(SKKN 2022) using written corrective feedback to improve writing ability of grade 10 students at tong duy tan high school

For all the reasons mentioned above, the researcher wishes to conduct a study entitled "Using written corrective feedback to improve writing ability of grade-10 students at Tong Duy Tan

in order to express their ideas in a comprehensive way

From my teaching experience, I realized that most of my students at TongDuy Tan high school have similar issues with their writing They often make avariety of mistakes in the procress of writing all kinds of Englishdocuments.Trying to overcome these challengesis time-consuming, particularlywhen students do not have sufficient awareness of the significance of improvingtheir writing skills Hence, they are often de-motivated or get discouragedduring writing lessons, which affects their learning results to a certain extend.Thus, how to improve students' writing as well as to change their attitudestowards writing activities has greatly attracted my attention

Some researchers in writing (Leki, 1991; Raimes, 1983) believe that givingfeedback is one of the important ways for teachers to help the writers improvetheir writing Until now, feedback used in pedagogicalcontext is considered as

an essential part of the teaching and learning process to improve knowledge and

feel obliged to provide it Feedbackcreates interactions between teacher andstudents in the second language writing class and it enhances students’ writingaccuracy (Ferris, 1997) Raimes (1983, p.139) also emphasized the importance

of corrective feedback by considering it as "very much a part of the process ofteaching writing" That means corrective feedback is crucial for the success ofwriting tasks

In Vietnam, there have been some researches on teacher’s correctivefeedback but none of the studies investigates the effectiveness of teacher’swritten corrective feedback on grade-ten students’ writing

For all the reasons mentioned above, the researcher wishes to conduct a

study entitled "Using written corrective feedback to improve writing ability of

grade-10 students at Tong Duy Tan high school”.

2 Aims of the study

This studyaims at investigating the effectiveness of written correctivefeedback on improving students' writing ability

3 Scope of the study

This study focuses only on the types of written feedback provided byteachers in language classrooms Moreover, the participants of this study are 35grade-10 students at Tong Duy Tan high school that the researcher directlyteaches

4 Methods of the study

Two methods were utilized to obtain sufficient information for the study,which are document analysis and action research to improve a situation Aftercarrying out an initial investigation, a writing instruction course was designed,and different types of teacher written corrective feedback were then applied.The data were collected through analyzing students' writing and surveyquestionnaires Students' writings were collected and analyzed before, duringand after treatment period to measure the students' progress in their writing

performance Additionly, students' survey questionnaires were collected andanalyzed at the end of the research to find out their attitudes towards each type

of feedback and its effectiveness

PART II: CONTENT

1 Literature review

1.1 Definition of writing ability

Writing ability as a critical theoretical construct that has too often beeninterpreted largely by the testing industry as whatever a particular writing testmeasures It means that writing ability has traditionally been defined by test ofwriting Yi(2009) said that the term‘writing ability’ can be defined depending onthe teachers' own experience as a teacher or their ideology on writing

Also, Yi(2009) said that approaches themselves are classified differentlyaccording to researchers However, they can be reduced into three majorapproaches as following:

1.1.1 Writing ability implied in product/text-oriented approach

Those who think oftextsasautonomous objects define writing ability as theability to respond to a given stimulus according to some authority's definition ofthe correct response (Nunan, 1999) In other word, it is the ability to adhere tostyle-guide prescriptions relating grammar, arrangement and punctuationwithout consideration for audience, purpose or context, working on theassumption that a text can mean the same thing to all people only if it is writtenexplicitly going after the given prescriptions Meanwhile, "text-as-discourse"viewiers consider writing ability as the ability to create coherent and cohesivediscourses following prescribed patterns for developing and organisingdiscourse

