How to reduce grammatical errors in writing of huflit freshmen through written corrective feedback

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING o0o HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY – (HUFLIT) RESEARCH METHODOLOGY COURSE HOW TO REDUCE GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN WRITING OF[.]

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING o0o

HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY – (HUFLIT)

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY COURSE

HOW TO REDUCE GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN WRITING OF HUFLIT

FRESHMEN THROUGH WRITTEN

HO CHI MINH CITY, December 14 th , 2015

NAME: Hồ Trọng Nghĩa Nhân

14 th , 2015

EMAIL ADD: kanphanh@gmail.com

DATE SUBMITTED: December 14th, 2015

WORD COUNT: 3124

It has been noticed that there are quite a large number of grammatical errors in thewritings of English major students at Ho Chi Minh City University of ForeignLanguages and Information Technology (HUFLIT) even although they havecompleted certain intensive grammar courses in high schools Therefore, variousways have been employed to help reduce grammatical errors, and one of them iswritten corrective feedback This research was conducted to examine theeffectiveness of the two kinds of written corrective feedback in the improvement ofstudents’ grammatical accuracy in their writing The participants of the researchwere 5 English teachers and 20 freshmen of English major in HUFLIT Data wascollected by means of online questionnaires Participants answered thequestionnaires with their practical experience The findings of the researchindicated that both kinds of feedback helped students improve grammaticalaccuracy in writing significantly and prevented students from repeating the sametype of errors However, all of participants considered indirect corrective feedback

as the best way to conduct the correction because of its significant benefits Inshort, it’s admitted that indirect feedback helped students write with more correctgrammar after a long-term period Accordingly, indirect corrective feedbackshould be widely used in education settings

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT……….…4

1 INTRODUCTION ……….……… 7-9 1.1 Background……… 7

1.2 Literature Review………8

1.3 Scopes……… 8

1.4 Objectives……….8

1.5 Organization………9

2 LITERATURE REVIEW……… 10-11 2.1 Distinguish between “mistake” and “error” in writing 10

2.2 Grammatical errors and some kinds of feedback 10

2.3 Common mistakes in writing 11

2.4 On-going debates on the good ways of conducting the correction in writing 11

3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY…… ….… …… ………12-13 3.1 Description of the Subjects 12

3.2 Procedures of Data Collection 12

3.3 Statistical Treatment 13

4 FINDINGS 14-17 4.1 Teachers’ Survey 14

4.2 Students’ Survey 17

5 DISCUSSION 20-23 5.1 Purpose of the Study 20

5.2 Findings and Explanation 20

5.3 Limitations 21

5.4 Implications 21

5.5 Recommendations 21

5.5.1 Recommendations for Teachers 21

5.5.2 Recommendations for Students 22

REFERENCES 24

APPENDIX A: OUTLINE 26

APPENDIX B: TEACHERS’ QUESTIONNAIRE 27

APPENDIX C: STUDENTS’ QUESTIONNAIRE 29

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background

Language is a means of communication with the function of transmitting themessage from a person to a person, which emphasizes the importance of speakingand writing skills Indeed, the language we use would become useless if what wespeak or write cannot convey what we mean to say Therefore, we learn a languagenot only to know about and understand it but also to use it properly incommunication, normally referred as knowledge and performance (Johnson &Johnson, 1999) Among the four skills of using a foreign language in general aswell as English in particular, writing is getting more and more essential today, but

it is also believed the most difficult skill to master (Richards & Renandya, 2002).Actually, being able to convey messages effectively in writing is not easy.Otherwise, it requires the language learner to be equipped with good knowledge ofthe various aspects of the language, and an important one of them is grammar.However, a gap between the learners’ knowledge and their performance, especially

in writing skill, is quite a popular phenomenon in classes of English as a foreignlanguage (EFL), in which the learners can perform fairly well in conventionalgrammatical exercises, but then fail to employ such knowledge of the languagesuccessfully in the writing tasks There are a considerable number of grammaticalerrors found in the learners’ writings, which may affect the readers’comprehension of the indented message

