MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HUE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ---------------------- NGUYEN TRUONG QUYNH TRANG THE EFFECT OF CONCEPT MAPPING ON EFL LEARNERS’ WRITING PERFORMANCE AT VINH DINH HIGH SCHOOL IN QUANG TRI PROVINCE MA THESIS IN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING CODE: 60140111 SUPERVISOR: Assoc. TRUONG VIEN HUE, 2013 i BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO ĐẠI HỌC HUẾ TRƢỜNG ĐẠI HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ ---------------------- NGUYỄN TRƢƠNG QUỲNH TRANG SỰ TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA PHƢƠNG PHÁP LẬP BẢN ĐỒ KHÁI NIỆM ĐẾN VIỆC NÂNG CAO KỸ NĂNG VIẾT CHO HỌC SINH TẠI TRƢỜNG THPT VĨNH ĐỊNH TỈNH QUẢNG TRỊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ LÝ LUẬN VÀ PHƢƠNG PHÁP DẠY HỌC BỘ MÔN TIẾNG ANH MÃ SỐ: 60140111 NGƢỜI HƢỚNG DẪN KHOA HỌC: PGS. TRƢƠNG VIÊN HUẾ, 2013 ii STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby acknowledge that this study is mine. The data and findings discussed in the thesis are true and have not been published elsewhere.
Author Nguyen Truong Quynh Trang iii ABSTRACT Traced back to 1972, concept mapping was the early work of Novak and his research team at Cornell University. This study examined the potential of concept mapping in an attempt to improve EFL learners’ writing performance. The one-group pretest-treatment-posttest procedure was adopted with 35-tenth-grade students participating in the study. The study comprised of three major parts.
Initially, students’ perception towards using concept mapping in writing yielded, pertaining to questionnaires and interviews, showed their attitudes towards this strategy. Next, pairwise comparison regarding five subscales, namely Content, Organization, Vocabulary, Language use, and Mechanics at two points of measures was analyzed to illuminate the impact of concept mapping on students’ writing performance. Recommendations stemming from teachers’ interviews and class observation sheet were, by the same token, proposed to strengthen the effect of concept mapping. The findings were that positive attitudes pervaded the utilization of concept mapping and the students’ writing performance measurably improved in the light of Content, Organization, Vocabulary, and Language use.
The ideas of providing students with more training sessions and incorporating the strategy in other skills was heartily recommended to facilitate the effect of concept mapping in educational purposes. iv Acknowledgements This research is a milestone in all my personal and professional endeavors. I am eternally grateful to a number of people who helped to bring this project to fruition. My thanks first go to my supervisor, Assoc.
Truong Vien, for his constant encouragement, invaluable assistance and suggestions throughout this long journey despite his many other academic and professional commitments. I have been extremely lucky to have a supervisor who cared so much about my work. I would like to thank Dr. Luu Trong Tuan, currently a teacher at National University of Ho Chi Minh City, for enlightening me the first glance of research and his insightful comments.
I wish to send my appreciation to all the teaching staff and students at Vinh Dinh High School who participated in this study for their willingness to help me with questionnaires, class observations and interviews. My thesis would not have come to a completion without the help from my colleague, Nguyen Thi Yen, who kindly provided technical guidance during the adoption of Inspiration software for my research. I am also deeply indebted to all my friends, especially to Tu Liem, Minh Tri, Tram Hang, for their whole-hearted help and encouragement when I deal with the data. In particular, I am grateful to Nam who helped me download the precious reference materials.
I would like to show my deep gratitude to my beloved family- my grandmother, my father, my mother and my siblings who shared all of the ups and downs of my academic endeavors with their boundless love and continuous support – both materially and spiritually; my mother-in-law for all her tender care and profound understanding. There are not words to express my gratitude to my husband, Hong Viet, for his endless encouragement and unfailing belief in my ability to conduct this research amidst the distance that separated us. In a word, my sincere gratitude goes to all of those without whose support my study would not have been made possible. v v TABLE OF CONTENTS SUB COVER PAGE.
i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP. v TABLE OF CONTENTS. vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. ix LIST OF TABLES.
x LIST OF FIGURES. xi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. Aim of the study. Scope of the study.
Significance of the study. Organization of the thesis .7 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. An overview of Concept mapping. Definition of concept maps and concept mapping.
The theory pertaining to concept mapping. The construction of concept maps. Procedures for constructing concept maps. Application of concept mapping in language learning.
Concept mapping facilitates collaborative learning via collaborative concept maps. Concept mapping as a tool to enhance critical thinking ability. Concept mapping as a promising tool in planning stage. Concept maps facilitate reading comprehension.
English writing process .28 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHOD. Tests on English writing. Class observation sheet. Data collection procedure.
Composition scoring rubrics .36 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. Students’ perception towards the use of concept maps in writing class. The usefulness of using concept maps in writing. Students’ current attitudes towards using concept mapping in writing process.
After practicing concept mapping activities. Possibility of using concept mapping. Ways to conduct concept mapping activities in writing. Difficulties in concept mapping activities.
