MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY -------------------------------- TRAN THI NIEM MY MY THE EFFECTS OF REFLECTIVE JOURNAL WRITING (RJW) ON THE VOCABULARY ACQUISITION AND WRITING PERFORMANCE OF PRIMARY STUDENTS AT VINSCHOOL CENTRAL PARK A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in TESOL Ho Chi Minh City, 2019 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY ---------------------------------------- TRAN THI NIEM MY MY Major: TESOL Major code: 60 14 01 11 THE EFFECTS OF REFLECTIVE JOURNAL WRITING (RJW) ON THE VOCABULARY ACQUISITION AND WRITING PERFORMANCE OF PRIMARY STUDENTS AT VINSCHOOL CENTRAL PARK. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in TESOL Supervisor: Assoc. Pham Vu Phi Ho, Ph.D Ho Chi Minh City, 2019 I Certificate Of Originality I certify my authorship of the Master’s Thesis entitled “the effects of reflective journal writing (RJW) on the vocabulary acquisition and writing performance of primary students at Vinschool Central Park.” All sources used by me have been documented. No other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgement.
This piece of work has not been submitted for assessment in this or any other subject or course at this University or elsewhere. Ho Chi Minh City, 2019 Student’s signature II Acknowledgements This work would not have been possible without the tremendous academic support of my supervisor, Assoc. Pham Vu Phi Ho, Ph. I am especially indebted to Prof.
Pham Vu Phi Ho, who has been supportive of my thesis as well as encouraging me strongly during my hard times. Your advice on research has been invaluable to me. I am grateful to all of those with whom I have had the pleasure to work with during this research. I would like to thank my managers, Ms.Le Thi Ngoc Diep, Ph.D – Vinschool Principal and Ms.Tran Ngoc Thuy Nhien – Vinschool Vice Principal for consulting and giving me an opportunity to conduct the study at Vinschool Central Park.
My deep gratitude goes to my co-workers at Vinschool Central Park, who have been giving me emotional support and sharing their own teaching experience with me. Each of the members in ESL Vinschool team has been a great inspiration and motivation for me to finish this research. Finally, but by no means least, words cannot express how grateful I am to my family. Your endless love for me has been what sustained me thus far.
They are the most important people in my world and I dedicate this thesis to them. III Abstract The learning and teaching English in Vietnam has not been a new issue for ages. It has especially gained more attention in such a rapid economic and social development. New curriculums have been planned, new textbooks have been tried out, modern teaching approaches and methods have been discussed and applied.
However, it is just a turning point in which not all aspects of renovation can be successfully carried out. In many schools in Vietnam, Grammar Translation Method alone, which focused on the translation of text and the rote learning of vocabulary, is still used to teach all skills, no matter it is reading, writing, speaking or listening and regardless of what learning objective that is. Teachers say the words, students repeat. Teachers force students to memorize the words by copying.
Students learn writing by translating sentences from their mother tongue to English and vice versa. Thus, the effectiveness of the teaching and learning English has been not as good as expected. This research aimed at examining the impacts of reflective journal writings (RJW) on the learning of vocabulary and writing performance of primary students at Vinschool Central Park, Ho Chi Minh City. The quasi-experimental research design was used in this study.
60 primary students of level 3 in the 12-level English proficiency scale aged from 8 to 10 participated in the study. These 60 students were divided into two groups of 30 including control and experimental one. Both groups were taught with Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) method, but the treatment group wrote reflective journals in the wrap-up phase of every vocabulary lesson in 3 months, while the control group took the regular spelling and writing practice in the wrap-up phase. Pre-test and post-test were used to measure their progress before and after the reflective journal writing experiment.
Each test paper was marked separately by two raters, then the final score was the average number of these two scores. The findings disclosed that the achievement in the participants’ writing skills and vocabulary mastery in terms of vocabulary quantity, spelling, word meaning in specific contexts, and word use of the treatment group is considerably better than that of the control group. The research also confirmed the positive influence of RJW on students’ IV abilities to remember the words, use words in context, writing fluency and accuracy. The results might have pedagogically significant implications for material developers, language teachers and students.
Keywords: Reflective journal writing, vocabulary acquisition, writing fluency, writing accuracy V Table of Contents Certificate Of Originality .1 Background of the study .2 Statement of the problem .3 Purpose of the study .5 Significance of the study .6 Structure of the study.1 Definition of terminology. Definitions of reflective journal writing. Definition of vocabulary acquisition. Definition of writing fluency and accuracy.
Theory-based approaches to reflective journal writing. Theory-based approaches to teaching writing .3 Theory-based approaches to critical thinking .4 Other benefits of reflective journal writing. Previous research studies and research gap .1 Previous research studies. Research setting and participants.
Data collection and analysis .1 The English proficiency test .2 The vocabulary pre- and post-test. The pre- and post-test construction .1 How to measure vocabulary knowledge? .2 The pre- and post-test format .3 The pre- and post-test construction .2 Inter-rater reliability .3 Test reliability data analysis. Results/ Findings and Discussions. A comparison of students’ vocabulary acquisition and writing performance of both groups in the pre-test .1 A comparison of students’ overall score in the pre-test .2 A comparison of students’ writing fluency in the pre-test .3 A comparison of students’ writing accuracy in the pre-test.