1.1.2 Writing ability implied in process/cognitive-oriented approach

This approach emphasizes what the composer does throughout writing.Commonly known as the Process approach, it can be divided into threesubcategories including Expressivist, Cognitivist and Social (Situated)strands.Learners are encouraged to look for their own authentic voices and

subscribing to this view are likely to be individual essays and journal writing,which are suitable for self-discovery Hence, writing ability can be considered

as the ability to freely express oneself Yi(2009) noted that writing ability in thisapproach isdefined as the ability to initiate and evolve ideas and then use certainrevising and editing practices to develop them to maturity in a given context

1.1.3 Writing ability implied in reader/genre-oriented approach

Yi(2009) said that this Genre-based approach emphasises awareness of thereader It regards successful writers as those who are able to make reasonableassumptions about what readers know and expect, balance between their writingpurpose and readers’ expectations as well as satisfy the readers’ rhetorical needs

In other words, writing ability is the ability to perform writing tasks for a givenpurpose, satisfy a given discourse community concerining the structure andcontent of the discourse, and communicate functionally

1.2 Corrective feedback

1.2.1 Definition of corrective feedback

Definitions for the term "feedback" vary depending on researchers.Lightbown and Spada (1999, p.172) says that feedback is "an indication to thelearner that his or her use the target languages is incorrect" Teacher feedbackcan be considered as an effective means to communicate to students about theirwriting so that they can enhance their composition

Corrective feedback refers to the response that second language studentsreceive on the errors that they make in their oral or written production (Sheen,

Y & Ellis, R 2011)

When reviewing students' writing, second language teachers give feedback

on various issues They may address content of the text, idea organization, andvocabulary choice Among them, the type of feedback that has attractednumerous researchers' attentionis feedback on linguistic errors, known as

“corrective feedback” or “error correction” Yeh and Lo (2009) defines

corrective feedback as the responses to errors in the text They also claim thatcorrective feedback supplies students with direct or indirect responses aboutwhat is inappropriate The responses can indicate where the errors are, whattypes of errors those belong to; a provision of correct form of the targetlanguage; metalinguistic information about the errors or any combination ofthese Yeh and Lo (2009)'s definition seems to be the most suitable and closelyinvolves in the scope of this study and is adapted in this study

Corrective feedback is used when the teacher gathers the most commonmistakes and corrects them in class This could be considered to be more group-focused oral feedback

1.2.2.2 Written feedback

Written feedback involves feedback given to students' written work Thistype of feedback is usually not provided immediately as teachersneed time toconsider how to give feedback and on what Therefore, there are differentstrategies used when providing students with written feedback According toWeigle (2002), the purpose of teachers' feedback lies in providing guidance inwriting

a.Peer feedback

Peer feedback is a practice in language education where feedback is given

by one student to another According to Bartels (2004), peer feedback meansfeedback from the fellow students If students are working on the sameassignment together, peer feedback means exchanging drafts and comments oneach other's drafts Peer feedback is used in writing classes to provide studentsmore opportunities to learn from each other

b Teacher's feedback

In the light of process writing approach, teachers play an important role inhelping students to revise their writing drafts Teacher's corrective feedback, tosome extent, is the teacher's correction and can be defined as teachers'indication to learners' errors, which takes the forms of implicit or explicitcorrection Written corrective feedback refers to teacher written feedback on astudent's essay with an aim of improving grammatical accuracy (includingspelling, capitalization, and punctuation) as well as idiomatic usage (such asword order and word choice) The primary of this thesis is meant to be aninvestigation into how the different teacher written corrective feedbackstrategies improve students' writing performance Some researchers indicate thatstudents favor corrective feedback from teachers because they believe that theywill benefit greatly from it (Leki, 1990)

c Teachers' written corrective feedback strategies

There are different classifications for corrective feedback strategiesproposed by different researches Ellis (2009) presents a typology whichconsists of six main strategies to provide corrective feedback (see Table 1)

Table 1: Ellis' typology offeedback types (2009, p.98)