Mean score of students’ perceptions towards the use of concept maps in writing class. Participants’ writing performance in two measures. Pairwise comparison of the mean scores of pretest and posttest. Pairwise comparison of mean scores between pretest and posttest regarding five subscales.
Correlation between pretest and posttest mean scores. Teachers’ perception towards the use of concept maps to writing instruction. Credits of concept mapping in writing. Recommendations to strengthen the effects of concept mapping to writing instruction.
60 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS. Summary of research findings. Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further research.
79 viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS No Abbreviation Full version 1 EFL English as a foreign language 2 ESL English as a second language 3 MOET Ministry of Education and Training 4 PASW Predictive Analytics Software 5 Ss Students 6 T Teacher ix LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1: The usefulness of using concept mapping in pre-writing stage .2: Mean score of the usefulness of concept mapping in writing process .3: Mean score of students’ current attitudes towards using concept mapping .4: Ways to conduct concept mapping activities .5: Ways to concept mapping activities .6: Mean score of difficulties in concept mapping activities .7: Mean score of students’ perception towards using concept mapping in writing class .8: The paired t-test to compare the difference between the mean scores of pretest and posttest .9: The paired t-test to compare the difference between mean scores of pretest and posttest regarding five subscales. 54 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1: Key memory system of the brain all interact when we are learning .2: Concept map notation .3: Concept Map about Concept Maps by Novak .4: A student-generated computer-based concept map – Unit 13: Dolphins14 Figure 2.5: The cognitive process model of the composing process .1: Students’ attitudes after practicing concept mapping activities .2: Possibility of using concept mapping .3: Difficulties in concept mapping activities .4: The boxplot shows the relationship between pre and post test mean scores .5: Mean score of two variables: pretest and posttest .6: The scatterplot to show correlation between pretest and posttest scores55 Figure 4.7: The improvement in the second concept map when compared to the first one .8: Multiple responses to strengthen concept mapping to writing instruction .9: “Snow White and seven dwarfs” concept map. 62 xi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This chapter describes the rationale, aim of the study, scope and significance of the research. The chapter ends with organization of the thesis.
Rationale The emergence of English as the number one foreign language in Vietnam can be traced back to 1986, when an overall economic reform known as Doi Moi (Renovation) was initiated, opening the door of Vietnam to the whole world. English becomes nearly the only foreign language to be taught in Vietnam. During the last decades, Vietnam has implemented rapid reforms in educational system. At the beginning of 2002, the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) organized the design of the new curriculum and textbooks.
However, it was not until 2008 that the new textbooks of English were put into use marking the shift in language teaching and learning methodologies. As a matter of fact, the four skills distributed evenly in each unit lesson put an end to the dominance of reading comprehension and grammatical structures in a long time. Among the four skills, writing is deemed to be difficult for students; and teaching writing effectively is a daunting prospect for teachers within the context of teaching and learning English in Vietnam. What causes Vietnamese students at loss how to write when they are supposed to write and teachers feel puzzled when considering how to teach writing effectively? Following are some reasons creating a big word PROBLEM that result in students’ poor writing performance and their unfavorable perceptions towards learning to write, especially, reflecting the practical realities of teaching and learning writing in the researcher’s study context.
A big word PROBLEM derives from Practice limitation in writing, Roles of teachers and learners in writing classes, Over-emphasis on the finished product, Brainstorming and organizing ideas for writing – limited capabilities, Lacking interests in learning writing, Examination as students’ utmost goal and Mismatch between testing and teaching in English language teaching. It is believed that they remain interrelationships causing the big “problem” word of writing instruction. 1 Practice limitation in writing The reality is of course, no minimum or maximum, that writing lesson appears in 8 sessions per semester, hence, this means that few opportunities for writing practice open to students. With this time constraint, it is unavoidable that students have trouble with writing.
More detailed, whilst students’ English is limited, the prescribed lesson is so long, and normally, three tasks within each writing lesson. According to Le and Barnard (2009), time is always a matter of concern for many teachers since they are mandated to finish the tasks in each writing lesson within forty-five-minute-period. Students are pushed all the time otherwise the teacher’s lesson plan will “get burnt”. With such assumption existing in the classroom, students are barely afforded the opportunity to practice in writing.
Additionally, the heavy study load, with 10-11 courses per semester, more or less, makes students busy with revising what they have learnt, preparing new lessons of other subjects and, consequently, they are left little time to practice writing outside classroom. Little by little, it is not surprising that their self-study, finding out the extra knowledge outside textbook and a desire to improving their writing performance will become a luxurious prospect. It is irrefutable that, suffering from the limited time for writing and lacking skills for self-study, not many of the students can acquire enough linguistic input, promoting their creativeness as well as linguistic skills to scaffold their ideas in their writing process. Role of teachers and students in writing classes Apparently, due to the influence of Confucian philosophy in thousands of years, which demands obedience and respect to superiors, Vietnamese students regard their teachers as a source of knowledge and are deemed to be passive recipients of knowledge.
This habit prevents students from exploring new knowledge, enriching their knowledge based on prior information, taking into account the active participation in collaborative environment. They tend to be “spoon-fed” rather than having to work out for themselves.