A comparison of students’ vocabulary acquisition in the pre- and post-test 69 4.1 Control group: A comparison of students’ vocabulary acquisition in the pre- and post-test .2 Experimental group: A comparison of students’ vocabulary acquisition in the pre- and post-test. A comparison of students’ vocabulary acquisition of both groups in the post-test. A comparison of students’ writing fluency and accuracy in the pre- and post-test .1 Control group: A comparison of students’ writing fluency and accuracy in the pre- and post-test .2 Experimental group: A comparison of students’ writing fluency and accuracy in the pre- and post-test .3 A comparison of students’ writing fluency and accuracy of both groups in the post-test .1 The effect of reflective journal writing on the vocabulary acquisition of Vinschool primary students .2 The effect of reflective journal writing on the writing fluency of Vinschool primary students .3 The effect of reflective journal writing on the writing accuracy of Vinschool primary students. Conclusions, implications and recommendations.
A summary of the research findings. Implication of the study. Limitations and recommendations .97 Appendix 1: Sample reflective journal writing with guided questions .97 Appendix 2: Sample reflective journal writing with scaffolding for the first two sessions .98 Appendix 3: Sample regular spelling and writing practice .99 Appendix 4: Writing Rubric .100 Appendix 5: Curriculum planning and detailed lesson plan for each treatment session .101 VIII Appendix 6: Vocabulary pre-test and answer key.115 Appendix 7: Vocabulary post-test and answer key .121 Appendix 8: Students’ writing samples .127 Appendix 9: SPSS data analysis results .128 List of figures and charts Figure 2.1 Conceptual framework of reflective journal writing .2 A summary of the literature and the research gap .1 Vinschool English program level mapping .2 Control group teaching procedure .3 Experimental group teaching procedure .1 Two ways of conceptualizing breadth and depth .1 A summary of the data analysis result .77 List of tables Table 2.1 A summary of the theory-based approaches to reflective journal writing 16 Table 2.2 Reflective journal writing across academic disciplines .3 A summary of the reviewed literature about reflective journal writing. 1 Procedures to develop the research .2 Common grammar and spelling errors in the reflective journal writings .3 Pre- and post-test specification .4 A comparison of students’ score in the pre-test pilot .5 A comparison of students’ score in the post-test pilot .6 A comparison of group 1 students’ score in the pre- and post-test pilot .7 A comparison of group 2 students’ score in the pre- and post-test pilot .1 A comparison of students’ overall score in the pre-test.2 A comparison of students’ writing fluency in the pre-test .3 A comparison of students’ writing accuracy in the pre-test .4 A comparison of students’ vocabulary acquisition in the pre-test and post- test (Control group) .5 A comparison of students’ vocabulary acquisition in the pre-test and post-test (Experimental group) .6 A comparison of students’ overall score in the post-test .7 A comparison of students’ writing fluency and accuracy in the pre-test and post-test (Control group) .8 A comparison of students’ writing fluency and accuracy in the pre-test and post-test (Experimental group) .9 A comparison of students’ writing fluency and accuracy in the post-test 75 1 Chapter 1.1 Background of the study In such a rapid economic and social development, English, which is spoken in Vietnam as a foreign language, has gained more and more attention in families, workplaces, schools and universities recently.
It is a mandatory subject at primary and secondary schools, even universities not to mention English language centers. As stated by the MOET (as cited in Hiep, 2007 and; Huong, 2006), the proportion of lower secondary students studying English at least three hours a week is 67% and that of upper secondary students is 86%. As for colleges or universities, all students learn a foreign language, among that 90% choose to study English as their requirement to pass schools (Canh, 2007). In spite of the fact that English is highly focused at schools of all levels, Vietnamese students find it hard to use the language.
“Many Vietnamese students do have the words, they either heard them or read them but they can’t say them or use them in certain contexts” (Patrick Hayeck, personal communication, April, 29, 2016). For example, primary students may know landfill is “an area of land where large amounts of waste material are buried under the earth” (Oxford learner’s dictionaries); however, they may not know how to use this word in a particular context like “many tons of waste go into landfill each month.”, or “plastic in landfill lasts for hundreds of years.” Fanliver Pham (personal communication, Jun 2, 2016) supposed that having studied English 7 years at schools, most of the Vietnamese students cannot use English for daily communication; they just study English for passing the exam instead. Undoubtedly, these issues are caused in relation to various factors concerning the socio-cultural environment, teaching and learning methods. At school, it is said that in spite of a great number of English lessons per week, students have not got sufficient exposure to English.
Students, except those studying at international schools, usually speak their mother tongue outside schools or right after their English lessons. Additionally, a large majority of teachers in Vietnam have been applying traditional teaching methods following teacher-centered approach. Teaching 2 vocabulary with this method, teachers read the words, while students listen, repeat and write them only; no meaningful or authentic contexts are provided for practicing the language. It turns out that at the end of the lesson, students can learn by heart the words without really knowing how to use them in either spoken or written communication.