Types of corrective feedback (CF) Description

1 Direct CF The teacher provides students with

correct form

2 Indirect CF The teacher indicates that an error

exists but does not provide thecorrection

a Indicating and locating the error This takes the form of underlining

and the uses of cursors to showomissions in the students’ text

b Indication only This takes the forms of an indication

in the margin that an error or errorshave taken place in a line of text

3 Metalinguitic CF The teacher provides some kinds of

metalinguistic clue as to nature oferror

a Use of error code Teacher writes code in the margin

(e.g.: ww = wrong word, pre =prepositions)

b Brief grammatical description Teacher numbers errors in text and

writes a grammatical description foreach numbered error at the bottom ofthe text

Ellis, Loewen and Erlam (2006) categorize responses from teachers tostudents' error into three forms or strategies:

(1) teacher feedback that indicates that an error has been made

(2) teacher feedback that provides the correct form of the target language (3) teacher feedback that provides the metalinguistic information about thenature of the error

This current research adapts this categorization together with Ellis'typology of written corrective feedback in that the focus of this research washow and whether students' writing performance could be improved throughthree main types of written corrective feedback strategies, namely direct,indirect, metalinguistic corrective feedback

As for direct corrective feedback, the teacher gives the corrected form ofthe mistake to the students Direct feedback may be done in various ways such

as by striking out an incorrect or unnecessary word, phrase, or morpheme,inserting a missing or expected word, phrase or morpheme; and by providingthe correct linguistic form above, in the margin or near the erroneous form(Ellis, 2008)

Meanwhile, indirect written corrective feedback refers to situations whenthe teacher indicates that an error has been made but does not provide acorrection, thereby leaving the student to diagnose and correct it This can bedone by underlying or circling errors, recording in the margin the number oferrors in a given line, confirmation checks, and request for clarification(Bitchener, 2008) The last strategy, metalinguistic feedback, could take one oftwo forms Use of error coding or a brief grammatical description In the formertype, the teacher writes some codes in the margin to suggest what problemlearners have Of course, the learners will have a list of codes to avoidconfusion However, in the second type of metalinguistic feedback, the teachernumbers the errors and briefly provides a brief explanation for the error at theend of the text

2 Research setting

2.1 Tong Duy Tan high school

Founded in 1995, Tong Duy Tan high school is located in the mountainousarea of Vinh Loc district, Thanh Hoa city with nearly 50 teachers including 4English teachers and over 18 classes

English is among the most important subjects at school It is one of thethree compulsory subjects of the required examinations the students have topass in order to be qualified for the General Education Diploma The studentshave four periods learning English every week The material is the text bookissued by Ministry of Education and Training The responsibility of teaching the

language is on the hand of the teachers of English at the school The grade 10students at Tong Duy Tan high school are sixteen years old and have beenlearning English for about six years; their English knowledge is generally notvery good, particularly writing skill.

2.2 Participants

This study includes 35 students with relatively equal quantity of boys andgirls coming from class 10B at Tong Duy Tan high school All of them aresixteen years old and live around the school

The students basically are beginners of English despite finishing theEnglish program for the secondary system Apart from instructing knowledge intextbook, the teacher usually has to review the very basic knowledge that theyhave learnt at secondary school

Moreover, there are numerous factors that make teaching and learningEnglish challenging Firstly, most of them come from low-income householdsand they usually have to help their families to get some more earnings Besidethat, students have no extra materials except for their textbooks Therefore,though most of them have already learnt English for at least four years at lowersecondary school, their knowledge of English is still poor and limited The otherproblem is that they learn English just to pass regular tests or examinations,while they cannot use English in reality

The textbooks which are required to teach English for grade-ten students inhigh schools are English Basic 10 They were developed based on the oldnational curriculum with 16 units, covering four skills

