1 LAC HONG UNIVERSITY FOREIGN LANGUAGES FACULTY RESEARCH REPORT TITLE: AN EXPLORATION ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PEER-EDITING TECHNIQUE IN TEACHING ESSAY WRITING AT FOREIGN LANGUAGES FACULTY, LHU Le Thi Bich Vy & Ngo Thi Thu Ha ACKNOWLEGEMENTS YZ To each of these following people, we would like to express our deepest gratitude for what they have done for the completion of our research First of all, we are deeply grateful to the Administration Board of the Foreign Languages Faculty, especially to Associate Professor Tran Thi Hong- the Dean, for their consistent support and encouragement as well as for their invaluable professional consultancy, without all of which we would not be able to finish our study on time Secondly, we also wish to express our great gratitude to the four colleagues who, in spite of their very busy schedule, were very willingly to participate in and to provide us with much useful ideas for our study Thirdly, we would like to thank all of 120 senior students of batch 2007 for their very enthusiastic co-operation during our research Last but not least, our big thanks are hoped to be sent to all of the other colleagues of the Foreign Languages Faculty for their precious comments that enabled us right-time adjustment in the way we carried out the research TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1-5 1.1 Statement of the problem 1.2 Justification of the study 1.3 Research questions 1.4 Hypotheses 1.5 Significance of the study 1.6 Definition of the key terms CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 6-11 2.1 The rationales for using peer-feedback in ESL (English as Second Language) and EFL (English as Foreign Language) classrooms 2.2 Review of the prior studies on the use of peer-editing technique 2.3 Summary and the scope of the current study 10 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURES 12-21 3.1 Aims and Objectives 12 3.2 Methodology 12 3.2.1 Population and sampling 12 3.2.2 Data collection 15 3.2.2.1 Tests 15 3.2.2.2 Questionnaires 15 3.2.2.3 Interviews 16 3.2.2.4 Classroom observation 16 3.3 Procedure 17 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 22-36 4.1 Peer-editing has a positive influence on students’ writing skill in terms of accuracy and fluency 22 4.2 Peer-editing enhances students’ participation in the study 31 4.3 The use of Peer-editing technique in the classroom creates a positive atmosphere, necessary for language learners 33 4.4 Peer-editing technique is a welcoming tool to be employed in a writing classroom 35 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION 37-39 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY 37 RECOMMENDATIONS 38 REFERENCES 40-42 APPENDICE 43-60 LIST OF TABLES List Table 3.1 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8 Table 4.9 Table 4.10 Table 4.11 Label Chapter Page The detailed information of the research procedure Results of the pre-test & post-test of two groups T-Test on the EG’s results of two tests T-test on the posttest results of two groups T-test on the CG’s results of two tests Report on the kind and number of errors students of both groups made in the pre-& post-test Report on the change in level of accuracy within EG and CG Report on the change in level of accuracy between EG and CG Report on two groups’ scores of fluency T-test results on the comparison of posttest scores between EG &CG 18-19 22 4 4 24 24 25 26 28 28 4 30 31 31 35 Appendix Appendix Appendix Appendix Appendix 45 46 46-47 48 49 Appendix Appendix 11 Appendix 11 49-50 57 57 Appendix 11 58 T-test results on the comparison of posttest scores within EG Report on the analyzed data of results from post-questionnaires Table of Raw data of pre-questionnaire Table of statistics Table of frequency Table of Raw data Table of Descriptive Statistics Table of frequency Table of Final Scores of Two Groups Table of the Number of Errors of Two Groups Table of Scores of Fluency Table of Scores of Accuracy Appendix 11 58 LIST OF FIGURES List Label Chapter Page Figure 3.1 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Chart of the Sampling Process Change in the scores of CG Change in the scores of EG Report on the proportion of each error type in students’ writings Comparison of the number of errors made by groups in the pre & posttest Standard deviation values of the analyzed data 4 14-15 23 23 27 28 35 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 ABSTRACT YZ Many studies were done on the use of peer-editing technique and all shared the same conclusion that it is a useful teaching tool to be employed in EFL/ ESL classrooms In this study, peer-editing technique was tried in a 14-week experimental course in which 30 senior English majors of the Foreign Languages Faculty were designated to learn essay writing with this technique During the experiment, students were asked to exchange and to edit each other’s finished essays with the teacher’s guidance and the use of peer-editing checklist The results of the study show that the employment of peerediting activities in large and multilevel classes of writing can benefit both teaching and learning: students’ participation in their study is highly promoted; their writing ability is improved in terms of the level of accuracy and fluency and also a stimulating atmosphere is created in the classroom CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Feedback is widely seen in education as crucial for both encouraging and consolidating learning (Anderson, 1982; Brophy, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978) (as cited in Hyland, K& Hyland, F(2005) and it is also regarded as a fundamental factor in the writing context Supporting this view, Williams (2003) states that written feedback is an essential part of any language course that involves a writing element, and this has also been recognized by those working in the field of second language writing Virtually, for a long time, product-approach has dominated