As a matter of fact, grammatical errors are also unavoidable in the papers offirst-year students in Huflit When having a look at my friends’ first paragraph as

an assignment of the writing course, I found quite a lot of errors relating togrammar, the most common types of which were the errors of plural/singularnouns, verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, and articles This was really a serious

matter due to the fact that most of the students had focused on grammar points As

a result, it’s important that I as well as teachers-to-be at SA1201 find out aneffective way to help students avoid repeating grammatical errors so as to useEnglish more effectively in writing work This is also a big step to lead students tothe mastering of writing skill, ensuring them certain success in studying as well as

in social life

1.2 Literature Review

Since the 1970s, a number of researches have been conducted to figure outthe value of error correction For written corrective feedback in writing, someresearchers found it to be ineffective (Hillocks, 1982; Semke, 1984), while someother researches found that different types of written error correction in writing can

be useful (Dulay & Burt, 1977; Krashen & Selinger, 1975) Briefly, the effects ofdifferent types of written corrective feedback have been examined in variousresearches (Chandler, 2003; Young & Cameron, 2005; Ferris, 1997)

1.3 Scopes

There are various ways suggested to solve this problem such as giving oralcorrection of common errors in typical papers to the whole class, providing usefulgroups of accurate sentences, using peer feedback or introducing some samplepieces of writing with no grammatical errors (Miftari, 2011) However, very little

is known about written corrective feedback with both direct and indirect forms.Therefore, this research is conducted to investigate whether use of writtencorrective feedback is really effective to first-year Huflit students

1.4 Objectives

There are two research questions to be examined in this study:

1) In terms of theory, do the indirect corrective feedback and direct correctivefeedback help reduce grammatical errors in HUFFLIT freshmen’s writing?

2) Having been studying English for at least 6 years, which of the method betweenindirect corrective feedback and direct corrective feedback do the first-year Huflit

students find more useful?

1.5 Organization

The first part of this research paper is an analysis of the importance ofwriting skills in English It is followed by the method the research was carried out.After mentioning about the research findings and discussion, there is a conclusionthat using either kind of written corrective feedback helps reduce the number ofgrammatical errors in the writing work

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Distinguish between “mistake” and “error” in writing

It is assumed that among the three categories of mistakes including “slips”,

“errors” and “attempts”, the category of errors most concerns learners (Harmer,2007) Errors are defined as the mistakes that learners cannot explain themselvesand need explanation, and they “result from incomplete knowledge” (Harmer,2007; Richards & Schmidt, 1992) However, there is sometimes a distinctionbetween the two terms: “mistake” and “error” As mentioned in the Dictionary ofLanguage Teaching and Applied Linguistics (Richards & Schmidt, 1992),

“mistakes are due to lack of attention, fatigue or carelessness”, or “mistakes arecaused by hesitation, slips of the tongue” while “an error reflects the languagecompetence of the learners” (Brown, 1980)” Although it is defined, it is error butnot mistake that a language teacher should pay attention to when correctingstudents’ work

2.2 Grammatical errors and some kinds of feedback

Grammatical errors are errors on forms and mechanics (Understandingmistakes in written language, n.d.) It is widely believed that grammatical errorsare caused by the interference between the mother tongue and the target language,which is inevitable in the process of fully mastering the language Therefore, it’sthe teachers’ duty to provide feedback when responding to such errors in order tofacilitate that process (Harmer, 2007) As defined by Penny Ur (1996), feedback is

a “type of information which is provided for the learners about his or herperformance of a learning task, usually with the aim of improving thisperformance” Written corrective feedback, which is nearly the most popular kind

of feedback used in teaching writing, is believed to be provided by the teacher withassessment informing how the learner has performed and correction providing

some specific information on what the learners perform There are two forms ofcorrective feedback Direct feedback refers to explicit correction of errors, and theinstructor corrects all the error in the students’ written assignments On thecontrary, indirect feedback just prompts students about the location or type oferrors and leaves correction to the students themselves.