During over-10-year teaching time, the researcher found that the studentsseemed to be very weak at writing skills in comparison to English grammar andvocabulary More specifically, almost all of the them were not interested inlearning writing, and they often made writing mistakes although they performedrelatively well in reading skills as well as English grammar and vocabulary Tofigure out students' writing problems, the researcher had the students complete asurvey questionnaire (Appendix A) to investigate their attitudes towards Englishwriting lesson, problems with writing lesson and the possible reasons for theseproblems It turned out that half of the students enjoy writing lesson fairly wellbut another half does not like writing at all A large number of students (28 out

of them) admitted that they found writing the most challenging skill 25 out of

35 students even said that they did not often get regular, detailed feedback fromteachers, except for some good students, so they hardly know exactly what theirweak points in writing were Even when feedback was delivered, teachers hadlittle time to check and process the students' revision so students often remademistakes, making error fossilization inevitable A large number of studentsadmitted not rewriting their paper so even when they were given feedback onspecific errors, they still repeat the same kinds of error in the next writing Afterthe results were obtained, the study was conducted to improve the situation

Step 2:Planning the action

In order to help students improve their writing ability, the researcherusedvarious types of written corrective feedback during the pilot teaching It isbelieved that apart from teacher's writing instructions, in many cases, teacher'scorrection and comments could help to address the problems of students' writingaccuracy and their attitudes towards writing It means that teacher's goodfeedback strategies may stimulate students to do revision and motivate them tomaintain their interest in writing

Due to the time limitation and the writing exercises mainly focus onspecific grammatical features, this study was limited to the investigation of theimpact of 3 written error correction strategies on students' writing performance.After giving a clear written model, the students were asked to do a sentence-building exercise (about 10 sentences) related to the main topics of specificunits in their English book The time allowance for doing the exercise was about

25 minutes at the class During this time, they were encouraged to do it on theirown and not to consult any books or their friends They received feedback ontheir work, mainly on their language usage, and then they were asked to rewritethe exercises based on the teacher feedback and resubmitted a revised draft Theresearch was divided into three stages with a different type of feedback appliedfor each stage All the students' papers were collected and analyzed The errorclassification was adapted from five error categories used by Ferris & Roberts(2001) and based on errors which occurred most frequently in the participants'writings The four targeted error types are: verb tense and form, subject- verbagreement, article and preposition

The following is the planned timetable (see Table 2) the researcherfollowed during 4 months of the action implementation

Table 2: Timetable of the action implementation

1 Sentence-building exercise 1 &

Step 3: Implementing the action

Stage 1: Metalinguistic corrective feedback applied

Due to the big size of the class and my students' low level of English, Ionly used the first form of metalinguistic corrective feedback, which is theusing of error codes Students were provided a list of error codes (Appendix B)and all the codes were explained The list containing abbreviation and symbolsand a gloss of their meanings was adapted from International English LanguageTesting System code list

- After collecting students' written work for the first time, the teacherlabeled different kinds of errors placed over the location of the error in the text

or in the margin, then counted errors

- Students then got the writings back

- Next, they rewrote the tasks with correction and resubmitted their writingexercises

- The teacher got the papers back, read and counted the errors stillcommitted

- The teacher returned the papers to the students

- After one week, students were asked to write new sentence buildingexercises following the same procedure

- Two weeks later, delayed test 1 was conducted to see the long-term effect

of metalinguistic corrective feedback

Stage 2: Direct corrective feedback applied

With this strategy, the teacher provided the students with the correct formabove or near to the erroneous form

- After having corrected the students' sentence-building exercise 1 for thefirst time, the teacher counted errors

- Then, the teacher handed back written work, the students had chance tolook at the papers carefully and rewrote the tasks and resubmitted the papers

- The teacher got the papers back, kept reading and correcting the secondtime, then counted the errors committed and returned the papers to the students

- One week later, students were required to write new sentence-buildingexercises following the same procedure

- Two weeks later, delayed test 2 was conducted to see the long-term effect

of direct feedback

Stage 3: Indirect corrective feedback applied

- After the students' written papers were collected for the first time, errors

in students' writing were simply underlined or circle without any correction orexplanation of the errors The teacher then counted errors

