TABLE OF CONTENTS Statement of Authorship. ii Table of Contents. 1 List of Abbreviations. 5 List of Tables.
6 List of Charts. Background of the study. Rationale of the study. Purposes of the study.
Significance of the study. Scope of the study. Structure of the study .15 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. Discourse - text- essay.
Discourse and text. Discourse, text and essay. Academic essay writing. Criteria for evaluating academic essay.
Coherence and cohesion in an essay. The term "discourse markers". Definitions of Discourse markers. Types of discourse markers used in written discourse.
Positions of Discourse markers. The importance of discourse markers in academic essays. Teaching and learning essay writing skills in EFL environments. Teaching and learning essay writing skills at EFL colleges.
Teaching and learning essay writing skills at Vietnamese colleges. Teaching and learning academic essay writing skills at Ninh Thuan Teachers' Training College. An overview of the previous studies on the use of discourse markers for essay writing. Previous studies from different countries in the world.
Previous studies conducted in Vietnam. Gaps in literature review. Research questions and hypotheses. Data collection instruments.
Likert scale questionnaire. Interview questions for students. Reflective learning journals. Data collection procedures.
Collecting data from student interviews. Collecting data from learning journals. Quantitative data analysis. Qualitative data analysis.
Descriptions of treatment course. Procedures of research .51 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. Questionnaire data analysis. Students' perceptions of using discourse markers for essay writing before and after the treatment.
Students' abilities to use discourse markers for essay writing before and after the treatment. Test score data analysis. Pre-test on writing. Post-test on writing.
Pre- and post-test analysis.1 Correlation between students' perceptions on using DMs for essay writing and writing performance. Correlation between students' abilities to use DMs for essay writing and writing performance. Reflective learning journal data analysis. The first reflective learning journals.
The second reflective learning journals. Interview data analysis. What do you think about using DMs for essay writing?. To what extent can you use discourse markers exactly and appropriately in your essay?.
How does the use of DMs influence your writing performance? .84 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS. Limitations of the study .92 APPENDICES 4 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 1. EFL English as a Foreign Language 2. ESL English as a Second Language 3.
DMs Discourse Markers 4. DM Discourse Marker 5. SPSS Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 5 LIST OF TABLES Chapter 2: Table 2.1: Position of Discourse Markers .1: Participants of the study .2: Clusters and items of the questionnaire .3: A summary of data collection instruments .5: Learning journal group .7: Procedures of research .1: Students' perceptions of using discourse markers before and after the treatment .2a: Students' abilities to use DMs for essay writing before and after the treatment .2b: Students' abilities to use DMs for essay writing before and after the treatment .3: The scores of pre-test on writing .4: The scores of post-test on writing .5: The mean scores of pre-test and post-test .6: The mean scores of organization component before and after the treatment .7: Correlation between students' perceptions of using DMs for essay writing and writing performance .8: Correlation between students' abilities to DMs and writing performance. 67 6 LIST OF CHARTS Chapter 4: Chart 4.1: Mean scores of perceptions on using DMs before and after the treatment .2a: Students' perceptions on using DMs for essay writing (item 2) .2b: Students' perceptions on using DMs for essay writing (item 17) .3: Combined percentages for "strongly agree" and "agree" of the items 1, 5, and 18 before and after the treatment .4: Combined Percentages for "strongly agree" and " agree" of the items 5, 6 9, and 14 before and after the treatment .5: Percentages of agree and strongly agree attitudes in the items 3, 10, 12, and 20 before and after the treatment .6: Results of pre-test on writing .7: Results of post-test on writing.
63 7 ABSTRACT This study was an attempt to investigate the implementation of the use of discourse markers for essay writing in a group of 52 students at Ninh Thuan Teachers' Training College. Its major purposes were (a) to examine the students' perceptions of using DMs for essay writing, (b) to explore the students' abilities to use DMs for essay writing, and (c) to test the effects of using DMs on students' writing performance. The measures of the study were done twice: before and after the treatment. The collected data from pre- and post- questionnaires, pre- and post- tests, interviews, and reflective learning journals were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively.
The obtained findings demonstrated that the treatment course had a definite impact on students' perceptions and abilities in the use of DMs for essay writing as well as their writing performance. Students' perceptions after the treatment increased remarkably compared with theirs before the treatment. They were acutely aware of the importance and necessity of DMs in an essay. In addition, students' abilities to use DMs after the treatment improved significantly.
More specifically, before the treatment many of them did not know how to use DMs correctly in an essay. Nevertheless, after the treatment they were able to employ DMs for essay writing more competently. The findings of the study also indicated that the use of DMs had a more beneficial effect on their writing performance, and to some extent helped students create a cohesive and coherent essay. Moreover, there were positive correlations between perceptions and abilities in using DMs for essay writing and writing performance.
