MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HUE UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ----------------- NGUYEN THI LY KHA AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE PRACTICE OF TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH PARAGRAPH WRITING AT SOME HIGH SCHOOLS IN THUA THIEN HUE PROVINCE MA THESIS IN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Hue University of Foreign Languages HUE, 2017 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HUE UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ----------------- NGUYEN THI LY KHA AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE PRACTICE OF TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH PARAGRAPH WRITING AT SOME HIGH SCHOOLS IN THUA THIEN HUE PROVINCE MA THESIS IN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING CODE: 60. TON NU NHU HUONG HUE, 2017 BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO ĐẠI HỌC HUẾ TRƢỜNG ĐẠI HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ ----------------- NGUYỄN THỊ LY KHA NGHIÊN CỨU VIỆC THỰC HÀNH DẠY VÀ HỌC VIẾT ĐOẠN VĂN TIẾNG ANH Ở MỘT SỐ TRƯỜNG CẤP III TRÊN ĐỊA BÀN THỪA THIÊN HUẾ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ LÝ LUẬN VÀ PHƢƠNG PHÁP DẠY HỌC BỘ MÔN TIẾNG ANH MÃ SỐ: 60.11 NGƢỜI HƢỚNG DẪN KHOA HỌC: TIẾN SĨ TÔN NỮ NHƢ HƢƠNG HUẾ, 2017 STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself. Date: 05/ 11/2017 Signature Nguyễn Thị Ly Kha iii ABSTRACT Writing is a very important skill in teaching and learning English especially paragraph writing.
But for high school students in Viet Nam in general and in Thua Thien Hue in particular, they still get many difficulties in paragraph writing. This study aimed to find out the teachers‟ and students‟ perceptions about teaching and learning English paragraph writing and investigate the reality of teaching and learning English paragraph writing. The study also aimed to find out the difficulties that students face when they learn English paragraph writing. In terms of methodology, the researcher conducted a survey with 40 teachers and 150 students at some high schools in Thua Thien Hue province using a 33-item Likert scale questionnaire for teachers and a 34-item Likert scale questionnaire for students and made class observations as well as the in-depth interviews to clarify some data from the questionnaires.
Regarding main findings, the study pointed out teachers and students‟ perceptions of teaching and learning paragraph writing. They almost had positive attitudes toward writing. However, they thought that teaching and learning writing were challenging. Also, many students still ignored paragraph writing because writing is not the targeted skill at secondary education.
Accordingly, the reality of teaching and learning paragraph writing was collected and discussed. What is more, the difficulties faced by students in their paragraph writing learning practice were pointed out. They were lack of vocabulary, poor organization, lack of idea, errors in spelling and so on. With these findings, the researcher drew some implications for teachers and students in teaching and learning paragraph writing.
Additionally, limitations and suggestions for further research were also included in the hope that more convincing and reliable conclusion will be drawn out in the field of English paragraph writing teaching and learning. iv This paper could not have been completed without the encouragement and support from a number of people who all deserve my sincerest gratitude and appreciation. First and foremost, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Ton Nu Nhu Huong, for her continual encouragement, careful reading, critical comments and patient guidance that made my paper better and more professional. I would like to give thanks to Assoc.
Truong Vien, who gave me the inspiration for this thesis topic and taught me how to deal with SPSS software. My sincere thanks go to all my colleagues and my pretty students at Thua Luu high school who always encourage and support me, especially who are willing and enthusiastic to contribute to my study. I would like to show my warm gratitude to the teachers and students from Phu Loc , An Luong Dong, Phu Bai and Dang Tran Con high schools, who also had an enormous contribution to the success of my research. Last but not least, I would like to show my deepest gratitude and appreciation to my family, my parents, my parents- in law, my husband, my five-year-old son, especially my baby who had went away during the time of this study gave me the strongest motivation to finish this paper.
I also give thanks to my close friends and my classmates who always by my side and give me great mental and physical support. Their love, support and constant encouragement gave me a great deal of strength and determination that help me during the stressful time of writing this paper. v v TABLE OF CONTENTS Contents Pages STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY .iv TABLE OF CONTENTS.vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .ix LIST OF TABLES. x LIST OF CHARTS .xi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION.
Objectives of the study. Scope of the study. Significance of the study.3 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW. Definitions of key terms.
What is writing?. Writing as a process. The importance of writing in language learning. Teaching English writing.
What is a paragraph? .1 The structure of a paragraph .2 Paragraph writing in current textbooks. Teaching paragraph writing. Vietnamese EFL teachers and high school learners. Vietnamese EFL high school teachers.
Vietnamese EFL high school students .26 vi CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY. Data collection methods.28 * Participants of the study.1 Questionnaire to teachers.2 Questionnaire to students.36 CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. Teachers and students‟ perceptions of English paragraph writing. Teachers‟ perception of English paragraph writing.