2.3 Common mistakes in writing

According to some conducted researches, students are likely to make writingmistakes such as: run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and subject-verbagreement Besides, the errors of plural/singular nouns are also one of the commonerrors in writing

2.4 On-going debates on the good ways of conducting the correction in writing

Up to now, many different approaches have been introduced for errorcorrection However, there is still not any certainty about the best way to providecorrective feedback Moreover, debate about whether or not corrective feedbackshould be put into practice has also continued for several years A popular educatorwho was against grammar correction in L2 writing classes asserted that “correction

is harmful rather than simply ineffective” and “grammar correction has no place inwriting classes and should be abandoned” (John Truscott, 1996: 97-98) Hereasoned that giving error correction means ignoring the learners’ developmentalsequence of acquisition, it may also cause bad effects on learners’ motivation and

it is just a waste of time and energy There has been a great deal of criticism onTruscott’s claim One of them is from Ferris (1999) However, not until futureresearch proves that there are particular cases in which grammar correction mightnot be a misguided activity had Truscott changed his perspective that grammarcorrection is a bad idea (Truscott, 2007: 255-272)

CHAPTER 3

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 3.1 Description of the Subjects

In the general survey, 20 freshmen and 5 English teachers from theDepartment of Foreign Languages at Ho Chi Minh City University of ForeignLanguages and Information Technology were chosen to take part in theinvestigation All of these students had passed the graduation examination in 2015

In addition, they have been studying English for at least 6 years This wasimportant because students were required to be proficient enough in reading andwriting English so that they could understand the questionnaire items and providereliable responses

Moreover, the researcher selected 5 English teachers from the Department ofForeign Languages who are experienced in teaching writing skills to participate inthe survey With their experience, the results of the survey would be considerablyreliable

3.2 Procedures of Data Collection

To compare students’ and teachers’ preferences and their reasons for thetypes of “written corrective feedback”, two questionnaires were constructed Bothquantitative and qualitative data was collected by means of two questionnaires ingoogle forms that elicited participants’ opinions about the usefulness of differenttypes of “written corrective feedback” and also the reasons for their responses.Quantitative data was collected through close-ended questionnaire items withevaluation scale formats To gain more in-depth information about why teachersand students preferred a particular type or amount of feedback, qualitative data wasalso collected through open-ended questions with the option “other” These open-ended questions allowed participants to describe, in their own words, the reasonsthey had for their preferred feedback choices While the teachers’ version of the

questionnaire was sent to five English teachers mentioned via emails, the students’version was posted on a facebook group They all had a week to return thequestionnaires to the researcher.

3.3 Statistical Treatment

To evaluate the usefulness of two types of “written corrective feedback”, ananalysis of variance was used to compare students’ and teachers’ preferences Inaddition, Google Form Application and Microsoft Excel were also used to showstatistics of the result in percentage and to display them in charts

CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS 4.1 Teachers’ survey

Figure 1: Method of written corrective feedback

Figure 1 indicates teachers’ preference of written corrective feedback method Themajority (80%) of teachers appreciated the prompts given to students so that they

in today’s university settings, students’ autonomy is one of the top priorities.Therefore, teachers are likely to give prompts about the location or types of errors.This method seems to be valuable in arousing students’ interest in writing On thecontrary, there were 20% of teachers considering the method in which “teacherscorrect all the errors” better This might be due to the obstruction of students’language competence In fact, some students want to see all the errors because they

do not know whether they have errors in their writing work and how to correctthem

4.1.2

20%

Very usefulUsefulNot useful

Figure 2: Clues or directions on how to fix an error

Figure 2 shows teachers’ evaluation on the value of clues or directions on how tofix an error when they give feedback on students’ writing work Of the 5 teacherswho provided evaluation to the above item, the majority (80%) placed value on theimportance of clues or directions when giving corrective feedback Thisoverwhelming majority can be explained that teachers think this is a good learningtool to improve students’ writing In addition, it seems important that students have

a chance to know how to self-correct so that they can remember their errors Onthe other hand, there were 20% of teachers who thought that this type of correctivefeedback was useful partially Their choice may be due to some drawbacks such assome errors are too advanced for students to understand, or students are not excitedabout correcting their writing work themselves Especially, no teachers consideredthis type of feedback as a useless method This can be explained that teachersnowadays have applied a new approach in teaching writing in which theyappreciate and simulate students’ autonomy

4.1.3