writing pedagogy and teacher feedback is used as the only way to respond to student writing “Surveys of students’ references indicate that ESL students greatly value teachers’ written feedback, and those coming from cultures where teachers are highly directive generally welcome and expect teachers to notice and comment on their errors and may feel resentful if their teachers not so “ (Hyland, K& Hyland, F, 2005: 4) While teacher feedback has been indicated to be desirable for the development of student writing, there are still many debates on whether it should be provided as it is often neglected and misunderstood by students This is also a great concern to teachers teaching writing including the researchers at Lac Hong University (LHU) 1.1 Statement of the problem It is true in nearly all the teaching and learning contexts of the Foreign Languages Faculty (FLF) of LHU that teacher feedback is the dominant and the most preferable mode According to the results of the researchers’ survey on 120 English majors of batch 2007 conducted on May 15, 2010(see appendix 2), a majority of these English majors prefer teacher’s feedback to their peers’ Up to 70.8% of the surveyed students just trusted and appreciated teacher feedback 65% of them said that they had used peers’ feedback, but they rarely did it Thus, students tend to write only when they know that their writings would be read and evaluated by their teachers, as the confession of 75.8% of the respondents Since students depend so much on the teachers, their practice opportunity has been restricted Concerning it, 60% of the students revealed in the questionnaire that two is the average number of writings they usually produce for a writing course and just a very small portion of the respondents (12.51%) have more than 2, which has been confirmed by the information obtained from the interviews with writing teachers(see appendix 6) According to those students, they were demotivated from practicing writing due to four main reasons: The first and also the leading reason is that they have no one to read and comment their writings (41.7% of the respondents); the second one is due to the difficulties they have in writing in terms of grammar and structure (31.7%); the third one is due to their occupied timetable at school(19.2%) and the last one is that they not feel it imperative to write(7.5%) What is worse, according to the survey, is students’ lack of practice, which is one of the causes of their failure in learning writing In fact, many teachers of writing have been trying their best to help students, but very little success has been achieved due to the giant sizes of the classes there Regarding it, out of teacher-interviewees clarified that the big size of the writing class usually discouraged them from giving their students lots of chances to write because correction work always took them much time to Because of the lack of systematic practice, English students including high-level ones cannot write (Baskoff, 1990) While students said they were badly in need of teachers’ feedback, in reality, few of them take it properly When being asked about their responses to kinds of teacher 10 feedback, a majority of students admitted that marks were what they expected or were eager to see first when getting the writing assignments back from the teacher; only about 26.7% of the students paid attention to the teachers’ comments and corrections, but they did no follow-up based on the teachers’ remarks in the returned writings; and just 5% made a good use of teacher feedback This fact explains why many students usually make the same errors over and over again although those mistakes have been explained to them for many times Obviously, once students not want to revise their writing based on feedback, teachers’ feedback is useless (Chandler, 2003) In short, teachers teaching writing in general and essay writing in particular at FLF of LHU are now sharing the same fiasco in enabling their students to practice sufficiently and in drawing students’ attention to their feedback, all of which have negatively affected the results of both teaching and learning Thus, being teachers of writing, we have been strongly urged by the long-lasting wish to find out an effective way to help ourselves as well as our colleagues positively modify our teaching contexts for the sake of students’ progress 1.2 Justification of the study With the development of writing pedagogy, in addition to teacher feedback, new feedback modes are burgeoning and varied feedback techniques are explored Among the feedback techniques have been studied, peer-editing proves to be advantageous to some extent Particularly, in our research we decided upon it for some primary reasons, which have been carefully considered in relation to the specific context of FLF First, peerediting is an interactive technique for stimulating students to actively work with their peers through the exchange of their first drafts of the text Second, it helps students realize the changes they need (e.g for better organization, paragraph divisions, sentence variety, and vocabulary choice) Third, it is suitable for big classes with multi-levels like those at LHU, where teachers have big difficulties maintaining their role as the primary communicator with the students via one-on- one interaction This creates ground for the ... addressed in the research To what extent can peer-editing technique help better the context of teaching and learning essay- writing at the Foreign Languages Department of LHU? What are students’ responses... essay- writing at the Foreign Languages Faculty, LHU and the application would bring about significant changes in students’ learning of this subject in terms of their improvement in the writing ability... be independent It means that they should get rid of the habit of relying on their teachers as the only source of knowledge or of feedback in the context of learning writing In respect to the indicated