encouragements. Third, I would like to express my sincere thanks to the English Staff in Ninh Chau high school and Dao Duy Tu high school for their helps during the time I carried out this study.
Last, but not least, I wish to express my deep thanks to my mother, siblings and friends for all their support during the time I was conducting this project. ii Table of contents Pages TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………….…………………………1 LIST OF TABLE.6 LIST OF CHARTS. Organization of the thesis .14 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. Theories of English writing skill.
English writing skill. Product-oriented writing. Process-oriented writing. The process of composing.
The process of communicating. The process of improving .4 Top-down and bottom-up approaches. Assessment and Evaluation in writing. The teaching and learning of English writing skill.
The teaching of English writing skill. The sense of purpose. The sense of audience. The sense of direction.
The learning of English writing skill. Definitions, types, functions of charts and graphs in EFL writing. Definitions of charts and graphs. Types of charts and graphs in language education.
Functions of graphs in the teaching and learning of English writing skill. Techniques in the teaching and learning of chart and graph description. Features and language. Comparison and contrast.
Frame and language. Graph writing activities and tasks. Difficulties for graph application in EFL writing classes. Syllabus and curriculum constraints.
Time and psychology challenges. Technical and theoretical knowledge. Previous studies on the use of charts and graphs for English education .52 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURES. Data collection methods.
Sample lesson plans .56 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. Functions of graphs in teaching and learning English writing skill. Teachers' and students' perceptions on using graphs for writing skill. Teachers' and students' attitudes towards graph writing.
Teachers' attitudes towards graph writing. Students' attitudes towards graph writing. Attitudes towards teaching and learning graph description. Teachers' attitudes towards teaching graph description.
Students' attitudes towards learning graph description. Teachers' and students' practice. Students' abilities and teachers' activities in graph writing. Students' abilities to graph description.
Writing activities or tasks in teaching graph description. Teachers' and students' reality. Feedback and error correction. Teachers' feedback giving and error correction.
Students' response to feedback giving and error correction. The effects of graph writing on EFL classes. Teachers' motivation provision. Teachers' and students' difficulties.
Teachers' difficulties in using graphs for teaching writing. Students' difficulties in using charts and graphs for learning writing. Teachers' and students' suggestions. 87 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS.
Summary of the findings. The functions of Cs&Gs in teaching and learning the English writing skill .Teachers' perceptions and practices in teaching English writing with Cs&Gs. Students' perceptions and practices in learning English writing with Cs&Gs. Possible solutions for better use of Cs&Gs to improve students' English.
Implications and recommendations. For teachers and students. For future researchers.93 APPENDICES 4 List of abbreviations - C&G: chart and graph - Cs&Gs: charts and graphs - EFL: English as Foreign Language - ESL: English as Second Language - L1: First Language - L2: Second Language - SLA: Second Language Acquisition - Ts&Ss: teachers and students - Ts&Ss': teachers' and students' 5 LIST OF TABLE Table 1: Teachers' and students' ideas about the functions of graphs in writing .57 Table 2: Teachers' attitudes towards writing about charts and graphs in English .59 Table 3: Students' attitudes towards writing about charts and graphs in English .61 Table 4: Teachers' attitudes towards teaching graph description in English .62 Table 5: Students' attitudes towards learning graph description in English .64 Table 6: Reality of teaching and learning graph writing .68 Table 7: The atmosphere of graph-wrting classes .77 Table 8: EFL teachers' motivation provision .78 Table 9: EFL students' motivation in learning graph writing .79 Table 10: Suggestions for better use of graphs in writing skill .85 LIST OF CHARTS Chart 1: Students' abilities of graph description .65 Chart 2: Writing activities or tasks used by teachers in graph description .66 Chart 3: Teachers' feedback and error correction .74 Chart 4: Teachers' feedback giving and error correction for students .76 Chart 5: Teachers' difficulties in using graphs for teaching writing skill .80 Chart 6: Students' difficulties in using graphs for learning writing .83 6 Abstract This research studies how charts and graphs (Cs&Gs) are used to teach and learn English writing skill. Describing Cs&Gs plays important roles in the innovation of teaching and learning methods to suit communicative approach and to meet students' communicative needs in economic development.
They help students to develop writing and other language skills and knowledge as well as social and economic knowledge. Moreover, in the tendency of economic and knowledge integration, students cannot be successful in future world if they are not fully prepared with what usually exists in the real world. C&G description, which appears in international economies, sciences and examination systems, gives students chances to develop their thoughts, creation and self-learning. Therefore, Cs&Gs are indispensable in English teaching and learning.