That is, the higher the students' abilities and perceptions of using DMs were, the better they wrote academic essays. The outcomes of this study prove that once Vietnamese students of English are taught how to use DMs for essay writing, their writing performance may be considerably fostered. Therefore, teachers who are teaching writing at Vietnamese colleges should attach special importance to teaching their students the use of DMs for essay writing. Background of the study In order for English to be used fluently and naturally, Vietnamese students of English are advised to master four basic language skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing.
At almost all colleges and universities in Vietnam, English major students themselves have to learn and practise these skills frequently and regularly to be able to employ them perfectly. Of the four crucial skills, writing is always regarded as one of the most difficult ones. Most, if not all English major students at colleges in Vietnam has to, currently, learn academic writing skill, and in the words of Oshima & Hogue (1999), “writing, particularly academic writing, is not easy. It takes study and practice to develop this skill (p.
In academic writing, students are required to know how to write essays, and as Mc Larent (2001) states, “essay writing can be compared to mountain climbing. It is an act of exploration. It takes preparation, practice and discipline”(p. Therefore, it is obvious that academic essay writing has been an extremely difficult task to Vietnamese students.
Turley (2000) admits that, “For many students, essay and nightmare are virtual synonyms. That blank computer screen…the struggle for an idea.those first words!” (p. How to help students write good essays has become a great challenge to Vietnamese teachers of English. Nguyen (2009) asserts, “Most of EFL teachers in Vietnam find writing a complicated skill to teach” (p.
In fact, in order to enhance Vietnamese students' essay writing skills, teachers need to take a lot of time and effort to discover difficulties faced by their students, and find the best ways of dealing with them effectively. As a teacher of English with ten-year teaching experience at Ninh Thuan Teachers' Training College, the researcher realizes that 9 students often have troubles with grammar, syntax and vocabulary together with their poor spelling skills. Nevertheless, these obstacles can be thoroughly solved in the process of their practice of writing. The current existing problem, which causes difficulties for the researcher in teaching essay writing, is the lack of cohesion and coherence in students' essays.
It seems to the researcher that their essays cannot be called „natural and smooth written text‟. Through observing students' essay writing during several years of teaching, the researcher discovers that students are unable to write a good essay since they have no ways of arranging and linking their ideas in an essay appropriately. In other words, they do not know how to use discourse markers effectively in writing essay. According to Beare (2010), some words and phrases help to develop ideas and relate them to one another.
These kinds of words and phrases are often called discourse markers. Using discourse markers accurately will create the coherence and cohesion in the paragraph and essay. The reality has shown that the majority of students at Ninh Thuan Teachers' Training College are not sufficiently equipped with the knowledge of discourse in language learning. They do not realize that writing an essay is producing a written discourse, and that using discourse markers effectively contributes the logic and unity towards a meaningful discourse.
As a result, discourse markers are infrequently utilized in their essays, which leads to making them not coherent as well as not cohesive. Furthermore, several students misuse or do not use discourse markers properly, which also makes their essays become rather ambiguous. Other students learn isolated discourse markers by heart, and apply them to their essays mechanically. Accordingly, their writing style is nonsensical and unacceptable.
From this setting, the researcher would like to conduct an experimental study entitled "An Investigation into the Use of Discourse Markers for Essay Writing by Students at Ninh Thuan Teachers' Training College". Rationale of the study This study was carried out based on the following main reasons: Firstly, essay writing is an extremely important task. Most academic courses at colleges and universities use essays to access student's work (Bailey, 2003). The first-year and second-year students often have to complete the tests on essay writing within limited time in the examinations.
The third-year and final-year students always have to master this skill because of its convenience and effectiveness in carrying out assignments or doing research on English language. As confirmed by Newfield (2003), the ability to write in-depth academic essays is widely viewed as one of the hallmarks of a higher education. Secondly, English major students' essay writing skills at Ninh Thuan Teachers' Training College are still limited. With their available knowledge of writing skills, they can only write some simple sentences; however, when being assigned to write a whole text by their teacher, they, by and large, have difficulty expressing the ideas, and creating a written discourse with a good combination of coherence and cohesion.
Also, they do not have enough ability to use cohesive devices for contributing the meaning of an essay; even few students do not know what discourse markers mean, and how to use them for their essays. Thirdly, discourse markers play a significant role in essay writing, which is asserted by Sharpling (2008) that without sufficient discourse markers in a piece of writing, a text would not seem logically constructed and the connections between the different sentences, and paragraphs would not be obvious. Additionally, they are considered as one of indispensable elements in English essays. Indeed, Connor (1996) affirms that English essays employ explicit discourse markers to signal relations between sentences and parts of texts.
These devices are words or phrases that act as aids to help readers make connections between what has already been stated and what forthcoming.