TABLE OF CONTENTS Contents Pages SUB COVER PAGE STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TABLE OF CONTENTS. 1 LIST OF ABRREVIATIONS. 5 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES. 6 LIST OF FIGURES.
Background of the Research. Rationale for Conducting the Research. Purposes of the Research. The Organization of the Research Paper.
Difference between Mistakes and Errors. What is a Grammatical Mistake?. Definition of local mistake and global mistake. Attitudes towards Mistakes.
The Traditional Attitudes towards Mistakes. The Communicative Approach to Mistakes. When and What to Correct. Students to Student Correction.
Correcting students‟ written work. Ways of Correction. METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURES. General Pedagogical Context.
Quoc Hoc High School. English Courses and the English Teaching Staff at Quoc Hoc High School. Instruments for Data Collection. FINDINGS AND DICUSSIONS.
Findings and Discussions. Teachers‟ and Students‟ Attitudes towards Mistake and Grammatical Mistake Making. Teachers‟ Perception on Mistake. Teachers‟ Attitudes towards Students Who Make Grammatical Mistakes.
Students‟ Perception on Mistake. Students‟ Feeling When Making Grammatical Mistakes. Common Grammatical Mistakes Students often Make. The Students‟ Frequency of Making Grammatical Mistake.
Causes of Students‟ Grammatical Mistakes. Teachers‟ and Students‟ Perception on Mistake Correction. The Teachers‟ Frequency of Conducting Grammatical Mistake Correction. Students‟ Feelings When Having Grammatical Mistakes Corrected.
When Teachers Correct the Grammatical Mistakes. Type of Students‟ Grammatical Mistakes that Teachers often Correct. The Strategies Teachers Use To Deal with Students‟ Grammatical Mistakes. The Techniques that Teachers Use.
Reasons for Teachers‟ Preference to Using the Techniques. The Techniques of Grammatical Correction that Students Like. Ways of Correcting Learners‟ Mistakes that Teachers often Employ. Difficulties Faced by Teachers When Using the Correction Strategies To Deal with Grammatical Mistakes.
Teachers' Reaction When Their Correction Strategy Is Not Successful. The Teachers‟ Frequency of Adapting Grammatical Mistake Correction Activities. Suggestions for Making the Grammatical Mistake Correction Activities really Effective. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATION.
Teachers‟ and Students‟ Attitudes towards Mistake and Grammatical Mistake Making. Students‟ Feeling When Making Grammatical Mistakes. Common Grammatical Mistakes Students often Make. Causes of Students‟ Grammatical Mistakes.
The Strategies Teachers Use To Deal with Grammatical Mistakes Made by Students. Contribution of the Study. Suggestion for the Further Research. 70 4 LIST OF ABRREVIATIONS L1 : First language L2 : Second language 5 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 4.
Teachers‟ attitudes towards students who make grammatical mistakes. Students‟ perception on mistake. Common grammatical mistakes students often make. Students‟ feelings when having grammatical mistakes corrected.
The techniques that teachers use. Reasons for Teachers‟ Preference to Using the Techniques. The techniques of grammatical correction that students like. Ways of correcting learners‟ mistakes that teachers often employ.
Difficulties faced by teachers when using the correction strategies to deal with grammatical mistakes. Suggestions for making the grammatical mistake correction activities really effective. 61 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 4. Teachers' perception on mistakes.
Students' feelings when making grammatical mistakes. The students‟ frequency of making grammatical mistake. Causes of students‟ grammatical mistakes. Students‟ perception on the importance of grammatical mistake correction.
Teachers‟ perception on the importance of grammatical mistake correction. Teachers‟ frequency of conducting grammatical mistake correction. When teachers correct the grammatical mistakes. Type of students‟ grammatical mistakes that teachers often correct.
The teachers‟ frequency of adapting grammatical mistake correction activities. 60 7 ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to investigate the grammatical mistakes made by students at Quoc Hoc high school. Another aim was to know more about grammatical mistake correction strategies used in English lessons at Quoc Hoc high school. Moreover, the discovery of the students‟ attitudes towards the strategies teachers use to deal with these grammatical mistakes was examined in the study.
Finally, the paper gave some suggestions to make the grammatical mistake correction really effective. In this thesis, both quantitative and qualitative approaches were applied. This study involved 7 English teachers and 120 students at Quoc Hoc high school. The researcher carried out the survey using questionnaires, interviews and class observations.
The results revealed that teachers and students at Quoc Hoc high school has changed their attitudes towards mistakes and mistake correction. Furthermore, it is unavoidable for learners to commit the grammatical mistakes in their learning. Students maybe make various mistakes. It was also found that most teachers were aware of the importance of mistake correction.
Therefore, most of them paid attention to correction activities. A majority of teachers often conducted the so-called grammatical mistake correction in their class. However, when doing the activities of grammatical mistake correction, teachers had to face many obstacles. The principal conclusion was that grammatical mistake correction seemed to be an easy activity, however, it required much more time and effort.