In this research, the teachers' and students' perceptions on teaching and learning to describe Cs&Gs in English have been discovered; their reality of applying Cs&Gs to teach and learn writing skill in English at Quang Binh high schools has been analyzed and discussed based on some theories and approaches. Some suggestions for better use and improvement of C&G description have also been made. Two sample lessons are designed as solutions for this thesis. The study employs both quantitative and qualitative research methods.
The data used in this research are collected from 15 EFL teachers and 100 EFL students of 2 high schools in Quang Binh province via the research instruments: questionnaires, interviews and class observations. The research procedure consists of data collection, data analysis, findings and discussion. From the results, conclusions for the research are drawn. The implications for using Cs&Gs in writing English more effectively in order to improve students' writing skill as well as communicative abilities in English are also mentioned in the conclusion part of the research 7 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale There is a fact existing in Vietnam and Quang Binh that, a large number of students or high school leavers are not confident of writing different genres in daily communication and taking part in international examinations such as IELTS and TOEFL, and especially that even very few participating these exams can get success in graph description in IELTS' Academic Writing Task 1 because they are not good at writing skill.
This fact is a barrier preventing Vietnam and Quang Binh learners of English from integrating themselves into the English-speaking world. This problem is partly originated from the EFL teaching and learning process in high school classes that requires a profound research. For current high school curriculums and textbooks of English published after 2006, the problems in the English writing skill in the old textbooks (published before 2006) such as writing skill as the last skill to be addressed, the shortage of communicative tasks, and no lessons about Cs&Gs, and so forth are mainly solved. However, there are still some difficulties and shortcomings existing in these new versions, curriculums, and teachers' and students' (Ts&Ss') performance, especially in graph-writing lessons, which need studying deeply and widely.
Actually, the series of the current English textbooks such as Tiếng Anh 10, Tiếng Anh 11, Tiếng Anh 12 (Van et al., 2006, 2007, 2008), take their consideration into the important role of language skills thanks to the innovational viewpoint of the whole program textbooks in education. These new textbooks consist of a variety of topics to develop students' writing skill, and bring considerable benefits both in teaching linguistic and communicative competence and in training language skills. The communicative approach such as clear communicative purposes, emphasized whole-text writing are mainly highlighted and simplified in these writing tasks. Moreover, in current high school textbooks of English, there are a few lessons for graph and table description, such as, Unit 16 (Tiếng Anh 10), Units 5, 7, 11 (Tiếng Anh 11) and Units 7, 15 (Tiếng Anh 12).
According to the teachers' guide books 8 like Tiếng Anh 10, 11, 12 (Van et al., 2006, 2007, 2008), writing about Cs&GS as well as other English writing topics in this new program is designed with increasing difficulty levels. These writing lessons play an important role not only in the English acquisition and communication, but also in the preparation for English learners to take part in international exams if they have chances to further study. However, both the final examinations - the high school achievement tests and entrance university examinations - seldom asked students to perform their writing skill in the whole texts, and there are very few and even no writing tasks in other summative tests. Ts&Ss have not, therefore, paid much attention to the important role of English writing skill, especially of graph writing.
From my teaching experience, teaching and learning the description of Cs&Gs are not fully played, except for some coaching courses for gifted students who are going to take part in local or national contests. In the graph-writing lessons, teachers tend to provide some writing tasks short of communicative strategies such as sentence transformation, sentence completion, sentence building from cues, sentence rearrangement and so forth. Because of lacking above-sentence-level tasks in some of the writing lessons and tests, Ts&Ss seem to consider the teaching and learning of the English writing skill as well as the C&G writing as less important and impractical tasks. For writing about Cs&Gs, Ts&Ss meet many difficulties because it is rather new and rare in Vietnamese educational context.
It is complicated for many learners to interpret from a diagram or a picture into English words because of their limited knowledge of geography and English. Thus, it is more difficult for EFL teachers to improve their students' English by making use of Cs&Gs. To some EFL high school teachers in Quang Binh, writing in English and writing about Cs&Gs might still be considered to be a "lesser" skill. Graph writing in Tiếng Anh 11 (Hoang Van Van et al., 2007) Writing activities in Tiếng Anh 11, as well as other new textbooks, possess their own characteristics, not only having advantages but also existing shortcomings.
9 One of the advantages of writing lessons about Cs&Gs in Vietnamese high school textbooks of English in general and in Tiếng Anh 11 in particular is that these lessons relate closely to the topics of the units to which they belong (Van et al. Therefore, Ts&Ss can easily use or exploit ideas, information and language of their previous lessons of the same skill or of other skills. Moreover, the majority of writing lessons follow roughly the same plans. Some lessons begin with a reading passage or a fill-in exercise that illustrates the type of writing taught in the lesson and that is used as a model (i.
Units 5 and 11 - Tiếng Anh 11). Others begin with comprehension questions whose information and answers are the basis for further writing.