- Then, students got them back and rewrote the tasks with their owncorrection, and handed in the papers

- The teacher got the papers back, read the second time, counted the errorscommitted

- The teacher then returned the written work to the students

- One week later, students were required to write new sentence-buildingexercises following the same procedure

- Two weeks later, delayed test 3 was conducted to see the long-term effect

of indirect feedback

At the end of the semester, the students were asked to complete a surveyquestionnaire (Appendix C) to express their attitudes and opinion on theeffectiveness of written corrective feedback on improving students' writingperformance as well as their preference for certain type of corrective feedbackand suggestions for more effective use of teacher corrective feedback Thequestionnaire was written in English and in Vietnamese so that students couldunderstand better

Step 4: Reflecting the action

The data collected during the action implementing period and the students'survey questionnaires, interviews were analyzed The results of the analysiswere consulted to find out the effects of different types of written correctivefeedback on students' writing performance The data analysis results were alsoused to answer the research questions

The reflection was done at the end of the cycle The results of the analysisafter implementing the action were evaluated to see whether the action waseffective or not Because of the limited time, the researcher would not continuethe action in the next cycle

With a view to assessing the effects of teacher different feedback strategies

on student revision actions and behaviors, all students' initial writing papers andthe revised drafts were analyzed and compared The collected data in Figure 4.1clearly indicated the revision effects

Figure 3.2.1: Effects of three common types of feedback on students' revised writing exercises

From these above data, it seemed that students would be most successful inincorporating direct corrective feedback into their revision, since it mostlyinvolved transcribing or copying of the teacher's suggestion into the next draft

In fact, the students were able to make correct change in response to directfeedback in the vast majority (93.2%) of the case This finding suggested thatdirect feedback was more helpful to students in revision because it reduced thetype of confusion that could occur if learners failed to understand or rememberwhat the feedback was saying Direct feedback also provided learners withsufficient information to resolve more complex errors (for example, errors inverb tenses and form) This is consistent with Lightbown's (2006) conclusionthat every repetition and instance of language use prompted by writtencorrective feedback can enhance the memory effect Moreover, direct feedbackprovided learners with more immediate feedback on hypotheses that they mayhave made However, even when students received direct corrective feedback,there were still a certain number of errors (6.8%) in the second draft One

possible explanation lies in the fact that the second draft was not always aduplicate of the first draft with the errors corrected Students were sometimesrequired to extend their first draft and revise some of the contents based on thecontent feedback provided by the teacher When students wrote more, therewere more chances for them to make errors The findings are similar to those ofFerris and Roberts (2001) that indirect correction does not seem to haveimmediate advantage over direct correction

Interestingly, the other, less explicit forms of feedback also led to accuraterevisions most of the time Metalinguistic feedback, in which errors wereunderlined and marked with error codes, led to correct edits in 86.8% of theinstances More interestingly, the research also found that indirect feedbackcould be traced to 86.1% of the accurate changes

Concerning different types of errors, almost all of grammatical errors such

as verb tense and form, subject-verb agreement, article and preposition weresuccessfully edited However, some of the correction was not successful.Grammatical errors were easier to correct since students could choose the rightmorphological form for different situations, such as the past tense and subject-verb agreement, as long as they knew the rules For metalinguistic feedback andindirect feedback, the second draft still contained a certain number of errors While trying to make sense of the data (see Figure 3.2.1), I found thatstudents were able to make effective revision in response to teacher's correctivefeedback However, it is suggested that when considering the effects of teachercorrective feedback, more attention should be paid to whether they couldintegrate what they learnt from teacher feedback and revision action in the newassignments According to Ferris (1999, 2004), the efficacy of error feedbackneeds to be evaluated by measuring accuracy on new texts Therefore, in thisstudy the reseacher measured the changed linguistic accuracy through a series ofassigned writing exercises