In order to make this activity really effective as well as to overcome the difficulties, there should be the combination of school, teachers and students. 8 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Overview This chapter firstly presents the rationale of the study in which the background of the research and the reasons for the research are given by the researcher. Moreover, purposes of the research, research questions, research scope, significance of the study, and the organization of the research paper are also presented. Background of the Research According to Thornbury (1999), “Language learners make mistakes.
This seems to happen regardless of the teacher‟s skill and perseverance. It seems to be an inevitable part of learning a language.” For a long time, many teachers in the world in general and those in Vietnam in particular thought that it was a bad thing if a student made a mistake. For them, a mistake was the consequence of ineffective teaching and learning or as an evidence of failure. In some cases, some teachers also blamed students for their laziness, stupidity.
They sometimes punished their students for making mistakes. This led to create a certain effect on the attitudes of both teachers and students during the teaching and learning process. Students were, therefore, often afraid of making mistakes. That was the reason why those who made mistakes often felt embarrassed and ashamed.
Nowadays, the communicative approach is becoming more and more popular. The attitudes toward making mistakes in learning have changed. Both teachers and students have the new insight into mistakes. Most of the teachers 9 and students of English tend to be more open in their perspectives on mistakes.
They realize that if students make mistakes, this means that these students are trying to formulate sentences and expressing ideas themselves not simply copying the teacher‟s model. Learning is a process. Therefore, students cannot come up with a perfect product such as an essay, or a paragraph or even a sentence with no mistakes at the first time. Therefore, a lesson with no mistakes seems to be not a real lesson at all.
From Norrish (1983), we can find that mistake is something natural which should be seen positively in the process of language teaching and learning. He also stated that teachers, learners, and those who are related directly and indirectly to the teaching and learning process should have a positive point of view on learners‟ mistakes, mistakes making and mistakes correction. For the communicative approach teachers, correction is an integral part of the lesson. The teacher‟s attitude towards correction is positive and correction techniques are used to encourage students, not to put them down or make them feel stupid.
Not only Norrish (1983) but also a great many other methodologists, through their books, articles and studies on mistakes and mistakes correction have contributed to the more and more effective process of language teaching and learning. Lee (1997) studied ESL learners' performance in error correction in writing: Some implications for teaching. The paper describes an investigation into ESL students' performance in error correction in writing and discusses the pedagogical implications that arise from the study. An error correction task was designed to examine three common assumptions behind ESL teachers' error correction practices (1) that overt correction is helpful; (2) that students can cope with error feedback in the form of a correction code; and (3) that all errors deserve equal attention.
The findings show that students' major difficulty in error correction lies in their failure to detect errors rather than the lack of knowledge. In addition, the study finds that students have limited understanding of grammatical terms commonly used in a correction code, and 10 that they correct surface errors better than meaning errors. The pedagogical implications, which arise from the findings, are discussed with reference to the three assumptions put earlier: (1) error feedback may be more desirable than overt correction; (2) error feedback by means of a correction code must be handled with care; and (3) some errors may deserve more attention than others may. The study has shown that learners' performance in error correction in writing can provide teachers with valuable information to guide their error correction policy.
In general, mistake making and mistake correction has drawn much more attention of a large number of people. The positive attitudes towards mistakes have taken the more dominant part in teaching and learning process. In Vietnam, there were some researchers had studied on mistake and error correction. Van Thi Minh Chau (2007), in her MA thesis in education which entitled “An investigation into written errors and how they are corrected in classes of English at Hue college of foreign languages”.
As the title suggests, the paper focused mainly on written errors and how they were corrected. Her study, therefore, played an important role in helping both teachers and learners in their teaching and learning process. Rationale for Conducting the Research Due in large part to the trends towards economic globalization, English has the most widely disseminated and ubiquitous international language and thus honorably described as a lingua franca over the world. English is the dominant international language in communication, science, business, aviation, entertainment, diplomacy and the Internet.
Teaching English, therefore, is essential to school success and acculturation, especially in this time of integration. English itself has been considered one of the most compulsory school subjects that demand both subject teachers and students‟ time and effort to impart and grasp knowledge in its true sense. In the course of its own 11 development, English language teaching has had many changes. Looking back on the previous time, we can see that acquisition of grammar points used to be the central issues in the teaching and learning language process.
The fact shows that whenever learners have a good knowledge of grammar of a language, they will be more confident in using that language and being better in using it. However, grammatical mistakes are unavoidable in English lessons. Grammatical mistake correction is, therefore, one of the issues in which many teachers care for. They often use different techniques to correct their learners‟ mistakes or help students realize the mistakes and then let them correct by themselves more effectively.
Thus, it can be said that getting to know patterns of strategies to deal with grammatical mistakes is one of the necessary matter that teacher should focus on his or her process of correcting. Moreover, many methodologists such as Norrish (1983), Doff (1988), Brown (1993), and so on asserted that mistake correction played a very important role in the process of second language acquisition. From my own experience as a teacher at present and a student in the past, I myself find that grammatical mistake corrections are not paid well attention enough. Many teachers still have difficulties in using grammatical mistake correction.
Correspondingly, it is necessary for teachers to have an adequate knowledge of this issue. Furthermore, it is essential for teachers to be aware of their students‟ attitudes towards grammatical mistake correction so that mistake correction can be conducted appropriately.