Students‟ perception of English paragraph writing. The reality of teaching and learning English paragraph writing. The contents teachers often taught and students often learnt in English paragraph writing lessons. Activities teachers and students often employed in teaching and learning English paragraph writing lessons.
While- writing stage. Post- writing stage. Difficulties students had in learning English paragraph writing class .65 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS. Summary of key findings .3 Implications of the study.
Implications for teachers .2 Implications for students .3 Implications for administrators. Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further research. 71 viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CEFR :Common European Framework of Reference for Languages EFL :English as Foreign Language ESL :English as Second Language GCSE :General Certificate of Secondary Education M.A :Master of Arts MOET : The Ministry of Education and Training SPSS : Statistical Package for Social Sciences TESOL :Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching ix LIST OF TABLES Table 2.
Writing tasks in the current textbook Tieng Anh 10. Writing tasks in the current textbook Tieng Anh 11. Writing tasks in the current textbook Tieng Anh 12. Profile of teacher participants.
Profile of student participants .4 Summary of students‟ questionnaire. Clusters of questionnaire items in survey for teachers. Clusters of questionnaire items in survey for students. Mean score of Cluster 1 (for teachers).
ONE-SAMPLE T- TEST of Cluster 1. Mean score of questionnaire items in Cluster 1. Teaching writing skill in EFL classes is challenging. Mean score of Cluster 1 (for students).
ONE SAMPLE T-TEST of Cluster 1 (for students). Mean scores of questionnaire items in Cluster 1 (for students). Paragraph writing is included in many units in textbooks. Mean score of Cluster 2.
Mean score of Cluster 2. Mean score of Cluster 2. Mean score of Cluster 2. Mean scores of questionnaire items in Cluster 2.50 for teachers and students.
Teachers do brainstorming activities for Pre-writing. Questionnaire items in Post-writing stage. Teachers often conduct the writing process: pre-writing-> drafting-> revising -> editing-> publishing.17 Mean score of Cluster 3 for teachers and students. Mean scores of questionnaire items in Cluster 3 .61 for teachers and students.
61 x LIST OF CHARTS Chart 4. Writing a paragraph includes ability to establish a basic unit of organization that consists of a topic sentence and supporting sentences. Learning writing is challenging. I don‟t care much about paragraph writing because writing is not a targeted skill at secondary school.
Mean scores of Cluster 2.1 for teachers and students.5 Teachers often provide students with main ideas, vocabulary and structures that are necessary for paragraph writing task.6 Teachers often provide students with a writing model and ask them to create a similar one.54 xi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale Learning English is now the need of most people in the world because it has become an international language and is widely used in many parts of the world. With the integration of the global economy, English has been an important key to achieve every success both in science and technology. When we learn a foreign language, we learn to communicate with foreigners by talking or writing to them.
However, not all of us have lots of opportunities to meet them face to face to talk so that we can listen to their words or see their gestures directly. Therefore, writing has been becoming a social endeavor, a way of informing and persuading them. In fact, for most people, learning English is mainly to communicate with English speaking people from other countries by either speaking or writing to them. For speaking skills, it is possible that everyone can speak well if they live in an English speaking environment but for the writing skill, they cannot.
They have to learn how to write a correct word, suitable structure and proper meaning (Bader, 2007). In other words, they cannot become good at writing without learning and writing is not only “a language skill which is difficult to acquire” (Tribble, 1996, pp. 3) but also “is not a skill that is readily picked up by exposure”. Therefore, writing becomes an important skill for English learners and “the writing skill is often perceived as the most difficult language skill since it requires a higher level of productive language control than the other skills” (Celce-Murcia & Ohstain, 2000, p.
To be a good writer is not easy for English learners because it requires a process of learning from vocabulary, grammatical structures, and the format of writing and style of writing. Therefore, “English writing is always a headache for both learners and teachers in ESL” (Xiaofen, 2006, p. For the current textbooks, writing is arranged the last skill students need to achieve from reading, speaking, listening to writing. It is clear that after students 1 have already had basic knowledge about the topic, they will try to apply what they have learnt in writing.
It is obvious that many students are not able to write successfully. There are several reasons for this: Maybe they lack vocabulary or ideas, or do not know how to use proper language to express their ideas or even are not well-prepared for the language related to the topic they are required to write. According to Kellogg (2002), writing is a major cognitive challenge because it is a test of memory, language and thinking ability. It demands rapid retrieval of domain- specific knowledge about the topic form long-term memory.
Therefore, from the beginning of the writing learning, to possess the knowledge related to the topic given is very necessary. There are many genres of writing, including writing sentences, writing paragraphs, writing essays, writing stories, writing letters, etc. Of which, writing paragraph is probably the most popular type of writing included in the current textbooks of upper- secondary school with 35 out of 48 units. However, the paragraph writing skill of many students is still limited, some students do not want to learn writing, and even some can not know how to write an English paragraph.